What makes the Obama story so powerful isn't just the fact that as a half-white, half-black man, his public journey to the top visibly tied together some of the more painful frayed ends of our past. It's that he ran his race with dignity and honor against people who didn't return the favor, facing a succession of opponents who feared losing more than shame and gave in to pretty much every possible temptation to go low and appeal to the worst in us.
I didn't always see it at the time. But thinking back on it now, I realize what an extraordinary accomplishment his getting this far has been. A man who wasn't great would have blown this a hundred times along the way. So would a person who wasn't extremely lucky. The historical seas literally parted for this Obama guy, with inconceivable idiocy and villainy littering the political shores on either side of him as he ascended to the pantheon of all-time American heroes simply by walking straight ahead and not being a dick.
It's not the most profound observation but it is remarkable in its own way and something to think about before you get up and go to the polls in the morning.
Something else to think about would be Naomi Klein's article from the same issue of Rolling Stone in which she examines the structure of the Wall Street bailout and finds that it resembles not so much the "socialism" often invoked by its critics but more of the same "disaster capitalism" we've seen at work in New Orleans after the flood and in Iraq after the invasion.
In Iraq, the contractors were tasked with reconstructing the country from the mess made by U.S. missiles. After years of corruption born of no-bid contracts and paltry oversight, many Iraqis are still waiting for the lights to come back on. Today, a new team of contractors is lining up to reconstruct the U.S. economy — reconstruct it from the mess made by the very banks, brokers and law firms that are now applying for contracts. And it's not at all clear that America can survive their assistance.
See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. Private companies wanting to help manage the bailout were given just two days to apply for massive, multiyear contracts. Since it was such a mad rush — after all, the entire economy was about to implode — there was no time for an open bidding process. Nor was there time to draft rigorous rules to make sure that those applying don't have serious conflicts of interest. Instead, applicants were asked to disclose their conflicts and to explain — and this is not a joke — their "philosophy in fulfilling your duty to the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer in light of your proprietary interests and those of other clients." In other words, an open invitation to bullshit about how much they love their country and how they can be trusted to regulate themselves.
Anyone who has followed either of the kleptocratic reconstructions of Iraq or New Orleans is intimately familiar with this sort of game. A horrific disaster for poor and working people becomes a business opportunity for the well-connected and well-to-do.
The day after it met with the nation's top banks, Treasury announced that it had selected the firm that would receive the juiciest contract of all: that of "master custodian." The winning company will be to the bailout what Halliburton is to the military: the contractor of contractors. It will purchase toxic debts from Wall Street, service them and auction them off in the future — a so-called "end-to-end process." The contract is for a minimum of three years.
Seventy firms applied for the gig; the winner was Bank of New York Mellon. Describing the scope of the megacontract, bank president Gerald Hassell said, "It's the ultimate outsourcing — because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we're essentially the general contractor across the entire program. It's going to cross our entire company."
This raises an interesting point: Has the Treasury partially nationalized the private banks, as we have been told? Or is it the other way around? Is it Treasury that has been partially privatized by Wall Street, its massive rescue plan now entirely in the hands of a private bank it is directly subsidizing?
Shortly after receiving the contract, Hassell told investors that his institution is now well-positioned to profit from the market meltdown. "There's a lot of new business that's going on even in this chaotic marketplace," he said, "and so some of those things have been very positive to us."
There is a palpable sense of here-we-go-again with the banking bailout. Reading about this latest dispersal of "emergency" money thrown out with minimal oversight in order that the criminals can pretend to police themselves conjures images of routine fraud in Iraq and New Orleans of airplanes loaded with cash, of invisible cranes, of schools and homes demolished. The Bush and Nagin years have been a nightmare of crony capitalism; a brazen display of systematic disregard for the needs of real people in real danger for the benefit of those willing and able to profit from the emergency.
National elections are not cure-all events. This election does not offer the voters an opportunity to literally choose a new kind of leadership. The individual candidates are themselves all steeped in the same culture of self-interested rule of interconnected elites. But all politicians are of this sort and as such are never to be trusted to lead. Instead they must be led. They must be given a clear sense of what is expected of them and what they can and cannot get away with. They must be given boundaries. Elections are one (imperfect) way of achieving this.
Rest assured that the candidate you vote for today will not deliver according to your expectations. But those inevitable failures will come later. Today is not about them but about you. You get to make one small statement about how you might like to be treated during the upcoming inevitable failures. You get to say... if nothing else... that you might prefer the next failure of a President to simply not be a dick.
And if that message gets through, it would certainly be worth the long wait in line.
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