BE STILTED, MY BEATING HEART

Steyn on America
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Sunday, 02 November 2008
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review
http://www.nationalerview.com

It’s a bit late in the day to say what I’m looking for in a candidate. So let me say what I’m looking for in a voter. It was nicely summed up by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic Monthly, contrasting McCain and Obama back at the end of primary season as they clinched their respective nominations:

The enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.

And God bless ‘em: Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them. Alas, we stingy stilted cheerers are a dying breed, and, if present polls are any indication, on November 4th Americans will be looking for a leader they can exalt with more full-throated hosannas. Two and a third centuries after the Declaration of Independence, the monarchical strain in American politics is stronger than ever: Not for us a citizen-executive promising a chicken in every pot; we seek a benign sovereign promising hope in every pot – presumably a specialty item hand-crafted by some Vermonty artisan type.

The old kings – the ones we got rid of back in 1776 – were believed by their touch to be able to cure scrofula. I remember as a schoolboy relishing the onomatopoeic pleasures of the word and my history textbook’s accompanying pictures of medieval unfortunates with lurid pustulating necks. Yet a mere glide of the fingers by English monarchs from Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, and sufferers were instantly transformed – at least until King George I decided ixnay on the hand-lay and declared the racket “too Catholic”. An attempted French restoration of the practice by King Charles X at his coronation in 1824 was greeted with widespread derision.

Ah, “widespread derision”. That’s right up there with “stilted cheers” as a leading indicator of a well-adjusted citizenry. Yet, in the early 21st century, the benign sovereign can heal not merely a minor skin condition of his scurvier subjects but the entire planet. The speech which so moved Marc Ambinder was one Senator Obama largely devoted to the significance of himself: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”

“Heal” is the operative word here. Barack is not one of those warrior kings who cures sick children on weekend breaks from slaughtering foreigners, but rather the apotheosis of a therapeutic culture: He will “heal” the planet and thereby bring “closure” to the Bush era. The other day I found myself stuck in traffic behind one of his Hopemobiles - that’s to say, a van whose rear bore a giant poster in vaguely Soviet realist style of the Great Healer captioned not by his name but only by his message: “HOPE”. Smaller placards dotted around it fleshed out his policy platform: “KIDS’ FUTURE? VOTE DEMOCRATIC.” “HOPE NOT FEAR? VOTE DEMOCRATIC.” I felt a sudden desire to order up a gross of bumper stickers bearing the slogan “FEAR HOPE”.

“One of the objects of a mature political philosophy,” wrote Michael Knox Beran in City Journal this summer, “is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition. The American Founders recognized this, as did the English statesmen who presided at the Revolution of 1688: they rejected utopianism.” Ha! More fool them. Senator Obama promises to “remake this great nation”, which frankly sounds a little cheeseparing and parochial next to his wife’s pledge that an Obama administration will start building “the world as it should be”. It’s not precisely clear what that will involve, but it seems likely to be expensive.

As to his qualifications for remaking the world, my favorite moment of the campaign was when he got briefly touchy about having his minimal “qualifications” for the Presidency compared with Sarah Palin’s. The Senator huffily pointed that he has too got executive experience. Unlike the Governor, he’s never run a state or a town or a business, but, as he put it, for two years he’s been running a successful presidential campaign. In effect, Barack was acknowledging that his principal talent is for self-promotion. It requires some chutzpah to offer your skill at being Barack Obama as your main qualification for the job. The man who modified the title of Sammy Davis Jr’s autobiography for his campaign motto – “Yes, we can!” – might have done better to cut straight to one of Sammy’s signature songs: “I Gotta Be Me.” L’etat, c’est moi.

If Americans vote in accordance with their pollsters, these next four, eight (twelve? twenty?) years seem likely to be tough for us stilted cheerers. I doubt he’ll be lowering ocean levels. But, unlike King Canute, who at least arranged a useful demonstration to apprise the sycophants of his limitations in that respect, King Barack is in no hurry to disabuse his followers. So he’ll probably set up some cockamamie bureaucratic regulation designed hypothetically to lower ocean levels over the course of the next century or two. After all, there’s no point electing a megastar leader without mega-government to go along with it. You might think this is all profoundly unbecoming to a republic of free-born citizens. But these days that’s a concept you can barely raise a roomful of stilted cheers for.