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My grandmother tells the story of when she met John
F. Kennedy. It was back in 1959, as Kennedy was still gearing up
for his presidential run. Grandma and my grandfather, an active Teamsters
Union member and a Democratic precinct committeeman in Kankakee, traveled
to Chicago for a labor event featuring JFK. Kennedy, the story goes, was working the room, and
when he made it over to my grandparents he put his arm around my
grandmother, kissed her on the cheek, and told my grandfather that he had a
“beautiful wife.”
Grandma swooned, of course, and, decades later, when
I asked her how she reacted, she joked that she didn’t wash that
kissed spot on her face for two weeks. To this day, you can’t say a
bad word about JFK in front of Grandma for fear of risking the evil eye. I dearly love my grandmother, and I owe my
storytelling ability to her genes and her example, but it’s
impossible to say that Grandma’s love for JFK is rational. Good
looks, extraordinary charisma, and a unique personal contact that left a
lifelong impression fuel her undying loyalty. I told you this story because it seems to me that a
sizable chunk of this country is embarking on a similarly intense love for
our very own Barack Obama. Our U.S. senator’s announcement last week
that he was considering a run for president set off an explosion that had
been building for months. Grown men wept. Hardboiled political reporters
gushed. I’ve never seen anything like it. This Obama phenomenon is not rational in any form. It
is, in fact, almost completely irrational. As the skeptics continually point out, the average
Obama supporter knows very little about the man he or she adores —
but I’ve noticed that the more exposure he gets, the more people
swoon over him. In some ways he’s been able to accomplish on a fairly
wide scale what JFK did with my grandmother at that union gathering in
Chicago. Millions are personally smitten, and, at least for now,
there’s no reasoning with them on this topic. He’s inexperienced? That’s a good thing.
He’s black in a nation that still has many bigots? It won’t
matter and may actually help. He’s politically untested? He’ll
get all the seasoning he needs on the campaign trail. On and on it goes. The question everybody — including his fans
— asks is, “Will this last?” Of course, we have no way of
divining the future. Anything could happen. National campaigns in this
country have been exceedingly brutal, near-libelous affairs almost from day
one. And there’s that old saying has been whispering itself in the
back of my mind lately: “The bigger they are, the harder they
fall.”
As far as Obama’s immediate political future
goes, the only thing we may have to go on here is recent Illinois history.
Obama is as popular, perhaps more so, in Illinois
today than he was when he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in a
historic landslide more than two years ago. His style doesn’t seem to wear thin. His
schtick still seems fresh. His local enemies, amazingly few in number,
haven’t been able to make a dent and manage only to look petty and
mean when they do speak. His Tony Rezko real-estate “scandal”
appeared to deepen his respect among the populous when he owned up and
publicly apologized. I thought that he had deftly apologized for the wrong
thing, distracting us from the real issue at hand, but, because nobody ever
apologizes for anything in American politics, the swoon continued unabated.
I can’t tell you whether Obama will win the
presidency or even the nomination. Who knows what those oddball Iowans and
those idiosyncratic New Hampshireites will do? His liberal voting record
— both in Springfield and Washington, D.C. — won’t be
much of a problem in the primary, but perhaps the Republicans can use it to
break the spell in the fall if Obama makes it that far. And then there is our hopelessly juvenile and inane
national press corps, which will take a single sentence — even a
single word — and gleefully attempt to define an entire lifetime of
work, like children in a schoolyard. Even so, if my grandmother can still be in love with
John F. Kennedy after almost 50 years, maybe Obama can make it through the
next 22 months.
Rich Miller
publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and thecapitolfaxblog.com.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2007.
