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Borrowed style, shared substance

Thursday, October 16, 2008

AND FINALLY THEY CAME TO MY OWN BACKYARD. I have traveled pretty far afield to report on politics and the media from previous locations selected for this campaign's debates, including St Louis and Nashville, in each case well before their big events.

But last night’s hosting privileges fell to a venue really close at hand, the small but expanding Hofstra University here in New York State (virtually a Long Island potato-field back when its first building went up in 1935).

 

It’s a site I drive by just about every week, and it’s been a delight to see the mushrooming of local engagement, especially among the student body, in this massive ($3.5 million) effort at civic responsibility - a candidates' forum that as it turned out will surely endure in the annals as "The Joe the Plumber Debate".

 

Immediately before the event our regional media leaped greedily upon even the tiniest and oddest of backstage preparation details doled out by Hofstra's president Stuart Rabinowitz, and happily spread them to national news outlets ... like Rabinowitz having to hand over to the John McCain and Barack Obama campaigns actual examples of the water-glasses the candidates would be using on their table.

 

“So they know the heft,” explained the event’s host, raising perhaps some expectation - firmly dashed last night - that one US presidential hopeful might throw a glass at the other.

 

In the end, chair-bound proximity to each other, at that same table shared with CBS's moderator Bill Schieffer, helped to confine matters to a tense but relatively cordial exchange, despite Schieffer's worst efforts to get the contenders to replicate in person the nasty attacks of their TV spots. McCain’s coaches had evidently recognized that his recent caustic splutterings (remember his ugly snarl about “That One” in their last meeting?) had a counterproductive effect - see yesterday's New York Times - CBS News opinion poll on negativity, whether voiced in debates or amid the increasingly restive, sometimes threatening crowds that he and Sarah Palin have been addressing.

 

Obama acquitted himself well in laying out his own extra measures, carefully framed to build upon the Bush Administration’s desperate economic rescue plan, as it gets bigger and bigger all the time – especially in the sense of Republicans’ usually-hated “big government”.

 

By contrast McCain thrashed around the domestic topics, just as his team had done all week (starting somewhat incredibly with a media statement on Sunday that “we do not have any immediate plans to announce any policy proposals” – only to have the candidate himself announce, guess what, new policy proposals on Tuesday).

 

Obama’s demeanor, meanwhile, was calm and measured, even a little too understated at the beginning. For myself, I sensed in it some strong resonances from a major historical influence on the Illinois Senator ... the initially hard-charging, later grave and magisterial abolitionist of this country's Civil War years, Frederick Douglass.

  

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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I RECALLED THAT SOURCE OF OBAMA'S INSPIRATION when I took in one local detail at Hofstra that was overlooked by the 3,100 accredited media personnel. After the caravans have departed, the university will unveil later this month a powerful new piece of public art – a monumental bronze work (above right, a pre-installation study) by sculptress Vinnie Bagwell, which memorializes none other than Frederick Douglass. (He was a New York resident, by the way).

 

During Obama’s twelve years as a college professor, at the University of Chicago’s School of Law, his most original course was reckoned to be a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, focusing on racism and law. He in effect created his own textbook for the subject, and drew heavily on the essays of Douglass (while also including, inevitably, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, as well as citing seminal cases like Brown v. Board of Education). He additionally took care to fold in Conservative thinkers as well, like the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

 

What his students remember most - like Byron Rodriguez who’s now a San Francisco real estate lawyer - is Obama’s deep admiration for Douglass’ style, especially his blending of eloquence, even high-flown verbal elegance, with a down-to-earth vocabulary and thought-pattern. “No one speaks this way anymore,” Obama used to complain in class, according to Rodriguez.

 

He has clearly, as evident in last night’s close-quarters conversation as much as in the high-amplitude environment of sports stadiums, modeled his own delivery on Douglass, and on the former slave's adoption of a determinedly collective voice, which in its time managed to embrace generously both black and white people’s concerns. One of Douglass’ favorite sayings was: "I would unite with anybody to do right, and with nobody to do wrong."

 

Mid-way through last night Obama employed this distinctly Douglassian unity call:

 

"If we're going to solve two wars, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, if we're going to focus on lifting wages that have declined over the last eight years, and create jobs here in America, then Democrats, Independents and Republicans, we're going to have to be able to work together."

 

I turned to historian Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation for a seasoned expert's assessment of how much Obama has been guided by Douglass. Cohen studied candidates' rhetoric closely, for his evocative book “LIVE FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches", and his analysis is political as well as stylistic:

 

"Douglass’s words were recognition that radicalism and even the most principled stands must be balanced with the often difficult and far less enthralling process of incrementalism and political compromise. Some on the left would like Mr. Obama to be like the younger Douglass, the firebrand reformist. But Mr. Obama’s rhetorical approach seems more attuned to the pragmatic observer of American politics that Douglass became."

 

I firmly hope, and not just as a New Yorker, that Obama will - after the election and however it goes - return to the setting of his final Presidential debate, and pay a courtesy call on the great 19th century debater to whom he owes so much.

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