Barack Obama is the latest in a long series of next big things to hit American politics.  He is sharp, suave, a talented orator and a very gifted actor.  He has a unique ability to inspire and energize people across many different walks of life – and not just amongst the youth.  He is the product of a newer America, one less European and more global, the America of YouTube and Anderson Cooper rather than that of nightly news and Walter Cronkite.  He springs from an America perhaps more prosperous and more educated than the one our grandparents knew, but one no less troubled for it.  He is perhaps the most promising politician in a century or more.  And I cannot stand him.

It shocks me that he is the darling of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party – of liberals in general.  I was always taught that liberalism stood opposed not so much to conservatism as to populism – that it was an ideology of the rights of the person as opposed to the tyranny of the people, of rational egalitarianism than lowest-common-denominator equality.  Nothing is more popularly tyrannical than a demagogue; but in Obama that seems to be exactly what we get, a peddler of empty phrases and worn buzzwords, squeezing the last few drops of meaning left in once noble ideas like “hope” – or “change.”

The justification for this is that, apparently, he’s one of us.  The evidence is nearly non-existent but it is a fiction that I see implicitly parroted by self-professed liberals, and our wet ideological cousins, “progressives.”  The rationale is the same as Henry Burton’s in Primary Colors when asked if he wants to work for a man who just wants to get elected: “No, I want to work for a guy who fights for what’s right and watch a Republican get elected... I know the difference between a man who believes what I do and lies about it to get elected and one that just doesn’t give a fuck.  And I’ll take the liar.” 

At least that hope is real – not hope for someone who can “heal America” or some other meaningless platitude, but for someone who honestly believes as we do, someone who is truly a liberal but can inspire others to see past it or at least distract them long enough to get through the door.  We are looking for an ideological leader first; ironically the sort of figure Reagan was to the conservatives – and Obama knows it, hence the failed attempt to praise him.  But as William Kristol warned Reagan-hungry Republicans, I warn you: the standard bearer does not exist.  Obama has never had to fight an election on principles – the only one he actually has involves Iraq, a question on which his opinion was both unsolicited and unimportant when it mattered – and he has certainly never made great strides on any policy.  He continues to shirk that effort now, and gets a free pass for it both from we enlightened and from the media, so anxious to build up their darling.  Many are so desperate after eight wasted years that they believe in him anyway.  But that does not absolve him – and it will not save him.

A contrast with Hillary Clinton is telling.  It is true that she has little more under her belt than he after four additional years in the Senate.  But she has been on the national stage for decades – and unlike Obama, who has had his political career serendipitously and effortlessly handed to him, she has fought and bled in almost every political battle of the last two decades.  Doubt her sincerity but not for a moment her commitment: one need only recall her husband’s election, when America rejected her as an equal partner to him and she – for the good of our cause – stood back and let herself be a political wife instead of an autonomous human being.  Remember too the doomed health care effort, a ship whose helm she took even as it sank and one she stayed with even after the crew had fled.  That would be enough to bring down two or three normal politicians; but she recovered.  If you like her it’s perseverance; if you don’t it’s shameless ambition.  But she’s got it.

Liberals – and Democrats generally – should have long memories and a lot of grit; as an ideology we are crowded with great figures and with campaigns marked by danger, adversity and too often futility.  A checkered past and lost battles should count for you: it means you’re still here, you’ve fought and you’ll keep fighting.  Obama has never fought for anything except himself – this campaign itself is the first real challenge he has ever met, and even now the sea of hope has carried him much farther than his lackluster effort deserves.  He hasn’t been in the trenches and knows no greater cause. 

What’s worst of all is that he seems not to want any.  Behind that honey-sweet talk about change and hope is an earnest desire to avoid saying anything at all, to take no position for fear that any will be held against him.  It is the culmination of the trends in American politics of the past sixty years: the reduction of every concrete position or earnest belief to the point where any departure from the vagaries of stump poetry count against you.  And it is on this, this thin kind of hope, that liberals and Democrats are supposed to stake a nation!

We ought not risk it.  If nothing else it should be an issue of fairness: not to us, but to him.  The presidency is a hard enough job as it is, and I would not saddle anyone with it who lacked the most basic belief or stated principle.  It would be wrong, and an election should be nothing if not a moral contest.  That is one primary he’s already lost – and it is the one in which there are no second chances.