On Sunday morning I watched the CBS weekly features program, which included a segment on Michael Steele. Even the conservative commentator – Ben someone or another – called for Steele’s removal. On a side note, even though it requires a bit of mind bending, I kind of like this Ben character: the weekend before, he did a piece calling for conservatives to stop taking cheap shots at “the government,” which, he pointed out, includes everyone in the country. Why the Democrats can’t express that very simple concept is beyond me.
At any rate, on Sunday night I watched a documentary about the election of Barack Obama, called “By the People.” Although my guess is that the Obama people would consider the film a score for their team, I found the movie disturbing in more than a few ways. First, the volunteers. Young, mostly white, enthusiastic in a way I’d almost forgotten – and after eight years of W., who really could blame them? But the mesmerized, nearly catatonic way they listened and spoke was chilling. Perhaps it was staged, but the volunteers who were interviewed could barely utter a word without crying about the greatness of Obama and his mission. There were close-ups of the college students during conference calls, their faces focused on the speaker phone with such mindless awe and wonder that it seemed to me they were expecting God to come on the line, if not emerge, as if by magic, from the phone. I’m not sure if I was in a certain mood when I watched. Perhaps I was subconsciously thinking about genocides or something. But I wondered, as I watched and listened, how much – or how little – would it take to realign the intentions of the thousands of campaign volunteers toward something truly destructive? Yes, I thought with dread, we can.
Anyhow, the weirdest part of the movie is how white it was, which somehow brought me back to Michael Steele. Obama’s our first black president, but if you watch this movie closely please let me know if it doesn’t remind you of a present-day version of the plantation. My own family has more color in it than his campaign team did. White men everywhere. White men advising, strategizing, barking orders on cell phones, making proclamations left and right, white guys obsessing like toddlers over the numbers, white men sucking up to white man reporters on planes and buses and trains full of white people. White men like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs – seriously, is Robert Gibbs the best Obama can do for a press secretary? – walking along with their hands pressed into their pockets, heads thoughtfully bowed in deference to the weighty topics they’re tackling. White guys like the press secretary for the Iowa campaign, shameless in his sycophancy. White guys like the officious speechwriter, whose comment about the victory speech was, I thought, the most telling. Leaning back proudly in his chair on election night, the whiz kid broke it down as follows: “Hillary, you’re great. McCain … blah blah blah. You know, hope, change.” Although it scares me to type the following words, because I’m afraid my computer will blow up, hearing Obama’s speechwriter say that sounded to me an awful lot like, well, Sarah Palin.
