The Disappointment of Hope
Hope breaks out; disappointment follows in its wake. This should not be dismissed as cynicism; it is just the way things are. We invest great emotional and intellectual energy in dreaming our dreams of the future, enjoy the sweet thrill of triumph for a moment or two, before resuming our lives as before, disappointed that the promise was not realised. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still be able to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” How are we to function in these circumstances?
The election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America exemplifies this problem. Obama has been elected on the basis of “the audacity of hope”, and in doing so has created expectations that cannot be achieved, expectations that have been irresponsibly heralded by everyone from the political class to the media to the ordinary citizen. Like any other mortal politician, he simply won’t be able to do what people think he will.
Obama himself acknowledges this. Note the serious tone of his acceptance speech; there was no triumphalism, no ecstasy. Rather, he finally sought to dampen expectations, to make it clear to the American public that a long road lays ahead. “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep…There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem.” Some might argue that this was not such a significant departure, taking note that elsewhere in the speech he insisted that “we will get there”. This is to miss the point, I think. Look at the rhetoric in the days following the victory. “We have talked about this [the high expectations],” said Robert Gibbs, considered a top prospect to be White House press secretary. “It’s important that everybody understands that this is not going to happen overnight.”
The seeds for all this were sown by the media response to the Obama campaign. In three key areas, the media gave Obama an easy ride. Firstly, by not raking more muck from his so-called ‘dubious contacts’ (Reverend Wright, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers). Of course, it’s clear that these connections did not amount to anything that would give cause to question Obama’s suitability for office. Falsity is the nature of a smear. But a presidential race is a dirty game, fall of lies, and one feels that other candidates with similar connections would not have been so lucky. Secondly, in terms of policy – the media allowed itself to be seduced by Obama’s extraordinary oratorical and interpersonal skills, leaving a distinct lack of critical coverage of his policies (this has been explained in another way by those on the radical left: people were so terrified by the possibility of a Republican victory that they didn’t bother to critically scrutinise Obam’s plans). Thirdly, and most importantly, the messianisation of Obama has not gone unchecked. “I can’t imagine waking up in a world in which he loses,” read one friend’s profile on Facebook the day before the election, a natural culmination of a campaign in which otherwise sober-faced individuals have allowed themselves to drool in awe at Obama, as if he is a saviour sent from the Lord. None of this is good for America’s citizens, and it potentially spells trouble for Barack Obama.
Crucially, though, all of the above contributed to a stunning victory. Now, however, they are elements turned against him, because they will make the inevitable disappointment even greater than it might be otherwise. Obama has to govern as a human being and not as a deity; the question is whether or not the people and the media will allow him to do so. Some have already predicted that a press backlash against Obama will soon follow. As Jack Shafer writes in Slate, for example, “So even before Barack Obama swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution on Jan. 20, the press corps – which has failed to make anything it has thrown at him stick (Wright, Rezko, Ayers, voting “present”, his FISA, the surge, guns, capital punishment, and campaign finance flip-flops) – will finally start extracting maximum punishment.” A backlash may be excessive, but a bit of healthy realism will be long overdue. Indeed, Obama should have nothing to fear from it – extraordinary as his victory was, he now has to normalise himself in order to govern.
Some think there is nothing to worry about. Norma Geras writes that “those telling us to moderate the happiness are precisely appealing, whether explicitly or implicitly, to exaggerated expectations of what an Obama victory might be taken to mean – when anyone with just a little knowledge of relevant political facts would not have entertained such expectations in the first place.” This is missing the wood for the trees. Of course there are plenty of people out there who have recognised Obama for what he is: a supremely competent political operator, an absurdly talented orator, armed with a moderately progressive programme as an antidote to the failure of the Bush years. These people, however, do not tell the whole story. There are many others who see Obama as a redeemer, as someone who is going to usher in some sort of utopian age, and the price of disappointing these people – not least in terms of the effect on political participation – cannot be understated.
The salient point is that Obama has the opportunity to leave things a little bit better than when he embarked on his candidacy. This has been the driving motif behind his political career, and it is this that we should expect from him in the same way that we should expect it from ourselves. The importance of incremental steps towards a better world should not be lost amidst the clamour for instant transformation, and it would be a tragedy if the unfair expectations heaped on Obama’s shoulders (albeit expectations that he has – until now – not done enough to dampen) led to his failure. Only through appropriately nurturing our disappointment can we ensure that hope will continue to spring eternal.
