Wanting and Needing

The President attended the GOP Issues Conference today in Baltimore:  as Sullivan aptly says, going "into the lions' den."  Above are his opening remarks, and I wish you would listen to them and take note of the calm, reasonable, conciliatory tone:  pleading in a dignified way, without begging or unctuousness, for the good-faith cooperation and compromise that are quintessential to the workings of a little-d democracy, a little-r republic.  The video of the question and answer session that followed is here; or read the full transcript here.

At this point, after all the puerile assininity and screeching inanity of the past year, your Head Trucker's instinct would have been to arrive for the SOTU blasting away like Yosemite Sam:  All right you sonsabitches, sit down and shaddup while I tell you how it's gonna be around here . . .

And naturally, they would have taken my head off before I ever got out of the building.  Grin.  So it's really all for the best that it's not my job, you see.

Obama is a much cooler head.  Unflappable is the word that comes to mind.  All these things we've talked about here in the Blue Truck, he's aware of them.  (The other day, the President mentioned to an interviewer that Andrew Sullivan's blog is something he often reads, a fact which Sullivan was proud to mention, as I would be too.)  Obama knows what pigheaded stuff the Republicans and the Christianists and the teabaggers and all the other naysayers are doing and saying, the vile personal attacks as well as the totally goofball communist-muslim-atheist-fascist claims about his agenda.

And yet, after all that and after a whole year of obstinate stonewalling and sabotage by the other party, he still remains unruffled:  steady and certain in his progress towards the goals he set for his administration, however halting the advance, or how slow the ascent.

And no one can watch him speak as he has this week without realizing that this is an honest man; a decent man; a man of principle, not politics; who measures his words and chooses his actions according to an inner moral compass, not the shifting winds of public opinion or political opportunity.  For the most part, I mean:  a morally decent man, not a perfect man.  But what an enormous contrast with his immediate predecessor, whose every public utterance seemed to be spinning a yarn:  the entrancing spiel of a snake-oil salesman.  Remember?

It's the difference, I think, between warping reality to conform to a predetermined belief; and seeing reality clearly, the world as it is, and constructing a logical, workable plan to fix what is broken, and right what is wrong.  Or to put it another way:  the contrast between a rabbit's foot and a working compass, a four-leaf clover and a navigation chart.

It's not that I think Obama can do no wrong, or is infallible in judgment, not at all.  He's a man, like you and me, and therefore by definition another flawed and fallible human being like anyone else.  And as I've blogged here in the Blue Truck any number of times already, I have been disappointed, sometimes bitterly so, with his failure to live up to the tone, if not the letter, of his campaign promises to the LGBT community.  But despite all our failed expectations of him, we have to admit that he has demonstrated both by word and deed that he does indeed respect our community, and respects us as people, as fellow Americans - as his remarks in the SOTU address reveal, which I have already noted in other recent posts.

If you doubt this, brother, just stop for one ten seconds and recall to mind the hateful words and deeds of his predecessor, and of all that ilk, when it came to us queer folks, and I think you'll realize the unmistakeable difference.

And I'm coming to realize that perhaps Obama does know what he's doing, after all; or at least, that he is pursuing the most reasonable and most necessary course of action as President, according to a well-thought-out list of priorities.  Perhaps his seeming delay on advancing the issues we feel most acutely is not due to prevarication or lack of concern; perhaps he simply sees the bigger picture, the greater need to handle first things first, and do the greatest good for the greatest number.

Maybe, just maybe, like a good general, he sees more clearly than we do the need to reserve his main force to defend against the major thrust of the other side, and for now is leaving us to defend our outposts as best we can and wait for reinforcements later, when the tide of battle has turned.

I'm not a military man, so I'd best not carry that analogy any further.  But what I can say with assurance is that I am continually reminded of, and refreshed by, the President's manifest intelligence, goodwill, and good sense.  As well as his simple moral goodness.  For all the hoorah about the color of his skin and his multicultural family, I see what some others overlook:  the small-town, middle-class Kansas boy, not so very different from the small-town, middle-class Southern boys I grew up with:  a decent guy, a good friend, smart yes but humble also, where it counts.  He may have lived in some exotic places, and grown up in Hawaii; but I see the deep legacy of his grandparents in him, the solid heritage of hardworking, unassuming, neighborly Midwestern values.  Just look at these pictures, and see how much Obama resembles his American grandfather, Stanley Dunham:

The kind of people who roll out of bed every morning and march off to work, rain or shine, early to bed and early to rise; who do what needs to be done without having to be told, people you can trust, you can count on to do the right thing, and usually in a pleasant, courteous way:  the small-town types who just get on with it, quietly, methodically, without complaint, without drama.  People who count the cost, who save for a rainy day, who number their priorities and get their ducks in a row.  Methodical, dependable, and quietly determined to succeed, even if it takes a long time.  The solid American personality, the can-do, not-a-quitter type that prevails in the end. 

There are some limitations to that kind of personality, which can get bogged down in workaday details and local prejudices; but when coupled with a brilliant mind and unfettered imagination, those types can transcend all that and reach the mountaintops.

Maybe Obama is not all we hoped, not all we wanted him to be.  But maybe, it seems to me, just maybe he is indeed what we really need at this point in the nation's life:  a calm, steady hand at the wheel, judicious and thrifty of motion, calling and recalling all of us to reconciliation and common purpose - asking us time and again, with great forebearance, to see things as they really are.  Asking us, with all humility, to trust and follow - and fret not.

Who else can we follow?  Who else can lead this nation out of the mire and muck it was left in by the previous administration?  Who else is there to trust, really?  Just think about that for a minute.

Despite all the disappointments and setbacks for us gay people in the past year - and I feel them as sharply as anyone - perhaps we too, as well as the opposition party, need to pause, reflect, and look at the bigger picture.  Perhaps both sides need to listen to the call to be one united people.  Perhaps we all are guilty of straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel - to our peril.

Because, as Sullivan puts it,

it is the collapse of any desire for the common good, the evaporation of civic virtue that is our problem. No leader can save us from that. Only we can.

Athenian democracy flared up for a moment in history like a glorious flame, but was snuffed out by foolish internecine warfare and the lust for empire, despite the pleas and advice of good rulers and wise men.  The Roman republic expired in civil conflict and was succeeded by a long line of absolute rulers who kept the forms but not the spirit of a republic, and reduced the free citizenry to servile spectators; as Gibbon famously wrote of the Roman people in the prosperous age of the Antonine emperors, outwardly the empire was flourishing, but in their hearts it had withered away.

When the yet to be completed annals of the American experiment are written, what will be said about us, our spirit, our character, at this point in the story?   Here, still at the dawn of the third milennium, in the third century of our own republic, we are at a momentous turning point, I feel.  But when the chroniclers of the future come to write about the American people at this juncture, which way will they say we turned?