He likes Barack Obama, and for one of the best reasons. (No word on how he feels about Omar.)
In the same paper, Erica Jong writes a piece endorsing Clinton called "Hillary vs. the Patriarchy." Because nothing would topple the patriarchy like voting for a woman based on who she married. Or supporting another "liberal hawk" and DLC centrist who believes the only way to defeat the establishment is to vote just like it.
The amazing thing about Jong's piece is that it contains almost nothing supporting Clinton's policies or her accomplishments in office. She praises Clinton for her triangulation and compromise on Iraq and Iran, not because she says those are the right stands to take, but because she says those are the stands that will help Clinton get elected. Her biggest argument is that Hillary Clinton regularly caves in to the opposition and supports George W. Bush's saber-rattling so she can be the most electable candidate--in 2004.
Like many Clinton supporters, Jong can't let her arguments for Hillary pass without slipping in a couple shots at Obama. (Chabon follows the example of his candidate and makes an affirmative case for Barack Obama without stooping to name, let alone attack, his opponent. I wish I met that standard.) She claims Obama was "lucky enough not to be in the Senate when the Iraq war resolution was floated," implying that he somehow ducked the issue when in fact he took a considerable political risk by speaking out against the Iraq war at a time when "Dixie Chick" was becoming a very nasty verb. Jong hints, without quite having the courage to say it, that supporting Obama is "tokenism and condescension," which is pretty damn condescending itself--as if we only like Obama for his symbolic value and not his actual values.
Her piece is also a great illustration of Chabon's point that so many of the arguments made by establishment Democrats against Obama boil down to fear--fear that anybody who doesn't make the cynical, cowardly choices the Clintons made is somehow incapable of winning office in this country. One of the best things about Obama's campaign, the element Chabon highlights, is that he's showing us we don't have to shed our principles. We don't have to become the things we fear. Barack Obama (and John Edwards, for that matter, when he was still in the campaign) is inspiring because he offers something that's been completely absent from our political discourse over the last eight to fifteen years--so absent we didn't even know it was missing. We've forgotten that leaders can appeal to our best instincts and not our worst. And he can actually win the White House, if primary voters reject the self-defeating calculations that drip from Jong's piece.
In short, Michael Chabon and Erica Jong have both written fantastic endorsements of Barack Obama.
Nothing brilliant to add here except my agreement (and doubly so for Edwards.. I really hope he becomes Obama's veep), and to note how curious it is that Jong cites -- indirectly -- tokenism as the only reason to vote for Obama, while specifically mentioning Clinton's tokenism as the reason to vote for her.
Posted by: Ken Lowery | February 04, 2008 at 10:01 PM