January 8, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Written the morning after the New Hampshire primary, in which Obama finished second to Hillary Clinton)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n By\u00a0<\/strong>Jim Sleeper<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The preacherly cadences in Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cYes We Can\u201d speech last night in Nashua deepened his two greatest symbolic promises: Domestically, he makes being an American beautiful again because, in him, it makes achievable what is still incredible to many \u2014 a 400-year-old hope that we can untangle the race knot we\u2019ve tied ourselves in since 1607. \u201cIt\u2019s not something he\u2019s doing,\u201d Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times; \u201cit\u2019s something he\u2019s being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internationally, therefore, Obama reminds multitudes of what has fascinated them about America \u2013 not just its wealth and power, which are trashy and brutal even when irresistible, but a folksy universalism that disposes Americans to say \u201cHi\u201d to anyone rather than \u201cHeil\u201d to a leader, to give the other person a fair shot, and, out of that <\/em>kind of strength, to take a shot at the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our wealth and power often subvert what\u2019s best in us. But because Obama knows that human failings make this more complicated than either conservative moralism or leftist anti-capitalism alone can explain, his promise runs deeper than the poetry of campaigning. But can that promise really become the prose of governing? Can we take his symbolism for substance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama says \u201cYes we can!\u201d arguing that the movement his campaign is building will sustain him as president against countervailing powers. But a campaign isn\u2019t<\/em> a movement, and experiences of the 1960s taught some of us that even a swelling movement is no substitute for sustainable, organized power in a political party or coalition of parties, and in unions and churches that can mobilize disciplined multitudes in support of a program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many have been elected who could not govern. At David Dinkins\u2019 inauguration as New York City\u2019s first black mayor in 1990, the audience teared up as the Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn\u2019s Concord Baptist Church intoned, \u201cGod of our weary years, God of our silent tears.\u201c But those high sentiments foretold little about what they would accomplish, not mainly because racists crawled out of sewers to help elect Rudy Giuliani. That wasn\u2019t the main reason why Giuliani defeated Dinkins in 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hillary Clinton, Obama\u2019s chief opponent now for the Democratic nomination, has endured and overcome a great deal, but she knows what governing from a executive position actually entails, and it\u2019s unfair to say, as some do, that she knows too<\/em> much about it because of all the baggage she carries from her husband\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama doesn\u2019t yet know enough about governing to discredit Bill Clinton\u2019s argument that electing Obama would be a roll of the dice. Voting for JFK was a roll of the dice, too, but in consequence we got the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam disaster, and Kennedy and his brother Bobby had to learn civil rights on the job, as neither Barack nor Hillary will have to do. Still, Barack\u2019s learning curve is at least as steep as he is smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His really impressive personal struggle and the profound intuitions it has given him about public rights and wrongs are refreshing in a politician, much more so than anything was in candidate Jack Kennedy. And Obama\u2019s American self-becoming has made him the catalyst of a campaign that, while it is not yet a movement and may never be a governing coalition, has nevertheless earned him a strong claim to Americans\u2019 critical support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His campaign confirms many Americans\u2019 yearning to believe again that, unlike that of almost any other nation in history, the national identity of the United States was founded not on myths of primordial kinship, of \u201cblood and soil,\u201d but on a more universal experiment that enjoins all Americans, \u201cby their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,\u201d as Alexander Hamilton put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Claiming one\u2019s identity as an American, therefore, means standing up personally as well as politically for this daunting civic-republican challenge, against exclusionary racial, religious, and other strains that have persisted alongside and within our republican framework.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is what Rosa Parks did, and it is what Obama is doing \u2014 first by being what he has made of himself as a man, and second by running for president. And I must say, as one who has argued for years that Americans must let race go as an organizing principle of even progressive politics \u2014 because too much of even what passes for anti-racism only ends up recapitulating racism itself \u2014 I can\u2019t help feeling that Barack is everything I\u2019ve hoped an American could be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Hillary\u2019s claim to be doing some of this American heavy lifting is deep and credible, too. If I vote for Obama, it won\u2019t be because I discount Hillary Clinton\u2019s symbolic and substantive leadership but because my yearning to get beyond race will be strong enough to impel me to try this roll of the dice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (One of the many posted comments on this column and my response:)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On January 9, 2008 \u2013 11:11am ______ said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just a guess (Jim Sleeper will correct me if I\u2019m way off), but the challenge he\u2019s talking about is less Obama\u2019s being black than the reaction and response from \u201cthe rest of us\u201d to the participation and leadership that black folk can bring to our civic culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n