Like this fella, I was moved recently to revisit David Foster Wallace's report for Rolling Stone on one week of John McCain's 2000 primary campaign, 'Up, Simba.' (You can buy it online, but really you should buy his recent book of essays, Consider the Lobster.) And again like Mr Hallberg, I was put in mind of Obama and Clinton, analogous to McCain and Bush in so many ways, the former a 'straight-talking' insurgent against the party establishment whose ambition is shadowed by his narrative of genuineness, the latter the anointed establishment candidate, accused not unfairly of carpetbagging, the product of big donors, whose authenticity the press both encourages us to doubt and yet isn't allowed to openly question.
Wallace's essay, as Hallberg puts it, has something of a 'Generation-Y affect,' sure. But Wallace has always used his own (believable) earnestness as a bulwark against his tendency to get caught up in geeky details and ironic derision and cultured distrust, and that style serves him well in 'Up, Simba,' since the objects of his analysis - the authenticity of John McCain, his campaign, and voters' engagement with those two different-but-inseparable things - are just so convoluted and hypermediated that any authoritative declarations from DFW would just feed into the cynicism he's so worried about. The final echt-Wallace paragraph brings home his point in a now-familiar style:
But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes John McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too; you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox - the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain - is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.
That last sentence isn't meant to be haughty or disdainful; it's a warning shot well-intentioned. You should read Wallace's piece, which is long and in places utterly boring, and which in the final analysis is probably the single best thing ever written about John McCain.
Then you should think about Barack Obama and his one million campaign donors, and the fact that the 1996 election saw the lowest Young Voter turnout in history, while the 2008 election will probably be decided by the highest.
Let's not talk too much about Obama here; I'd like to think more deeply about the questions Wallace's essay raises - for several pages at a time it seems to be nothing but questions - and I'm not ready for the self-analysis that such an exercise would require. Nor maybe do I have time for it since I'm not the genius DFW is. But let's say this:
McCain's Y2K candidacy was a rebuke to eight years of Democratic leadership, yes, but also to the awesome corruption and partisanship indulged in by the Republican Congress, climaxing with the ludicrous impeachment proceedings - in which, by the way, John McCain voted 'yes' on impeachment, twice. McCain's rapid ascendancy had a lot to do with the moral squalor of the Clinton White House, but plenty to do with the awesome incompetence and falseness of George W. Bush, who was neither a Texan nor a warrior nor a shrewd businessman nor a conservative in any meaningful sense, yet who campaigned as the Shining Example of each of those traits, and 'compassionate' to boot.
McCain is running this year as a strange hybrid - partly a revision of Bush's policies, partly a repudiation of his manner. Forced to rely on the Republican machine, and facing an insurgency of his own (in the ridiculous Mike Huckabee), McCain can't run as the maverick; his Republicanism is too visible and he's counting on GOP votes to keep things close in November.
Meanwhile, Democrat voters face their own version of the McCain2K choice: Obama is running as a rebuke to both president Bush and the feckless Democratic Congress, which has aided and abetted every single step of Bush's political forced march, to war, misbegotten tax cuts, and grotesque entitlement expansion. Obama gets to be both not-a-Republican and not-another-Democrat, and he's lucky that his main opponent this year is in a literal sense running as dynastic successor. (Al Gore would have made things interesting.)
But following Wallace, we should observe this: in both 2000 and 2008, Young Voters have been faced with a choice they can't be expected to fully understand, because the terms in which the campaigns have been conducted are old terms, the metaphors invoked by the pundit corps are borrowed from JFK, and an 18-year-old Young Voter - hell, most 25-year-olds - can't remember a time before Gennifer Flowers, before James Carville, before HillaryCare. Obama and McCain have appealed rhetorically to a golden age before Spin Rooms and push-polling, but for many voters (most Young Voters), those times are fantasy. They may well be fictions made up by campaign consultants, for all we know.
I remember a little of the 1988 Presidential election; in our mock election at my elementary school in Texas, more than 90% of my 4th grade class went to George H. W. Bush (no surprise). I remember more clearly Clinton's ascendancy, and even more clearly how he staved off poor Bob Dole, how exciting it all seemed (I hated Clinton for no adult reason).
When Barack Obama talks about a 'different kind of politics,' I have to make it up in my head as I go along. And I do; and I believe it's possible, whatever it is.
In 'Up, Simba,' DFW talks about the difference between 'believing a candidate and believing in him.' I believe in Barack Obama, and I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why I should be afraid of this belief, though I know I would counsel someone else against the slippery slope to messianism, etc. I trust in the possibility of productive, thoughtful bipartisanship even though the great moment of American political unanimity in my lifetime was the disastrous fallout from 9/11/01. I cheer for Barack Obama partly because in my lifetime I've never cheered for a Democrat. Ever. And I boo Hillary Clinton partly because she's a reminder of who I have disliked and feared in the past. (No, not my mom. She was awesome.) At different times I've justified my vote for Obama as pragmatic, idealist, a gesture of racial integration, a post-racial gesture of assumption of equality, an indictment of the Clintons, and so forth. I know what I feel.
Yeah, see? That's what 'let's not talk too much about Obama here' looks like on a relaxed weekend with my fiancée monkey-laughing at blogs over at her desk. When I said we shouldn't shit around I was obviously shitting around. But there's a sequel to Wallace's essay yet to be written; the idea should be, roughly, What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?
What do these assholes think this is, a game?
Well that ended up somewhere unexpected. As will we all, no doubt.
