Obama and patriotism

Time's Joe Klein reports from an Obama rally in Pennsylvania, where Obama, in answering a question from a voter, missed an opportunity:

But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, "But hey, look, we're Americans. This is the greatest country on earth. We'll rise to the occasion."

This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right. When Ronald Reagan touted "Morning in America" in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight "and getting darker all the time." This is ironic and weirdly self-defeating, since the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature. Obama's hopemongering is about as American as a message can get — although, in the end, it is mostly about our ability to transcend our imperfections rather than the effortless brilliance of our diversity, informality and freedom-propelled creativity.

An interesting insight. You won't have forgotten apostate leftie David Mamet's summation of the liberal worldview: "Everything is always wrong." It's easier for conservative politicos to bitch and moan about everything that's wrong with America because -- fair or not -- this sort of thing gets interpreted in the broader political culture within a context that holds conservatives' patriotism to be generally beyond question. I didn't say it was fair, but it's certainly a factor. It's the same reason why Republicans can't catch a break when speaking about race. Fair or not, in our political culture, being a Republican carries with it a whole set of stereotypes and expectations. As does being a Democrat. This does not cut in Obama's favor on the question of patriotism -- which is why Rev. Wright's "God damn America" and Michelle Obama's earlier remarks have added potency to hurt him politically.

It's damaging for a couple of reasons, one obvious (it makes people think he's not as patriotic as he should be) and one not so obvious (it undercuts one of his personal strengths, his aura of authenticity). Along those lines, Steve Sailer has a couple of good posts up today. In the first, Sailer cites a Canadian lawyer who analyzes Obama's essential skill and orientation like this:

At bottom, I think Obama's basic theoretical framework is in dispute resolution. The worldview is sometimes attributed to his experience as an organizer, but it could also be that of a corporate litigator. He thinks of the world as filled with non-zero-sum games, in which the win-win alternative of making a deal and dividing the surplus isn't taken because each side is gripped with a narrative that makes rationally self-interested compromise difficult or impossible. The intellectual problem is to look at the interests coolly and dispassionately and see where the surplus-maximizing position lies. But the harder problem is to be sensitive enough to how the identity-constituting stories keep both sides from doing that. It's Harvard Negotiation project stuff, but it also works with who he thinks he is.

Hence what Larison has called the Obama "head fake" -- convince your opponents that you're really listening to them, then go ahead and do what you really want to do. Sailer says the problem is trying to figure out what Obama really believes -- that is, for whose interests is he really working:

The reporters covering him haven't managed (or even tried) to get him to speak frankly about this crucial question. That's what shocked so many naive people when they finally learned about Obama's 20-year-relationship with Rev. Wright -- that while on the campaign trail he says one thing, but at home for two decades he acted in a very different fashion.

In his second post, Sailer lays out a theory of why Obama's continued dodginess on the specifics of his intellectual relationship with Jeremiah Wright indicates a cunning strategy that depends on media and public discomfort with discussing race:

What Obama is counting on is that white Americans don't take blacks' ideological views seriously. Obama is betting on everybody treating his relationship with Wright as a racial matter rather than as an ideological matter, and since all nice people shy away from thinking about racial matters, they'll just let it drop.

In contrast, if Wright were a white minister who was an outspoken advocate of Sandinista-style "liberation theology," a white Obama would, at a minimum, be spending a lot of time answering searching questions about his ideological evolution. But, because Obama and Wright are black, nobody takes the disagreeable Wright's ideology seriously, and everybody assumes that the personable Obama must share their ideology.

That's a smart observation. I thought about it this morning when listening via podcast to Terry Gross interview black liberation theology originator James Cone on Fresh Air. It was a somewhat informative interview -- Cone sounds like a fascinating man, and a terrific preacher -- but she didn't take Cone's rather bold and controversial theology seriously enough to ask him a single challenging, or even critical, question.