My personal support for Barack Obama brings me a lot of flak from Djur, who believes that he lacks the Joementum of more sensible, moderate candidates like Bayh or a unity ticket (say, Giuliani-McCain). I’ve got an underlying reason, though.

I’ve been developing a personal philosophy of social-political interaction for quite some time. I lump it into ‘personalism’ - a sort of critique-driven mess at present, although check back in twenty years and I might be going somewhere with it.

I’m of the belief that people’s interaction with abstract concepts - like nationality, society, religion, etc. - are almost exclusively actually the result of interaction with individual personalities. One major example, especially prominent since the rise of network news and the 24-hour cycle, is the Presidency. More than anything, the President now helps form the image people associate with America. Clinton mari understood this when he made a central plank of his campaign attacking Bush pere for the economy - something he could hardly be blamed for (Schlafly’s idiotic forcing of a reactionary tax plan into his mouth aside), but which people in general seemed to accept. Long story short, the President helps set the boundaries for what ‘America’ includes, helps set the tone and the agenda in the national political discourse, and generally shapes people’s interactions with civil society in a pretty powerful way.

There’s a direct association between Reagan and violent crime, even if you set aside the funding of right-wing death squads in foreign countries, and I’d argue he’s done more than any man in American history to turn us into depraved monkey-man savages. The man oozed authoritarian contempt from every pore; he made a political career out of cultivated, slicked-over hatred for the environment (you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen ‘em all), the poor, minorities (black welfare queens in cadillacs, anyone?), and pretty much anyone who society made a habit of tramping into the dirt.

Where the 70s had turned MLK into a Christian martyr, the 80s saw the rise of a Christian right - people who would seriously call a Christian minister who justified fairly moderate civil rights and social justice positions in scriptural terms a communist philanderer, and compare naming streets after him to naming them after Marx. Where the 70s made the hippies irrelevant artifacts, the 80s saw their transfiguration to the betes noires of the larger culture, with so many dull, mean-spirited jokes cracked at their expense. The 70s saw environmentalism grow extremely important, and the 80s saw its collapse into the same assault of grunting right-wing laughter as the hippies. The same goes for international diplomacy, Vietnam (the people doing the spitting in the mid-70s, cracking wise about the dumb, crazy, druggie veterans, turned around and claimed the hippies spat on them coming home - and proceeded to cut their benefits and throw many of them with serious mental conditions onto the street), pretty much anything you can name.

Reagan wasn’t personally responsible for how shitty we were to each other in the 1980s, but he did a lot to legitimize it. Thanks in great part to his personal and rhetorical maliciousness, shunning people for reactionary politics became more or less unheard of. (In the height of an international struggle against Apartheid, many Republicans campaigned viciously in public against Nelson Mandela as a communist - sound familiar? - and made asinine movies like Red Dawn where ANC kommissars took over the poor, helpless Afrikaner government and set up a soviet republic. And now we’ve got one of them as a vice-president.) The wonky, misanthropic, self-obsessed assholes who swam around the cocktail party circuit, buoyed by their Pentagon and White House connections alone, giving nuclear weapons and government policy a severely bad name, shitheels like Ben Stein, were rehabilitated in the public eye. They’re still running around.

The ‘Me Decade’ - where ‘me’ is usually ‘wealthy white man’ - was all about Reaganaut inhumanity, contempt for civilization and society, and basic urge to suck the Earth dry. Reagan’s personality buoyed that incredibly.

Clinton started to reverse that - by sheer force of personality, on account of his politics are far less humane and far from desirable - but his major negative impact was essentially closing the debate to anyone left of his leash-bearer, Carville, and the multimillion-dollar Clinton assassination industry turned him into a national pariah. A generation of youths and apolitical adults watched a flawed but eminently decent and avuncular man pinned down by graft millionaires for the slightest suspicion of shady land trading, accused without evidence of mass murder by the men who helped fascists in Nicaragua slit nuns’ throats, and accused of sleeping with half of Washington by a procession of dirty, mean old men who would not know fidelity from fidelismo. From that point in the Reagan Administration when the Congress rejected the idea of tax-cuts on economic grounds and the President appealed his thinly-veiled class warfare to their gullible, greedy constituents on national television to the present, Washington has been dominated by partisan vituperousness, and the business of the modern politician is less administration than bloodsport.

Bush fils, one of the most evil men ever to have sat in the Oval Office, has spent his entire career viciously slandering the basic mechanisms of civil society and international civility as inefficient, dangerous, in accordance with the will of terrorism, anti-American. He pushed against the UN that usually serves as little but a rubber-stamp for the US, and has lead the loathsome rage of the modern conservative against it. He’s grown deeply invested in sectarian fanaticism, to the point that his willingness to admit that Muslims worship the same God as Christians infuriated his base.

When Nixon - who at least concealed his bestial hatreds in public, and pretended to accept his political opponents as human beings - is the most human representative of the Republican Party in living memory, and Ron Paul - a lunatic white-power-linked survivalist in the venerable great-plains tradition of far-right fucknuttery - represents the decent wing of the modern Republicans, we really have to take a step back and ask ourselves how we can bring ourselves away from the abyss.

It may be too late to save American society, but the first thing we need to do if we’re to try at all is to put a human being in the White House. Obama, for reasons I’ll be discussing at some later point, is pretty demonstratably a human being - rather than a human weathervane like your typical legislative candidate or a hateful vampire like the Republicans and Clinton marie. He was a labor activist in a time dominated by the AFL-CIA’s effort to crush meaningful labor politics, worked against Wal-Mart’s abuses before it became cool, and is one of those rare decent Christians - one endowed with that full (and, in my opinion, stupid - but important to a lot of people) faith in the Almighty, but being compelled by the same principally to serve their fellow man.

A man pissed on a woman in the street as she lay dying a couple of weeks ago. ‘This is Youtube material’, he said, filming it on his camera. The crowd cheered when they tased that poor son of a bitch at the Kerry event, and the Beltway has taken to describing belief in habeas corpus and the rule of law - something dating back to that hotbed of Marxism, the 11th century -as ‘far left’. We might go our whole lifetimes without learning all of the damage six years of W has done to our national psyche - but the first thing we can do to repair that is to have someone committed to social justice representing the country.

I don’t like a lot of Obama’s politics. But I think he represents the right wing of acceptable - in a perfect world, he’d be the person I was voting against. To me, he fits perfectly the Disraelian vision of ‘conservative’ (although to be fair, Disraeli himself paid that more lip service than anything else) - someone who acknowledges the injustices of the world and works for gradual, practical change in the service of changing them without damaging society. I’d like Obama to be a conservative, and I think keeping the misanthropes out of office for a few more decades is probably the only way we can achieve that.

That is the reason I use in public for voting for him; in private, like half of the Obama campaign (although they are careful not to wear their shirts emblazoned with the same too much in public either), I have an ulterior motive.