The Test

A beautiful little article provided the cover story for this week's New York Magazine.

It lays out the deeply existential crisis that Democrats are going through right now. After 8 years of descent into the inferno, there are two guides offering to show the path out. Which to choose?

Here are the article's choicest quotes:

Clinton, describing her strengths...

“Most Americans need a president—not everybody, probably not the two of you,” she said with a smile, gesturing to me and her press secretary, Jay Carson. “So you are free to vote however you choose. You can vote on a feeling, you can vote on a speech, you can vote on a debate, you can vote any way you want. But if you’re on the brink of falling out of the middle class, if you’re worried about health care, home foreclosures, and all these other problems, you need a president that you really can believe in and count on to deliver.”

Clinton didn’t contrast herself with Obama here, but she didn’t need to.

Amazingly patronizing insight--there are "2 kinds of Americans?!" Those who need a president and those who don't?! How could she say such a thing?

And yet... she's so dead on right about this. Almost all the people I know supporting Obama are upper-class educated liberals... for reasons like "his capacity to move me" through rhetoric. Obama makes them feel good when he speaks. No one talks about his capacity to govern well... or God forbid his policy platform. Hillary's right. The people who need a president just might need her.

The article goes on to superbly compare the distinct appeal of each candidate. Obama wants to change the way politics works--Clinton will work the system to make it work better:

The unconventionality of Obama’s campaign is the source of its power—and of many of the frustrations and worries it incites. Like any presidential candidate, he has position papers up the wazoo, but his rhetoric is almost entirely devoid of programmatic specificity. This gaping hole can make his bid seem narcissistic, even messianic: La campagne, c’est moi! But behind it lies a rigorous conception of the presidency and a diagnosis of what ails the political system. Obama believes that a fundamental change in how Washington works—an end to the intense partisanship that’s reigned for the past two decades, in particular—is a precondition for major policy advances. He believes that, as he often says, “we can disagree without being disagreeable.” He’s convinced that unity is attainable through the right kind of leadership: his.

Clinton doesn’t say so quite this bluntly, but she manifestly considers Obama’s outlook woefully naïve. Her view of the culture of Washington is darker, and of transforming it, more skeptical.

Obama is nothing if not messianic. I sat in a room full of pastors a few weeks ago and TO THE PERSON they were taken in by him. Glassy-eyed. Adoring. Follow-him-anywhere....

But the one time I heard Obama speak in person--at a New York rally here in Washington Square Park, surrounded by affluent college students--and he kept talking about remaking our political system, my head kept ringing the response "You can't DO THAT. No one can." I felt so damn cynical at the time. But that voice hasn't left me yet.

The article's conclusion is a brilliant compare-and-contrast between the two "Virgils":

But if [Clinton is] correct that the brutally polarized partisan dynamics of Washington are ineradicable, isn’t the logical conclusion that a Clinton restoration would mean four (or eight) more years of the Clinton wars—a perpetual 1998? The thought of it produced a dull throbbing in my temples, and I told her so. “I can understand the feeling,” she said with a laugh. “But, in some ways, psychologically and emotionally, that might be less painful and more short-lived than it would be with someone who’s never been through it. Because it’ll happen. I don’t think I’m saying anything negative, I’m just stating a fact: It will happen.”

What, dear reader, is your reaction when you hear talk like that? Do you find yourself vigorously nodding your head—or cradling it in your hands? The enthralling campaign playing out now before us has Democrats all over the city and across the country asking such questions and others that they have never contemplated before. The battle between Hillary and Barack has produced plenty of heat, with more to come, no doubt. But it has also generated considerable light, clarifying for many of us that the choice we’ll be making on February 5 isn’t mainly between two sets of policies or even two individuals. It’s between two different ways of looking at the world.

If you find yourself drawn to the Clinton candidacy, you likely believe that politics is politics, that partisanship isn’t transmutable, that Republicans are for the most part irredeemable. You suspect that talk of transcendence amounts to humming “Kumbaya” past the graveyard. You believe that progress comes only with a fight, and that Clinton is better equipped than Obama (or maybe anyone) to succeed in the poisonous, fractious environment that Washington is now and ever shall be. You ponder the image of Bill as First Laddie and find yourself smiling, not sighing or shrieking.

If you find yourself swept up in Obamamania, on the other hand, you regard this assessment as sad, defeatist, as a kind of capitulation. You’re perfectly aware that politics is often a dirty business. But you believe it could be a bit cleaner, a bit nobler, a bit more sustaining. You think that paradigm shifts can happen, that the system can be rebooted. Most of all, an attraction to Obama indicates you are, on some level, a romantic. You never had your JFK, your MLK, and you desperately crave one: What you want is to fall in love.

I've received more than one disgusted look of betrayal from a Democratic friend when I tell them that I think Hillary would be a better President. Part of me feels sleazy even admitting that I harbor this notion. I feel like a scum--like I don't get "it." I feel like it must have felt in the 60s when the really cool free-thinking kids pulled up in the VW bus with the tunes turned up the smoke wafting out the windows and they said, "dude, hop in... we're going to Haight-Ashbury..." and I stand there in my cords and my button-down blue oxford and say, "no thanks, I've got to practice my violin tonight and I should stick around town 'cause I've got a history paper on the Counter-Reformation due on Thursday... man..." and they drove away, laughing.

This voting stuff is so primal, it's ridiculous.