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November 06, 2008
Obama and the Virtue of Excellence
When reading the tea leaves to discover how Obama will staff his administration and, ultimately, govern, Howard Fineman observed that “excellence” was one of the President-elect’s animating values. The notion resonates more deeply than perhaps even Fineman is aware. It is a value straight out of Camelot and the Kennedy Administration’s faith in the powers of technocratic governance and its impulse to populate its ranks with, in David Halberstam’s ironic phrase, “the best and the brightest.” From a forty-eight year distance, the idea is likely to seem either naïve or banal—either a dangerous faith in experts (the sort Halberstam reminds us got us into Vietnam), or utterly lacking in the in the kind of deep human purpose that would make the work of those experts meaningful. But it’s worth remembering that, for Kennedy as for Obama, such a sharply defined faith in the transformative power of excellence is nothing less than a faith in human possibility. It was, and is, a belief that there is nothing we cannot do if we think smart enough and work hard enough. It is the silent verb buried deep within the American Dream. And, if those words strike us as just a little bit silly, even embarrassing, it’s because not believing them has become the defining attitude of our age.
Obama, of course, is no baby boomer, and so his connection to Kennedy’s unique brand of idealism is not a matter of generational nostalgia. But, it’s rather clear that the Kennedy connection is explicit for him, that it is a value he has inherited more or less directly from Kennedy himself. The link is his parents, both father and mother. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he describes his mother as a very real person, an eighteen year old Kennedy-style idealist who was attracted to his father in part by her own political romanticism. In several telling and poignant passages he makes it clear that her idealism was childlike in its innocence yet remained a potent force in her life until she died—driving her to live and work with the poor of Indonesia. Correspondingly, he presents his father as a larger than life, mythological figure—a stature he achieves in part because he genuinely had a charismatic personality and in part because he was absent, and thus owned a fictional persona unchallenged by its contrast with the more prosaic identity never came into conflict with its mythic counterpart. But more important still was the content of that myth. In his own estimation—and the estimation of others as well—he was a living embodiment of the same ideals Obama’s mother had fallen in love with. He was a bright, young, endlessly energetic African student who came to America not only because it was a place where he might realize his own promise of excellence, but because it was the fountainhead of promise itself. When he returned to Kenya he went back preaching the American gospel of a meritocratic society. He was eager to transform his homeland along the lines of the ideal America he believed in—to make it a place where a thirst for progress and a faith in the power of excellence could break the shackles of tribal cronyism and corruption. Barak Obama Sr. was a Kenyan Horatio Alger.
Though Obama only met his father once, the book makes clear that the myth of his father was a constant companion. It was kept alive, in part, by his mother. In Obama’s nomination acceptance speech he recounts a time while they were living in Indonesia that she decided Barak “was an American, and had better learn what that meant.” In that speech, out of context, it sounds like a throw away line—something might say to burnish his patriotic credentials, especially if they were being challenged by some jingoistic opponent. It’s a deeply unfortunate interpretation. In context we see exactly what his mother meant. It comes at a moment when she sees her son being corrupted by the necessities of raw power, a jungle law unmediated by American ideals, American hope, and American faith in the ability to envision a better world—and the human potential to make it.
This is the Kennedy legacy.
And this is Obama’s obsession with “excellence.”
Posted by stevemack at November 6, 2008 01:43 PM
