Dartblog

Christopher Hitchens asks “Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?” But Obama is not, really; and the self-deception that believes the lie about the pacific Obama campaign and its transcendent refusal to muck about in the mud gets very annoying to anyone trying to gain a solid apprehension of the campaign. Barack Obama has “gone” (to use the word that makes it seem more remarkable than it is) very negative indeed upon the McCain ticket. The only pulled punch so far has been a rather thoroughgoing refusal to attack Sarah Palin’s perceived provincialism, her annoying refusal to be a manish woman, succeeding instead in making the genuine breakthrough: a woman meeting with national success qua woman, depriving the Democrats, in a maddening spoiler, that blip of history. But the Obama campaign has done all of this while confident that scrappier surrogates would take up the fight in its stead. And they have, to the tune of eighty-four rumors, most of them about Mrs. Palin and her family.

In the in-between time, John McCain has extended that same courtesy to his opponent, knowing that no one was going to do the work for him. (A little sample? Consider the newsplay given over to the false rumor that Sarah Palin tried to ban The Catcher in the Rye and two dozen other volumes. And forget, for the moment, that fretting about spectrous book-banners, using this precise list now attached to Mrs. Palin, is the annual self-actualization ritual of English faculties everywhere. And now try to recall when, if at all, you heard that Barack Obama was, as much as one could be, in with the Fannie Mae in-crowd.) The absurd prattle about banning Salinger got play; the bit about Obama being an eager participant in the Democrats’ dirty affordable housing scheme got nothing. To speak of vapidity and weakness is, I think, to miss the point.

This election, whatever its produce, is not what one could call a quiet affair. And I wonder if there isn’t a fair bit of preparing for failure in these endless ruminations upon Mr. Obama’s gutlessness, his restraint, The Role of Race, and so forth.

There is a lot of talk about how very compelling Barack Obama is to the voter. But, really, how damned compelling does a man have to be to beat the Republican—now, in 2008, with this, and that? Christopher Hitchens ought to be asking how the phenom became such an irredeemable mediocrity.