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| Wednesday, 07 January 2009 |
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Home  Articles of Interest The Post-Boomer Meritocrat by David Brooks
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The Post-Boomer Meritocrat by David Brooks |
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Articles of Interest
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Tuesday, 05 August 2008 |
New York Times
(Original title - Where's the Landslide?)
Why isn't Barack Obama doing better? Why, after all that has happened, does he have only a slim two- or three-point lead over John McCain, according to an average of the recent polls? Why is he basically tied with his opponent when his party is so far ahead?
His age probably has something to do with it. So does his race. But the polls and focus groups suggest that people aren't dismissive of Obama or hostile to him. Instead, they're wary and uncertain.
And the root of it is probably this: Obama has been a sojourner. He
opened his book "Dreams From My Father" with a quotation from
Chronicles: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were
all our fathers."
There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament,
Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through
on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have
trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values
in which he is ineluctably embedded.
Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama's 12 years at the
University of Chicago Law School. "The young law professor stood apart
in too many ways to count," Kantor wrote.
He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in
faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the
institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never
committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.
He was in the law school, but not of it.
This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His
childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii
and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not
fully of them.
His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community
organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective.
He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it.
He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote,
he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping
stone to higher things.
He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing
the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the
United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the
inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know
more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there
speak of him fondly, but vaguely.
And so it goes. He is a liberal, but not fully liberal. He has
sometimes opposed the Chicago political establishment, but is also part
of it. He spoke at a rally against the Iraq war, while distancing
himself from many antiwar activists.
This ability to stand apart accounts for his fantastic powers of
observation, and his skills as a writer and thinker. It means that
people on almost all sides of any issue can see parts of themselves
reflected in Obama's eyes. But it does make him hard to place.
When we're judging candidates (or friends), we don't just judge the
individuals but the milieus that produced them. We judge them by the
connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go
home to be laid to rest. Andrew Jackson was a backwoodsman. John
Kennedy had his clan. Ronald Reagan was forever associated with the
small-town virtues of Dixon and Jimmy Carter with Plains.
It is hard to plant Obama. Both he and his opponent have written
coming-of-age tales about their fathers, but they are different in
important ways. McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" is a story of a prodigal
son. It is about an immature boy who suffers and discovers his place in
the long line of warriors that produced him. Obama's "Dreams From My
Father" is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts
of his past and constructed an identity of his own.
If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity
as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were
more likely to regard your identity as something you created.
If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn't — it is
the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of
rising leaders, Obama's age and younger, who climbed quickly through
elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious
and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It's not
clear what the rest of America makes of them.
So, cautiously, the country watches. This should be a Democratic
wipeout. But voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot
place. |
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