Promises, Promises

On Tuesday, this past Nov. 4, I voted for John McCain for President of The United States. On Wednesday morning, I woke feeling glad that he lost. Had McCain won, a spirit of gloom would have spread over the land, a deadening feeling of "Oh, God, business as usual," part of that business being that a man tied to failed economic policies was once again at the helm and a nonwhite candidate for president still hadn't a chance. But Barack Obama was our new president. Great day in the morning; a new age in American politics is upon us.

Or is it? Like Augie March, I am an American, Chicago-born, but unlike Augie—a follower of Leon Trotsky—I have never been able to take politics with an entirely straight face. So often, I find my antipathies divided; faced with two equally outrageous candidates, a plague, I usually pronounce, on both their condominiums. The source of this is genealogical. When I was a boy, my father remarked that the aldermen of the City of Chicago, who were then paid an annual salary of $20,000, were spending as much as $250,000 to win election. "The arithmetic doesn't quite work out," he said, pausing, as if to say (though the phrase hadn't yet been invented), "You do the math."

Politicians, my rich Chicago heritage tells me, are all guilty until proven innocent. When the great Rod Blagojevich scandal broke a few months ago, I, like most Chicagoans, wasn't in the least scandalized. All I found remarkable in it was the now former governor's efficiency, in the realm of corruption, in eliminating the middleman and asking for the money himself.

Nigel Dempster, the late English gossip columnist, who specialized in exposing the sexual peccadilloes of British politicians, once remarked: "No one cares what politicians say—they're all liars, cheats and fools." I've met a few—a very few—who weren't: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Paul Simon, Jeane Kirkpatrick. At the same time, whenever I see Joe Biden, with those hair plugs and those too-large dental caps, I imagine him, perhaps unfairly, in traffic court signaling me into the men's room, where in a husky whisper he lets me know that, for three grand, he can get me off that DWI, no sweat.

But even hardened Chicago-bred cynicism breaks down from time to time, and hopeless idealism not only threatens but actually does break through. Barack Obama's presidency seemed such an occasion. He was young, handsome in an elegant yet inoffensive way, he had the gift of even temperament, he was articulate; if not as eloquent as advertised, next to bumbling George W. Bush he seemed a veritable Edmund Burke. True, over several years in politics he seemed to have accomplished nothing but election, which some would say is the real point of politics in any case, but so much about him seemed promising.

Obama himself wasn't short on promises. He promised to change the very game of politics. He would bring transparency to government, toss out the lobbyists, encourage bipartisanship, unite the country, making us one people again. As a tremendous step toward doing so, he ran a magnificently race-free campaign, never once suggesting that America was a racist country or that he was in any way a victim, nor that he was deserving of election for any other reason but his pure inspirational quality and solid intellectual merits.

All politicians disappoint, to ring a change on Tolstoy, but every politician disappoints in his own way. The first inkling of the disappointment with Barack Obama, as we know, came with his appointments. Two major ones—Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle—had to drop out for tax and more intricate delinquencies; Nancy Killefer, his chief performance officer, fell by the wayside for similar reasons. Timothy Geithner, nominated as secretary of the Treasury, was given a pass. But Obama's lectures on the purity that he would bring to government were over. The high moral ground he had picked out for himself, he was finding, was swampier than he had supposed.