A Washington friend who is a lawyer and self-proclaimed libertarian, and who supported John McCain's bid for the Republican nomination back in 2000, recently disclosed he would probably be voting for Barack Obama.
This seemed odd. The Illinois Senator proposes to increase taxes, to expand public health insurance and to impose onerous new regulations on industry to fight global warming. Mr. Obama is protectionist, statist and interventionist. There is nothing about him for a libertarian to like.
All true, my friend acknowledged. But the U.S. president is both head of government and head of state. In presidential elections, voters usually cast their ballots for head of government, for the candidate they think would do the best job of running the country.
“But sometimes you vote for the head of state, instead,” he explained. “It's tremendously important for me that Barack Obama become America's head of state.”
As for the consequences for government, well, he can live with it.
Commentators and pundits, and more than a few Globe readers, are bewildered by the uncritical enthusiasm with which so many voters greet Mr. Obama's candidacy.
“Is the Obama campaign becoming a cult?” Lenore Skenazy asked in the New York Sun, and concluded the answer was yes. “I've seen only one similar national swoon,” observed Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. “As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.”
Critics point to the lack of specifics in Mr. Obama's soaring oratory. And they find that oratory vacuous.
“His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for,” wrote David Brooks in The New York Times, “but if we are the change we have been waiting for, then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?”
But these critical critics know – and it drives them crazy – that the growing voter enthusiasm for Mr. Obama is based on reasoning that goes beyond facts. People just like the guy. They recognize the strength of the mind behind the oratory, his seriousness of purpose, his level-headedness. These are just impressions, of course, but voters judge, as they should, on impressions.
There is something else. A great many Americans – liberal, conservative and don't-care – are deeply frustrated by the knowledge that the world's most productive and creative society has undermined its own global image, thanks to George W. Bush's misadventures.
They are frustrated as well by public-policy debates that can't seem to get past the 1980s. Liberals versus conservatives. Southern versus northern. Religious versus secular. Suburbs versus cities. Race versus race versus race.
These are the debates that shaped the world the boomers inherited and now run. But there is another world being shaped by their children: a world of young evangelicals who want to carry forward the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa; a world of postfeminist women who will put up with nothing from men, or from other women telling them who they ought to be; a world in which identifying yourself by your race is not only self-denying, but passé.
The candidacy of Barack Obama, its message of reconciliation and renewal, resonates with the people of this new world, who amplify and broadcast that message with roars of “Yes We Can!” And the boomers, hearing that roar, remember the world they had hoped to create, so different from the world we've been left with, and some of them will take up the chant as well.
While others, those who are perfectly happy with the world as it is, because they're in charge of it, wonder what all the noise is about.
The big worry is that expectations for Mr. Obama will be so high that, if he wins in November, they will be followed by tremendous disappointment, as the new president is confronted by the harsh limits of presidential power.
But it won't be what Mr. Obama does in office, it will be simply that he is in office, that will matter at first. It may take a while for America to get used to its new face. The country might spend the first year of an Obama presidency just looking in the mirror. And grinning.
