Obama's Dilemma

It should not be surprising that we are seeing aggression from the Hillary campaign. Now, her winning by reasonable democratic measures is besides the point: she cannot overcome a lead in pledged delegates or a lead in states won or by popular votes. Instead, she has two options: drop out and rally behind Obama; or stay in the race and hope that she can deligitimize him to the point that he is so unfit, weak and damaged, that superdelegates vote in her favor because she is simply the last person standing.

This is a remarkable and insidious hope. She is banking her success against her own party; it is the hope that Barack will lose to McCain in the general election. This explains Clinton's ad campaigns, her remarks about whether Obama is a Muslim (he's not, “as far as I know”), and – most incredibly – her repeated suggestions that McCain is a more worthy commander-in-chief than Obama.

Will she be successful? Probably not. However, the negative attacks reveal an interesting point: that Obama, the idea of Obama, is uniquely vulnerable to this type of aggression, not because he is weak or inexperience, but, importantly, because aggression is diametrically at odds with the narrative structure on which has has based his entire campaign. That is to say, he is muzzled by his own conceptions of a new politics.

We all know this conception. This election – so his narrative goes, one that I have been known to prop up – is not about two people or two plans but about two divergent sets of values. It is choice about the aesthetics of political power: the new versus the old, the united versus the divided, and finally, the beautiful and eloquent versus the tough. Obama based his campaign on this idea, that people were hungry for a different type of politics, and with great success.

The question is, however, Can a person who has decided to play by different rules, win the game? Does agreeing to abide by a future, more perfect politics, pose limitation on one's success within the confounds of old politics, where we currently reside, where people make accusations and throw mud.

What makes Clinton's attacks important is not just that they hit Obama on a tactical level (that is the theory of negative-sum campaigning, that everyone gets hurt, but the attacker falls less than the attack). What is important is that the negativityhits Obama on a structural level. Clinton's story becomes "Hillary the fighter" and Obama's, inverted, becomes "weakness." His new politics, one is meant to see, is not equipped for the world of old politics, he is too weak to survive, effete and thin.

This contrast will be difficult to escape, because it is built within the narrative of his campaign. If he fights like Clinton, he undercuts his message of transcendence; if he doesn't fight, then he is weak, and one wonders, can any presidential candidate survive perceived as weak? At best, his assertiveness is defensive, and at worst, it is whole-sale hypocrisy.

The point may be this: if Obama or anyone wishes to change things, he's first got to get into power. For even very good people must first succeed within the limitations of very bad systems.

This is Machiavelli's paradox. Good, he said, must necessarily be founded on the evil – who, after all, would Lincoln be without slavery or Churchill without Hitler. What Machiavelli gave us was the Prince, who knew that if he wanted utopia, he had fight for it within a reality-based world. The future, in other words, can be only be achieved from within the constraints of the present; and perhaps so too must Obama's new politics be achieved with the tactics of old politics, with strong people, armed prophets, a willingness to first get your hands dirty first, before anything can be clean.