In his bestselling 2003 book The Audacity of Hope, published some five years before he ascended the Presidency, Barack Obama wrote the following of himself: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views”.
His 2008 campaign slogan was just one word: “Hope”. Sometimes this was elongated to “Hope and Change” as a broad approximation of what it was that voting for Barack Obama would get you. When, after his election, he made the customary visit to Ireland in 2011, College Green was thronged for a speech that left most of the Irish media – literally and figuratively – weak at the knees. It’s worth recalling what he said during that speech, in the context of that comment in his book about his being a blank screen:
In dreams begin responsibility. And embracing that responsibility, working toward it, overcoming the cynics and the naysayers and those who say “you can’t” — that’s what makes dreams real. That’s what Falmouth Kearney did when he got on that boat, and that’s what so many generations of Irish men and women have done here in this spectacular country. That is something we can point to and show our children, Irish and American alike. That is something we can teach them as they grow up together in a new century, side by side, as it has been since our beginnings.
This little country, that inspires the biggest things — your best days are still ahead. (Applause.) Our greatest triumphs — in America and Ireland alike — are still to come. And, Ireland, if anyone ever says otherwise, if anybody ever tells you that your problems are too big, or your challenges are too great, that we can’t do something, that we shouldn’t even try — think about all that we’ve done together. Remember that whatever hardships the winter may bring, springtime is always just around the corner. And if they keep on arguing with you, just respond with a simple creed: Is féidir linn. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Is féidir linn.
I cannot recall, in all honesty, whether “Is féidir linn” made it on to the kind of t-shirt that would undoubtedly have been a best-seller amongst Trinity Students that following autumn, but somebody missed out on lots of money if it did not. The speech in Dublin was vintage Obama: He said nothing of any significance, but he made his audience feel great about themselves.
I was thinking about this while watching Van Jones, the CNN political pundit, reacting to Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday night. “I didn’t realise I had been in a spiritual desert”, Jones said on CNN, “until they (Obama and his wife) created an oasis on that stage”. This is what Obama offers those who love him: Food for the soul.
I am often asked by readers why it is, precisely, that my writing so often expresses deep antipathy to Donald Trump. One answer, amongst many, is that he reminds me of Obama. In fact, the similarities are as important as the differences.
Trump, like Obama, is a blank screen onto which his supporters project themselves. For those who believe the United States should be isolationist, and be involved in fewer wars, he is the man who will de-fund Ukraine and end meddling in the Middle East. Yet for a certain kind of hawk, he’s also a man who will stop Joe Biden’s slow abandonment of Israel and back Bibi Netanyahu to the hilt (as he did in his first term). For pro-lifers, he’s the most pro-life President in history, even as he publicly discards the pro-life cause from the Republican platform. For some conservative christians, he’s the guy who is going to restore family values, even as he wrestles criminal charges arising from adultery committed with a porn star during the pregnancy of his third wife. On and on it goes – for just about every reason given for supporting him, there’s an obvious contradiction in his record and conduct.
Like Obama, Trump draws a kind of religious support: His fans – many of whom would have correctly mocked Obama fans for referring to Obama as “the one” – are fond of believing that “only he can fix it” and of littering the internet with quasi-religious Trump-as-Jesus memes which those same people would have derided as blasphemy had they been made (and they were) about Obama.
Like Obama, he often blabbers on about nothing: Where Obama said “yes we can” and “hope and change”, Trump offers “it’s going to be so great, let me tell you” and “we’re going to win so much folks”. What “winning” looks like is defined with the exact amount of precision that “yes we can” was. Winning what? Yes we can what?
Like Obama, Trump manages to inspire utter loathing in the other side’s base voters. This is something that Messianic figures often do – they inspire as much hatred and loathing as they do love. It’s one reason so many messiahs die young, and not naturally.
I’m often struck by the duality of Trump supporters who will tell you on the one hand that liberals hate Trump and would stop at nothing to stop him – and then profess shock that 83million people turned out to vote for Joe Biden. “No way 83 million voted for Joe” they say, correctly.
83 million voted against Trump.
Obama inspired similar revulsion, it should be recalled: After the 2016 election, and the 2014 midterms that preceded it, the liberal writer Matt Yglesias noted that the Democratic Party was a “smoking ruin”, obliterated up and down the ballot.
The difficulty with this kind of politics, on both wings of the United States, is that it has largely ceased being politics at all, and instead become an odd form of religion, in which growing millions of people are seeking some kind of greater meaning in a decision as ultimately banal as to who will hold an executive office for four years, with each side utterly convinced that victory for the other means the end of civilisation as they know it. Both sides, incidentally, are guilty of believing that only the other side carries on like that.
I think back, somewhat frequently, to that exhortation of Obama’s in Dublin in 2011: “If they argue back with you, just respond with a simple creed: Is féidir linn”. Nobody has ever taken that advice, of course, because it’s so ridiculous. Can you imagine Simon Harris, faced with an opponent making a good point on television, simply looking into the camera and saying “is féidir linn”?
That is because it was not genuinely political advice, or even life advice, but spiritual advice. Trump and Obama offer it in equal measure, to different audiences. A cheap diet of feel-good pablum that bears no relation to achieving anything, or doing anything hard. That’s a big reason why both men left the US Presidency with hardly any lasting accomplishments to their names. It’s also a big reason why both sides voters are so angry, all the time.
Man can not live on yes we can, or so much winning, alone.