Last night in an interview, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tried to get Obama to criticize the Republican Party, and he wouldn't. Obama's playing for Republicans now.
It's time to identify a central characteristic of this great politician: his ambiguity. Obama is neither black nor white, he is neither progressive nor conservative, indeed even his sexuality can seem ambiguous. His femininity is part of his enormous charm. Look how lithe he is next to masculine McCain. Ambiguity has served Obama very well indeed. For instance, he alienated no one at Harvard Law School–the stories are always about him engaging a group of people in a spirited discussion of issues, and giving nothing away, never taking a stand. Despite the famous woodshed moment on the Senate floor with Joe Lieberman after Lieberman attacked him, I bet he hasn't burned that bridge either.
Obamaguity–I need to coin this–is a big issue for us on the left. We want Obama to be a leader not a pol; we want him to be the Reagan of the left. And, in my little camp, we want him to be the savior of the Palestinians' right to self-determination. He gives us very mixed signals. He used to be Rashid Khalidi's friend. I'm sure he knows the Palestinian narrative, and not just from eating Mona Khalidi's hummus. Now Obama's thrown Khalidi under the bus.
I derive some faith about Obama's ambiguity from a book my wife is reading: Adam Nicolson's Quarrel With the King, which describes the rise of the upstart Pembroke family in England in the 16th century, before they took on the king.
For a century, from about 1540 onward, this family maintained a long, simmering quarrel with the king, one that flickered across the decades, part opposition, part seduction, part manipulation, and part denial. Only, finally, in the 1640s did it erupt in civil war… At different times [the Pembrokes] both threatened the crown and acted as its bruisingly efficient and violent agents. These were rebels not to be found plotting in a dimly lit garret but either dancing in the candlelit halls and delicious arbors of royal pleasure or actually commanding royal armies… They were, in other words, highly ambivalent figures…[T]he quarrel itself was never quite absent but only rarely showed its fully nked face. It could be said that this book is a study in the ambiguity necessarily involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status. [my emphasis]
No one has had to teach Obama these lessons. He knows them in his dislocated fatherless Kenyan-Pacific bones. He is no rebel in a garret, he has always danced in the candlelit halls. And so I wonder if he is not deeply involved now in a quarrel with Jewish power in America/the Israel lobby. At AIPAC he seduced. He pandered on Jerusalem and praised the long-ago Jewish martyrs of the civil rights movement. Even though he knows what Avrum Burg knows: "American Jews today are no longer part of the minority coalition
with African Americans and Hispanics and the rest of the domestic
coalition in the struggle for American justice and liberties." He needs Jewish power, he courts it, he derives strength from it (as the Pembrokes rose on the backs of the king). But some day he will also turn on it.
