I am as pleased as anyone that Barack Obama emerged at the convention with a solidly above-average speech. But the fawning by even usually level-headed people such as Anna Quindlen strikes me as premature, and even a little ridiculous.
For instance, Quindlen is swept off her usually solid feet by Obama’s boast that “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” Quindlen then goes on, as a representative of American liberals everywhere, to take full personal credit for making Obama’s “story” possible even here in the United States.
But what does Obama mean when he says that only in America is his story possible, and what are Quindlen and all the other swooning liberals hearing when he says that? Do they mean that only in America can a son of immigrants from a racial minority rise to the pinnacle of power, the way Obama has?
Setting aside the facts that Obama, who is currently just a pipsqueak state senator, is nowhere near the pinnacle of power, and that not even all U.S. senators are particularly powerful, and that who knows, maybe Obama will suck as a U.S. senator, this statement of American exceptionalism is silly and demonstrably false.
Posted by at August 03, 2004 10:42 PM
The "American exceptionalism" made me wince too; it was one of an otherwise good speech's few false notes.
However, you exaggerate a little bit when you describe him as "just a pipsqueak state senator." There are thousands of pipsqueak state senators; only a few of them are accomplished Consitutional scholars who combine their state-legislative duties with teaching at a major university.
I agree that there's some danger of overrating Barack Obama, but you know, the fact that there's all this liberal passion out there looking for a decent leader is not in itself a bad thing.
Posted by: Patrick Nielsen Hayden on August 4, 2004 8:07 AMGood point, and for another view from acroos the waves:
"Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners."
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"Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society. That is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear example that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A., however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.
Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the "American Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its solution."
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i43/43b00701.htm
The legacy of MLK might deserve at least a passing footnote here.