It’s nice to assume that Barack Obama will be successful in his quest to be the first black president, the first minority president, the first non-old white guy president. That represents progress of a sort in a country where 3 in 10 people still admit to racial bias. And while quite frankly I’m not as enamored of the Illinois senator as I once was (apparently familiarity does in fact breed contempt), his election will be a happy day for me when/if it happens.
To engage completely in our hypothetical, I want to think for a second about how the first black president will be judged.
Does he pull our soldiers out of Iraq? Does the country dissolve into ethnic cleansing as a result?
Are our special forces able to drag Osama bin Laden out of his hiding place? Does he get a jury trial?
Does he pull the economy out of its morass? Does he do it by subsidizing oil? Drilling ANWR? Propping up the housing market? Allowing it to sink to its depressingly inevitable bottom?
I don’t know what a President Obama is going to do about any of these things. I do know that his economic team is remarkably free-trade oriented for a politician who spent the primaries pandering to Rust Belt voters with anti-NAFTA rhetoric. I do know that he was among the most self-righteous proponents of public campaign finance until he realized how inconvenient that was going to be for a campaign that has raised more private money than any other in history. In the first case, I’m glad he’s a typical slimy politico. In the later, not so much.
So I sit here curious how history will judge a “Chicago politician” (and we all know what I mean by that label) who gets elected as an inspirational icon of hope. Will he be more machine or messiah? I’m curious. I do know one thing. A President Obama who fails to live up to the significant hype he’s created in the process of getting the job would be tragic. It’s taken 500 years to put a black man in position to lead this country for the first time. If the first black president is a dud, it may be that long again before we see another.
