…was the head­line of an post I had in mind to write after read­ing Mau­reen Dowd’s column the other day. Luck­ily Jonathan Raban saved me the trouble:

Those who hear only empty opti­mism in Obama aren’t lis­ten­ing. His rou­tine stump speech is built on the premise that Amer­ica has become estranged from its own essen­tial char­ac­ter; a coun­try unhinged from its con­sti­tu­tion, feared and dis­liked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its econ­omy in ‘sham­bles’, its pol­i­tics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he con­jures a people grown lonely in them­selves and lonely as a nation in the larger soci­ety of the world. (Obama him­self is clearly on inti­mate terms with lone­li­ness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born out­sider nego­ti­at­ing a suc­ces­sion of social and cul­tural fron­tiers; it takes the form of a life­long quest for family and com­mu­nity, and ends, like a Vic­to­rian novel, with a wedding.)

The light in Obama’s rhetoric – the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-​woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorse­ment speech, ‘We are the ones we have been wait­ing for’ – is in direct pro­por­tion to the dark­ness, and he paints a blacker pic­ture of Amer­ica than any Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in living memory has dared to do. He courts his lis­ten­ers, not as legions of the bliss­ful, but as legions of the alien­ated, adrift in a coun­try no longer recog­nis­able as their own, and chal­lenges them to emu­late slaves in their strug­gle for eman­ci­pa­tion, impov­er­ished Euro­pean immi­grants seek­ing a new life on a far con­ti­nent, and sol­diers of the ‘great­est gen­er­a­tion’ who vol­un­teered to fight Fas­cism and Nazism. The extrav­a­gance of these sim­i­les is jar­ring – espe­cially when they’re spoken by a writer as subtle and care­ful as Obama is on the printed page – but they serve to make the double point that Amer­ica is in a des­per­ate predica­ment and that only a great wave of com­mu­ni­tar­ian action can sal­vage it.

(A side note/complaint: I sub­scribed to the LRB because I still find it so much easier to read things in print, but it’s telling that Raban’s arti­cle, which as a March 20 date­line, showed up on the same day that I received my copy of the March 6 issue. I guess it’s fit­ting that Raban alludes to a sim­i­lar prob­lem in the lede of his LRB piece: “For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-​sheathed national edi­tion of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morn­ing, and gone straight to the paper’s web­site, because news printed nine or ten hours ago is too old to keep up with the fast-​moving course of the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion battle.”)