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‘In No Other Country on Earth’: The Presidential Campaign of Barack Obama

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650040902828029

1557-3028

Gerard Toal,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Abstract Notes 1. Throughout his speeches Obama hails the historic – "this was the moment" – to create powerful rhetorical affects where his audience is within the moment yet beyond it recognising it as 'history,' and where forthcoming decisions (like the election result) are already decided. A useful discussion of the rhetorical devices used by Obama is Sam Leith, 'Man of His Words', Financial Times, 17–18 Jan. 2009. 2. David Kirkpatrick, 'Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life', New York Times, 13 Oct. 2008. 3. James Woods, 'Verbage: The Republican War On Words', New Yorker, 13 Oct. 2008. 4. Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Holt 2005); Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner 2008). 5. On Obama's fundraising success see Joshua Green, 'The Amazing Money Machine: How Silicon Valley Made Barack Obama This Year's Hottest Start-Up', The Atlantic, June 2008. 6. Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, rev. ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press 2004). 7. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press 2006). 8. This article only analyses a select number of Obama speeches and does not address his response to unfolding events in 2007 and 2008, like the debate over Bush's 'surge' policy in Iraq, Musharraf's rule in Pakistan, or the Georgian war of August 2008 in detail. It is based on reading all his foreign policy speeches including those on veteran affairs and energy independence as well as the Democratic primary and general election presidential debates. Obama's speeches are available at: . Thanks are due to Jeff Owen for organising and compiling these and to friends in Washington DC for conversations clarifying my thinking. Two volumes featuring Obama's campaign speeches have recently appeared: An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama: A Primer (Toronto: Ecw Press 2008) and In His Own Words: Barack Obama – The American Promise (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace 2008). 9. Barack Obama, 'Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention', Boston, 27 July 2004. 10. A chronotope (chronology-topology) is the term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the 'spatio-temporal matrix' that is the foundation of narrative. In the genre of American 'folk' tales and films, the chronotope weaves individual biographies into the grand arc of national and world historical events – Pearl Harbor, World War II, the Cold War, etc. Filmic examples include Forest Gump (Amblin, Paramount, 1994) and, most recently, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Kennedy/Marshall, Paramount, Warner 2008). Obama's election night victory speech used the life of one voter that day, 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, to move through the twentieth century to the present culminating 'historic' moment. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981). 11. Obama, 'Keynote Address' (note 9). 12. Colm Tóibín, 'James Baldwin and Barack Obama', The New York Review of Books, 23 Oct. 2008. 13. Obama, Dreams From My Father (note 6) p. 377 14. Video of Obama's appearance in Barnes and Noble is available at booktv.org. 15. Larissa MacFarquhar, 'The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?', New Yorker, 7 May 2007. 16. Also Obama's young chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, had previously worked with Ted Sorenson on his memoir and was thus steeped in the Kennedy Presidency. Sorensen was an early supporter of Obama and introduced him at an event at DePaul University in October 2007. Obama secured the endorsement of Senator Ted Kennedy at the end of January 2008, an event represented as the passing of the JFK mantle to the candidate. 17. Andrew Sullivan, 'Goodbye To All That', The Atlantic, Dec. 2008, p. 42. 18. Ibid., p. 49. 19. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1995) p. 88. 20. Samantha Power, 'The Democrats and National Security', New York Review of Books, 14 Aug. 2008. 21. Peter Brown, "Strong and Wrong vs. Weak and Right", RealClearPolitics.com, 15 Jan. 2007. 22. Matt Bei, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (New York: Penguin 2007). 23. Associated Press, 'Clinton Says U.S. Could "Totally Obliterate" Iran', Associated Press, 22 April 2008. 24. No copy of Obama's senior paper has come to light despite the best effort of conservative activists to find it in the hope of turning up arguments they could use against him. 25. Barack Obama, 'Remarks of Illinois State Senator Barack Obama against Going to War with Iraq' (Chicago: www.barackobama.com 2002). 26. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, 'Understanding Critical Geopolitics: Geopolitics and Risk Society', Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2/3 (1999). 27. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society; Towards A New Modernity (London; Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications 1992); Gearóid Ó Tuathail, 'De-Territorialized Threats and Global Dangers: Geopolitics and Risk Society', Geopolitics 3, no. 1 (1998). 28. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt 2004). Reflexive security thinking can be vacuous and is not necessarily progressive. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations offered versions of reflexive security. Clinton emphasised the 'enlargement' of NATO and a community of 'market democracies' while both Clinton and Bush spoke of the importance of the 'revolution in military affairs' in modernising the US military. Bush's reflective security rhetoric justified a more aggressive unilateralist policy. Multilateral agreements like the anti-ballistic missile treaty, for example, were Cold War relics that were no longer relevant to the conditions of the twenty-first century. Obama's critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy – the representation of it as a continuation of Cold War thinking – misses this. 29. Obama, The Audacity of Hope (note 7) p. 292. 30. Ibid., p. 292–293. 31. Ibid., p. 293. 32. Ibid., p. 302. 33. Ibid., p. 304. 34. Obama sponsored 121 bills between 24 January 2005 and 29 September 2008 of which 115 never made it out of committee and 3 were successfully enacted. Obama co-sponsored 505 bills during the same time period. See . 35. For a critique of this thrust see Derek Gregory, ''The Rush to the Intimate': Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn in Late Modern War', Radical Philosophy 150 (2008) available at 36. Nicholas Lemann, 'Worlds Apart', New Yorker, 13 Oct. 2008. 37. See . 38. Kurt Campbell, ed., Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2008). 39. Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy, available at . 40. Ibid., p. 5. 41. Ibid., p. 5. 42. Ibid., p. 14. 43. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 44. Obama, Audacity of Hope (note 7) p. 308, emphasis in the original. 45. Ibid., p. 309. 46. Christopher Hayes, 'The Pragmatist', The Nation, 10 Dec. 2008; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001). 47. Michael Massing, 'Obama: In the Divided Heartland', New York Review of Books, 18 Dec. 2008. 48. Peter Wallsten, 'Allies of Palestinians See a Friend in Barack Obama', Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2008. In announcing another run for president on 24 February 2008, Ralph Nader drew attention to how the Palestinian-Israeli issue "is a real off-the-table issue" for the Democratic candidates. They don't touch the issue, he charged, "even though it's central to our security and to the situation in the Middle East." Obama, Nader claimed, was "pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state Senate" and "now he's supporting the Israeli destruction of … Gaza." This was his reading of a letter Obama wrote in January 2008 to the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in which he urged no condemnation of the Israeli blockade of Gaza "that does not fully condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel." While expressing concern about the impact of closed border crossings on Palestinian families, the letter declares that "we have to understand why Israel is forced to do this." According to Obama, the Security Council "should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks, and should make clear that Israel has the right to defend itself …. If it cannot bring itself to make these common sense points, I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all." Tim Russert, 'Meet the Press: Interview with Ralph Nadar', National Broadcasting Corporation, 24 Feb. 2008. For the text of Obama's letter see . 49. Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, 'Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side', New York Times, 11 May 2008. 50. Barack Obama, 'Address to AIPAC Policy Forum' (Chicago: www.barackobama.com 2007). 51. Barack Obama, 'Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: AIPAC Policy Conference' (Washington, DC: http://www.barackobama.com 2008). 52. Barack Obama, 'Speech in Sderot, Israel', New York Times, 23 July 2008. 53. For the transcript see <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/politics/26text-debate.html?pagewanted=all. 54. Peter Canellos, 'McCain's 'Judeo-Christian Values' Reference Puzzles', Boston Globe, 19 Aug. 2008. 55. Elisabeth Bumiller, 'McCain Draws Line on Attacks as Crowds Cry 'Fight Back'', New York Times, 10 Oct. 2008. 56. For Obama's addresses on veteran affairs see Barack Obama, 'A Sacred Trust' (speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting) (Kansas City, MO: http://www.barackobama.com 2007). 57. Barack Obama, 'The War We Need to Win' (Washington, DC: http://www.barackobama.com 2007). 58. Ibid. 59. In 2008 Reinhold Niebuhr's 1952 classic was republished with a forward by the retired Army colonel, historian and Iraq war critic Andrew Bacevich of Boston University who lost a son in Iraq in May 2007. The edition features a back page blurb by Obama: "[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction." Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 2008 ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1952). 60. General James L. Jones, 'The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq', (2007); Barack Obama, 'Turning the Page in Iraq' (Clinton, IA: http://www.barackobama.com 2007). 61. Barack Obama, 'The World Beyond Iraq' (Fayetteville, NC: http://www.barackobama.com 2008). 62. Barack Obama, 'The Cost of War' (Charleston, WV: http://www.barackobama.com 2008). 63. Barack Obama, 'Renewing American Leadership', Foreign Affairs 86/2 (2007) pp. 3–4. 64. Barack Obama, 'Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Summit on Confronting New Threats' (West Layafette, IN: http://www.barackobama.com 2008). 65. Obama, 'Renewing' (note 63) p. 4. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Obama '08, 'Strengthening Our Common Security by Investing in Our Common Humanity', available at . 69. Barack Obama, 'The American Moment: Remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' (Chicago: http://www.barackobama.com 2007). 70. Obama, 'Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Summit' (note 64). 71. Obama, 'The American Moment: Remarks to the Chicago Council' (note 69). 72. Obama, 'The World Beyond Iraq' (note 61). 73. Elisabeth Bumiller, 'A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy', New York Times, 18 July 2008. 74. For a discussion see Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal), 'Russia's Kosovo: A Critical Geopolitics of the August 2008 War Over South Ossetia', Eurasian Geography and Economics 49/6 (2008) pp. 670–705. 75. For a selection see . 76. It remains to be seen if the British government's rhetorical repudiation of the 'war on terror' will occur under an Obama administration. On the war on terror as a American political economy complex see Ian Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2006). 77. Obama's speech before an estimated hundred thousand people in Berlin on 24 July 2008 was a remarkable event. In the speech he affirmed the importance of common security and 'global citizenship' but in ways which are familiar with idealistic traditions in American geopolitical culture. "This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet …. People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time." Barack Obama, 'A World Stands As One' (Berlin, Germany: www.barackobama.com 2008). 78. Barack Obama, 'A New Beginning (Remarks at DePaul University)' (Chicago: www.barackobama.com 2007). 79. For a discussion of the problem of Madisonian entropy, the wasted energy and structural incapacity created by the complex Madisonian system of governance duplication and institutionalised stalemate, see John Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia, Temple University Press 2005) pp. 114–117.