Republicans, independents, dogs, cats and paper clips are flocking to a Democratic candidate named Barack Obama and getting all excited about hope and change instead of fear and the status quo. I should be amazingly, astoundingly, hoppingly happy about all this, right? But I’m not happy about the development at all. It unnerves me.
It’s not as though Barack Obama the candidate is saying anything different from what he had been saying last month, or last season, or even a year ago. His stated policy priorities are somewhat more specific than they were in January of 2007, but are pretty much the same as they were six months ago. Those ideas have been widely disseminated on television, in newspapers and on the Internet. Americans aren’t flocking to Barack Obama because of his ideas. They’re flocking to him because other people are flocking to him, and everybody’s getting swept up in the feeling of being part of something big. It’s the same the feeling you get when you watch a football player break one tackle, two tackle, three tackles, fumble the ball, get it back and run 80 yards for a touchdown. It’s the same feeling you get when some kid nails her Olympic vault despite a broken ankle to win the gold. You aren’t doing anything. You aren’t responsible for it, and you aren’t in control of it. But you stand in front of your TV screen and cheer and stomp your foot and say “yes!” and “we won!” nonetheless. You feel a part of it, and you’re swept away in it all.
The difference is that we’re not talking about a sport. We’re talking about who’s going to be president, occupying the top position of the most powerful nation in the world. More broadly, we’re talking about politics and who will harness the collective energy and power of the United States to very consequential ends. The last time Americans got swept up in heady, gleeful politics like this, it was in the heady, gleeful rush to a war of choice. That didn’t turn out so well, did it?
I’m not saying that Barack Obama is the wrong choice. I’m saying that people are choosing Barack Obama for the wrong reasons, for dangerously manipulable emotional reasons. Please, enough with the heady and gleeful rushes, America.
If you’re voting today, go into a room all by yourself with the TV and radio off. Write out a list of your policy priorities. Write out what you know and don’t know about the candidates’ policy priorities. If it’s important to you, write out a list of the candidates’ personal qualities and histories that tell you something about the kind of decisions they’ll make in the future. Look for the blank spots in your knowledge, and when you head out of that solitary room try to fill them. Then return to your room, all by yourself, and ask yourself again: what do I want to see in a president? What do I want a president to do? Who is most likely to do that? And if your answer isn’t the most popular one, don’t worry, because nobody will know that you didn’t go with the flow. It’s a secret ballot, see. And if enough people turn away from popularity to matters of substance today in their voting choice, then the matter of who is popular can change all over again, just like that.
Again, I’m not saying that at the end of this Barack Obama won’t be your choice. I’m just saying that it should be your choice and your deliberation leading up to that choice.
So go ahead. Isolate yourself. Sit. Think. Then vote.
So, it seems that your problem is really with steamrolls in general, not just with the Obama steamroll in particular.
Be careful that you don’t have the opposite automatic reaction: To be against something just because it’s become popular.
Right, I agree. Barack Obama is not necessarily the wrong choice. But this tendency of Americans to swing around wildly based on what others are doing is disturbing. If there’s a major terrorist attack tomorrow, the wild American swing will go to something altogether different.
The herd mentality is what got Wall Street and the financial sector in such a mess: “Let’s all be predatory lenders and make tons of money ripping people off – hey, you want some of this? Yeah, it’s good paper – backed by the Fed, man!”