Like most people I know, my favorite feature in Us Weekly is the “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” spread. You know, Brad Pitt with his fly down, Ryan Phillippe pushing a cart at Ikea … (No, I do not read Us Weekly! Sometimes I just, you know, catch a glimpse when my wife leaves it open on the vanity.)
Next week, Us readers might see a spread featuring Michael Phelps (“They take bong hits in public!”), Tom Daschle (“They cheat on their taxes!”), and Christian Bale (“They tear underlings a new asshole!”). A lot of those readers might be appalled. But how many of them would have a right to be?
OK, forget Bale — that tirade truly was out of the ordinary. But before we send Batman after these other two arch-villains, can we please take a moment to consider the sheer mundaneness (mundanity?) of their actions?
Phelps is a 23-year-old with pockets full of dough and time on his hands. He’s part of the Pineapple Express generation, for crying out loud! How many of his peers, much less their ’60s-bred parents, really care if his idea of blowing off steam involves sucking down illicit smoke? A recent survey quoted no fewer than 42 percent of Americans who said they’ve tried pot, and the nation’s marijuana laws are steadily becoming as flaccid as the stuff supposedly renders its male users (I have no direct evidence, of course). Why is this a big deal?
As for Daschle, yes, the dollar value of his outstanding tax liability was eye-popping. Still, I encourage the working mom who has never once handed a wad of cash to the nanny without reporting it to the IRS — or the homeowner who has never once acted on his impulse to fudge the “charitable contributions” line on his 1040 — to cast the first stone. The rest of us should pause a moment. There must be some reason why tax-debt resolution has become such a growth industry in this country — and it can’t be that liberal politicos are the only ones responding to all those commercials on Fox News.
One of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.
As the hours blissfully speed away toward the end of the Bush administration, assessments of its “legacy” continue to bog down – not over the relative weights of its accomplishments (were there any?), nor over rankings of its disastrous failures, but over an astonishing question that pretty well defines the first decade of the 21st century: Will these criminals ever be punished?
With its brevity, its already-clichéd title, its lack of hardback-itude, and its Inauguration-friendly release date, Between Barack and a Hard Place bears all the earmarks of a cash-in. But Wise should be forgiven the indiscretion, because in recent years his authorial career has suffered from exquisitely poor timing. White Like Me first hit bookstores in early 2005, and (after not exactly flying off the shelves) was already headed for the remaindered racks when Hurricane Katrina suddenly shone a brilliant light on the struggles of poor blacks in our major cities – and white America’s inattention to those struggles. Sensing that the book had just barely missed its historical moment, Wise’s publisher offered him, in effect, a mulligan: a second edition that would incorporate an “open letter” to his fellow whites about Katrina. The new version, as fate would have it, was published in late December 2007 – just a week before a gaggle of honkies caucusing in Iowa launched the Obama campaign toward the presidency. 
In the end, however, electing Barack Obama and ending the Bush era didn’t require violence, or even civil disobedience. All it required was the force of our better ideas, the inspiration of a great young leader – and the resolve to stand steadfast against a stream of vitriol from politicians (and their dwindling core of followers) who couldn’t believe their house of malfeasance and misanthropy was at long last crumbling around them. American democracy finally proved capable of withstanding even Bush and the modern GOP – assuming, that is, that Bush and Dick Cheney actually vacate their residences on January 20.
Of course, Obama’s big crowds were never a perfect measure of his qualities as a candidate. They certainly did bear witness to his charisma, and his strength as an orator. More than that, though, I believe they were a testament to Americans’ pent-up desire to express ourselves politically, to participate in the act of changing this country, simply by virtue of Showing Up. It was a spirit of urgency and, yes, patriotism that also led millions of us to click a button on the Internet and send Obama another $10 or $100 every couple of months, and led many thousands to volunteer in campaign offices, on the phone and around our neighborhoods.
I couldn’t agree more with that analysis, but I would take it a step further: Obama must also take great care to ensure that we don’t forget his poet’s heart. Americans face tough times over the next few years, despite our newfound optimism in the wake of Obama’s election; chances are pretty good that, no matter what new policies he implements after his inauguration, our downward economic spiral will continue well into his term. Chances are excellent, meanwhile, that as Obama chooses his battles and launches his new initiatives, critics on the left will ask why he’s not doing even more, while critics on the right will simply dismiss everything he’s doing as pointless and misguided (if not Socialist and anti-American).
But it wasn’t until the close of Obama’s magnificent victory speech, after the pageantry and the big extended-family waveathon … it wasn’t until everyone else had left the stage, and Obama turned back and gave one last salute to the crowd, that I began weeping uncontrollably. A headache I had been nursing all day finally dissipated, and the tension I’d been carrying around for two months … for two years … for eight years, really, finally seemed to melt away.
What’s the big deal here? you might ask. After all, voters in 26 states already have written such restrictions into their constitutions – why not California? The difference is this: On Tuesday, for the first time, a state’s voters will be going to the polls with the power to take an existing marriage right away from same-sex couples. That is, Californians will be deciding whether to tell more than 11,000 couples who have exchanged wedding vows since last May that their marriages are no longer legally valid. Each voter’s moral and ethical decision on Prop 8 will not be made in the abstract, as those decisions were in other states, but will have real and immediate consequences.