Via.
… in response to the Washington Post’s observation that Obama is uncomfortable with performing Clintonesque sentimentality of the “I feel your pain†variety, I thought, that’s right, Obama’s more like “I feel your hope.â€Â Does the difference matter?
I think so. Obama is detaching from the liberal tradition of claiming that our wounds are what make us alike and what make us obligated to aid each other. Obama’s saying that it’s hope that makes us alike, especially the hope for politics to advance the world toward deserving our optimism for it.
For many of his supporters, Obama produces something like the return of limbs to life that frostbite survivors feel first as pain and then as a thrill that the numbness has finally ended….
I only wish feelings of unity could dissolve fundamentally antagonistic interests, but I don’t think so. But making it ok to demand from politics a reason to maintain hope for the coming community made up of people who are already alive is important. I think it’s great that we have a major politician who loves politics and the political, who does not run as though above it but from within it, who takes pleasure in the language of organization and struggle, who sees movement politics not as a sentimental exception to ordinary life but as what ordinary life requires for entrenched structures of inequality, insecurity, and injustice to be forced to change. Obama’s message about politics is much more radical (and hopeful) than are his actual neoliberal policies, a fact which I find infuriating and confusing.
Obama is challenging us in the best of ways.
h/t Nicole Ridgway
