Obama Presidency Still Offers A Glimmer Of HOPE; Decision 2012

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The Emotional Tug of Obama

FORGET your political affiliation. Never mind your assessment of his time in office so far. If you have any kind of heart, you’re struck by it: the photograph of Barack Obama bent down so that a young black boy can touch his head and see if the president’s hair is indeed like his own. It moves you. It also speaks to a way in which Obama and Mitt Romney, whose campaigns are picking up the pace just as polls show them neck and neck, are profoundly mismatched.

In a story that quickly went viral, The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote last week about the photograph, which was taken three years ago when the boy, then 5, visited the White House. It has hung there ever since, left on the wall even as other pictures were swapped out, as is the custom, for newer, fresher ones.

David Axelrod, one of the chief architects of Obama’s political career, told Calmes: “It doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

Axelrod’s words, meanwhile, are a reminder that more than three and a half years after Obama made history as the first black man elected to the presidency, he still presents more than a résumé and an agenda. He still personifies the hope, to borrow a noun that he has used, that we really might evolve into the colorblind, fair-minded country that many of us want. His own saga taps into the larger story of this country’s fitful, unfinished progress toward its stated ideal of equal opportunity.

And that gives many voters an emotional connection to him that they simply don’t have to most other politicians, including Romney, a privileged and intensely private man whose strengths don’t include the easy ability to humanize himself. There’s a Mitt-versus-myth element to the 2012 campaign, and it influences the manner in which Romney’s supporters and Romney himself engage the president and make their pitch. They must and do emphasize job-creation numbers over personal narrative, the technocratic over the touchy-feely.

Obama and his advisers don’t exactly tack in the opposite direction. Understandably concerned about longstanding prejudices, they don’t invoke his racial identity all that frequently.

But when they do, it’s powerful. The photograph released last week instantly reminded me of one taken in mid-April, when Obama visited a museum in Dearborn, Mich. It showed him seated in the bus that Rosa Parks made famous. And it, too, pinged fast and far around the Web.

Although race represents a less central dynamic for Obama now than it did in 2008, it’s a factor in his political fortunes nonetheless. It poisons some of his opponents, pumping them full of a toxic zeal beyond the partisan norm. How else to explain their obsession with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or the lunatic persistence of the “birthers,” including the Arizona secretary of state, who didn’t drop his threat to keep Obama off the state ballot until Wednesday? Even as he quieted down, Donald Trump piped up, raising questions yet again about where Obama was born, though Trump’s motivations are surely less racist than narcissistic, even entrepreneurial. For him attention is attention and ratings are ratings, no matter how repulsively drummed up.

BUT race is also a central theme — the central theme — in Obama’s own telling of his journey. It’s how he explains where he has come from and how far he has traveled. His best-selling memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” is subtitled “A Story of Race and Inheritance.” In the first sentences of his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he noted that his “presence on this stage is pretty unlikely” and that his father was “born and raised in a small village in Kenya.”

Race is the obstacle he has overcome, the trail he has blazed. And that, I think, is what Geraldine Ferraro, a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s, was clumsily trying to get at during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when she drew attention to the color of Obama’s skin and said that he “happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”

Although Romney would be the first Mormon president, that milestone doesn’t fit into the country’s history in the same way. Although his religion, like Obama’s race, has made him an outsider in certain circumstances and at certain times, that’s not something he or his supporters really promote.

And to a degree that’s striking in the age of Oprah, he hasn’t succeeded in rummaging through his biography for the sorts of broadly inspirational chapters that can help a candidate bond with voters. Even George W. Bush, another child of privilege and political scion, had his tale of midlife remorse and redemption: an end to drinking, a beginning of Bible study. Romney has ... the Salt Lake City Olympics?

On top of which, he seems to be congenitally closed-off and palpably awkward about transforming the personal into the political. He has five sons, all shepherded safely into adulthood. But he hasn’t mined fatherhood for memorable material. And Ann Romney has spoken more poignantly about his support for her in her illness than he has managed to.

In the end, that may not make a whit of difference. If swing voters were driven chiefly by candidates’ biographies, political analysts trying to predict election outcomes wouldn’t dwell so much on external measures like unemployment figures and right-track, wrong-track numbers. And if eloquence alone won the day, then these two candidates’ advocates wouldn’t believe, as more than a few of them do, that after all the speechifying and fund-raising and advertising, the results will boil down to positive or negative economic developments outside either man’s — or either campaign’s — control.

But if there are no clear developments one way or the other? If there’s an ongoing recovery, but a meager, tentative one at that? Then the spoils will most likely go to the candidate who makes the better case for himself. And that’s a battle over more than Bain Capital, the Keystone XL pipeline and the individual mandate. That’s a war for hearts as well.


Sources: Meet The Press, MSNBC, NY Times