Vic Socotra

04 June 2008

A Time to Love

Senator Obama at Wesleyan University (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Thank God it is over. We have been dragged all over the United States in every one of its manifestations, Lower 48, Alaska, Hawaii, state, commonwealth and territory. Yesterday the valiant voters of Montana and North Dakota trudged to the polls, produced a split decision, and ended it.

As if to celebrate the culmination, a line of thunderstorms rolled across the heartland, booming and crackling. Funnel clouds formed in some of them, and we were alert to the possibilities at Big Pink. It rained all night, and Bob Ryan the radio weather-guesser is telling me that the meeting in Fairfax I have to get to may be during the only part of the day that will be dry.

Then more booming tonight, and hail and humidity. The sky brings us the guns of summer, and let the games begin.

Everyone who is being permitted to have a vote in the primaries has had the chance, sorry Michigan and Florida. Senator Obama was gracious in victory, and Hillary was equally so in insisting that it is not quite over.

I was electrified when I heard that she said she might serve as Vice President- wasn’t all this about burning down the house? Still, it appears the embers are still glowing, and there are those pesky Conventions to get through, artifacts of a time when every party-boss was a super-delegate, and every ballot on the crowded convention floor could bring a surprise.

There can be no surprises left, can there? Senator Obama’s mother was trashed in an e-mail I saw the other day as being a wild-eyed Marxist. Senator Clnton’s personal preferences had already been paraded down internet mainstreet, and the things that I have seen about Senator McCain are beyond despicable and verge on the psychopathic.

There are even reports this morning that the reason Bill Clinton has been so nuts on the campaign trail is that heart operation he had a few years back that has robbed him of his reason.

“Deranged narcissism," was one of the best characterizations I have heard.

The bar has been set remarkably low for this historic general election, though of course that is a grand tradition in the Republic. One of Mr. Jefferson’s opponents didn’t stop with the allegations about Sally Hemmings and her children. He circulated the word that Mr. Jefferson was dead the day before the election.

That may- or may not- have been a hindrance to his effective execution of the office. This is a system of checks-and-balances, after all. I can only imagine the check on President Obama’s exercise of office that Vice President Clinton might have- something on the order of what Aaron Burr did to Mr. Jefferson in his first term. Naked, personal contempt every day.

What is interesting is not what sets all these people apart, but what unifies them. None have been successes in the wide world where most of us live. They all made bee-lines for public service.

Hillary made the best choice available to her, given the times, which was to set up a political organization in a banana republic in the old Confederacy. John McCain had no choice, of course. His Boat School education came with the obligation to head for flight training and then to the Fleet.

To Senator Clinton's obvious dismay, Senator Obama, four years from the Illinois Senate, seems to have been the luckiest at positioning himself prominently at the intersection of disgust and optimism, the two qualities that have always characterized the American electorate.

Senator Obama talked about it the other day in one of his Kennedy-esque orations on the topic of public service. He was standing in for Teddy, whose step-daughter was graduating from Wesleyan University. He urged the grads to "make us believe again" by dedicating themselves to public service. He talked about his commitment to community activism as a young man in a rousing appeal to change. He urged students to focus on more than "the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy.” He straightened visibly at the podium. "At a time of war, we need you to work for peace."

It sounds good. It has the symmetrical balance that Ecclesiastes 3:8 conveys so well. There is a time for all things under heaven, sowing and reaping, times for love and for hate. At Wesleyan, he talked all about the ways we all can serve the nation. At least most of them. If he mentioned military service it might have escaped me.

None of the candidates would have chosen the path we are on as lightly as did our current Commander-in-Chief, since his notion of the sacrifice of going to war is a vicarious and theoretical one.

I did choke a bit when I heard the words from Wesleyan, though. I have always thought that in time of war, you were obligated to try to win.

The awful cost of conflict has already been borne, and the fallen cannot be brought back. Peace that follows victory offers a much better range of options for change.

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