December 13, 2008
"When the sashaying of gentlemen brings you grievance now and then/what's needed are some memories of planing lakes/those planing lakes will surely calm you down." - John Cale, "Hanky Panky Nohow"
"Let's go change the world." President-elect Barack Obama to his new deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/diversity officer, Jim Messina
"Government is cool again," Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff/personnel director/human resources manager/and diversity officer for the Obama White House
Looking back on the fall campaign it is astonishing that anyone believed Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin had a lottery's chance in Oaxaca against a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a William Claxton photograph. All that was missing was a shark skin suit, thin tie, black shoes, a trumpet, and a cigarette (well, the cigarettes were there, we just didn't see them).
Government is cool again. So says Mr. Messina. But it's cool again because the president is cool again. President Reagan's publicity-still elegance was many things, but not cool. Sen. McCain was a member of the lost generation that was too old for bad rock concert sashaying; too young for the reflexive contempt of the babyboomers. Clinton, with his cheap sunglasses and saxophone was cool in a black knock off sort of way, but President Obama is black. Obama is Kennedy-cool without the Kennedy messiness. (The messiness is there, it is merely Chicago messiness.) Hip hop cool without the clownish Savoy Row sweat suits (shades of Savoy Row el jeffe fatigues). Poitier cool without the big screen chip on his shoulder.
Cool, like pornography, we recognize like a baby who knows the face that is his mothers and the face that isn't. We have been hardwired by good jazz and bad movies; hip tv detectives and tv cops on the take to know cool when we see it.
We can't or won't explain it. The President-elect is cool. That's what matters. Lee Siegel in the WSJ came close to the pathology of cool when he compared Obama with his muse, President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's eloquence was always on. President Obama is also on tap. Every situation requires a slick verbal gloss or response. Cool is the emotional numbness beneath the portrayal of a political stranger or Man with a Funny Name who comes to town to clean things up or bring change we can believe in.
As the new cabinet demonstrates and as the 750 million dollar war chest measures in the only metric we know, President Obama is neither a stranger nor an outsider to those who have promoted his elevation.
Yes, he is cool. Cool like spagetti-western Clint and Robert Altman's Philip Marlowe. Cool and cool and cool again until... Until the gun is drawn and the narrative of too cool to care erupts in bloodshed. Often of a friend.
Cool like Miles Davis who maintained his cool by mainlining. Cool like Mingus until he smashed the fingers of a musician by slamming down a piano lid.
In a media mediated world, cool creates tension of high expectations. In the real world, the protagonist holds it, holds it, holds it, then loses it.
Cool moves through the crowd unmoved by what moves the crowd. Free of anxiety and engagement. Only the cool can say something as arrogant and unknowing as "let's change the world."
There is the philosophical difference between the incoming Obama administration and the outgoing Bush presidency. "Freedom is God's gift to humanity," President Bush has said on more than one occassion. Freedom is liberation, it is also burden. It's hard. It makes you sweat when you think. It can be heavy as a conscience.
Change is change. And if the change doesn't work, you walk away unmoved, cool-like, leaving the mess behind. Inner city schools. Corrupt state houses. Haiti. Somalia.
A friend tells me that he was persuaded to vote for Obama because of recent columns by Peggy Noonan. Ms. Noonan certainly did her part for Obama, along with the Times and the Washington Post and Newsweek and People and Teen People. Peggy's heart belongs to Ronnie, her first love. President Reagan could speak with passion. He could take risks. He was engaged. He read Noonan's scripts. But he walked away from the slaughter of 242 Marines and set a precedent that liberated the Clinton administration and all those multilateral ngos from taking the only action terrorists understand.
Ms. Noonan wants Reagan back. Or rather, she wants to go back to Reagan. But we live with the president we have. Not the president we wish we had. And in the moment. Like most speechwriters, Noonan conflates her talent for English with political power and political insight. "Bush has ruined everything." And yet, things have been going wrong for a long time now. Before Bush. Before 9/11. The parties involved would fill more than a Georgetown party. Not to mention a large training camp in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran or Syria.
The good that President Bush did, as Paula Dobriansky has detailed in her State Department exit interviews, was mostly unseen. Like President Obama's cigarettes and late-night meetings with the governor of Illinois. "I'm not cool and I never will be" admits Woody Allen's alter ego in PLAY IT AGAIN SAM. An admission President Bush shares. He has referred to himself as "just a simple president," even as he could be over confident in his actions. But humility -- Christian humility? -- was never far below the bravado. Anyone who drank and partied as he did was somatically aware of his uncoolness.
No matter how bad things get, no matter what state fails next (my bet's been on Mexico this past year), or when the next jihadist slaughter takes place, the new president will know just what to say, even when his eloquence is appallingly inappropriate.
He won't lose his cool. Until he does. And then we might begin to miss a president who knew when to shut the hell up.
So "government is cool again." Only someone who could be summoned by "let's go change the world" and not laugh or cringe could say that. I'm betting that every law school graduate had a professor like mine. Prof. O'Flaherty's eyes would lose focus as he reveried about the 60s and 70s when Federal war on poverty and injustice programs were filled to the brim with tax dollars. The professor had apparently been appointed to run one. No questions asked. No accountability required. Easy money. Good times. Stickin' it to the middle classes.
Events -- we are reduced to that hope -- will bring rationality to Pres. Obama's grand old visions of a Great Society II. Even as Americans shiver in darkened houses and grow resentful and passive after being overwhelmed by digital tactics and virtual strategies designed to bypass city hall and elected representatives. The dull competence required to pick up the garbage and hire good teachers and honest cops -- all that is uncool -- will continue. Ordinary Americans, unlike the New Patriots of 1/20/09, will continue to work hard, raise their children, fly the flag on July 4th.
But it is going to get harder. Because it is going to get meaner. The institutional culture of academia and the big cities will now slouch toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Jim Messina will be responsible for hiring thousands of young eager federal employees to retrieve hundreds of failed mid-century programs mothballed in government warehouses.
Teach the illiterate to read. Feed the sugar-fed hungry. Create good mothers out of narcissistic teenagers. Make the buses run on time. Scrap the buses, build "light rail." Make the Jews lie down with Hamas. Don't speak until spoken to. Don't move until told to move. "House the houseless. Feed the foodless" as Robert Redford parodies in THE CANDIDATE. Make it so, says Captain Obama. The suppressive powers of cool will lead where denial always leads -- to civic and cultural madness.
Cool will become a parody of cool. Billions will be spent. Billions wasted. Programs will devolve into graft. Union overseers will preserve the entitlements of complacency. Scandals, corruption, indictments, perp walks. All armored in the green tarnish of big-city- machine brass.
During the campaign I held myself back. No point in talking about unions or New York or Chicago or all the other urban machines well-oiled for obstruction I watched hard-nosed Reaganites retreat into sentimentality. "Don't you hope he will succeed?" I have been asked since November 4th. Succeed at what? What is it he wants to do? Like the Clintons, he wants to be president mostly. He now governs as he campaigned. Governance will become a endless campaign, an unending series of movements as he rouses his followers to form groups (book clubs? sleeper cells?) to keep themselves "fired up." Not for him the dull job of governance, the tiresome detail, the negative reports from the field.
Government is cool again. Let's change the world. Not long before election day, an Israeli woman was asked what she thought about the Democratic candidate. As she gave a tour of her home, damaged by a missile attack that injured her husband and two children, she said "he seems like a good man, but he talks like a child."
Cool and Change are child words. Demanding without understanding. "We want the world and we want it now," screamed Jim Morrison of the Doors. We now have that man child presiding over a land of declining promise.
Sam Macomb
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