My big question about Obama isn’t why I love him, I understand that (Middle East, postracialism); but why young people are gaga for him. What are the issues they care about? Is this, as I want to believe, a great awakening of American progressivism, a resurgent belief that America must become a compassionate citizen of the world? Mary Zeiss Stange gets at the same point in a fine piece in today’s USA Today that dismisses the creepiness some see in Obama’s ardent following, and looks at it religious terms:
there is something transcendent about any man, or woman, who can move a people
to believe for the first time — or once again. You see it in churches on
Sundays, and we’re seeing it in Obama’s rallies today.Call it enthusiasm, if you will, call it wildly optimistic, exuberantly
hopeful. But it is not irrational any more than religion itself is irrational.
And his followers are not just carried away by lofty rhetoric. They are
actually, increasingly well-informed on the issues. They know what kind of world
my boomer generation is bequeathing them. They have every reason not to
hope, yet they’re audacious enough to try.
I’d like to know what those issues are. Still, Stange’s piece reminded me that in October 1960 Senator John Kennedy, then in a close race for the presidency, announced the idea of a Peace Corps in a 2 a.m. speech at the University of Michigan in which kids were hanging off the balconies to hear his every word. Some say that Kennedy won the ’60 election with the proposal that young people would be willing to give up five or ten years of their lives prosecuting careers here to go off and make the world a better place; certainly it invigorated his youthful supporters, who wanted to believe in an idealistic America, not the Ugly American, the name of a bestseller of a couple years before that had presented the image of an imperialistic, arrogant America.
Kennedy drew on ideas that had been kicking around for years. And Peace Corps by and large has been a good thing (though it’s just two years of service). Just wondering– what will Obama come up with in the remaining months of this campaign? What idealistic fire will he light under the soul of idealism that is so latent now in American public life? What concrete challenge will he issue to his following? ‘Cause we’re ready.
