Hoping For A Better Day With A Stranger In A Stadium

Eags (Timothy Egan) is one of the best writers in the NY Fishwrap's stable of columnists. Today, Eags spells out The Hopester's task for tonight (and all of the remaining nights over the next two months). If this is (fair & balanced) yearning for confidence, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Stranger In A Stadium
By Tomothy Egan

The nominee did not look or sound like most Americans. He spoke with flair in a flat-voweled land. He was optimism in a time of gray, a tomorrow man in a country where many felt their best days were behind them.

On top of that, he was thought to be a man without heft, a bit of a dandy.

But with one speech, Franklin Roosevelt put himself on the side of a huge majority of Americans eager to throw out a president. His voice would be that of “the forgotten man,” Roosevelt vowed on April 7, 1932, a day when he found his theme, and the Democratic Party found its agenda for the next half-century.

When Barack Obama goes before 70,000 people at Invesco Field on Thursday night, he will try to be the voice for those who also feel forgotten in the age of the global economy, among the nearly 80 percent of voters who say the nation is on the wrong track. But he’s fighting the headwinds of history. Obama is now clearly the underdog, as the weight of just how unusual his candidacy is becomes clear to voters, who truly only focus as summer ends.

Obama’s central dilemma — strange in this age of media saturation — is that so many voters still don’t know him. The most frequent thing I heard in the suburbs of Colorado recently was a simple question: Who is this guy?

All those who lament that Obama is only tied with John McCain in a big Democratic year forget the obvious: Obama does not look like most Americans, and grew up in Hawaii, a state that a supposedly mainstream commentator, Cokie Roberts, called “some sort of foreign, exotic place.”

“My story is your story,” Obama tells crowds. But it’s not. And the inspiring and deeply resonant parts — the son of a single mother who needed student loans to get through the nation’s best schools, the prodigy who passed up big bucks law firms for low-wage community organizing — are already being cast in a negative light.

On the Republican National Committee Web site, under the section on “Meet Barack Obama,” he’s called “a street organizer,” which can mean only one thing. By insinuation, Mother Teresa would be one step from a crack dealer.

“Do we know if he ever sold drugs?” Sean Hannity, ever eager to inject a lie that fits a stereotype in the national bloodstream, asked Jerome R. Corsi, the professional character assassin and author of “Obama Nation.”

The Texas Republican Party targets Obama with a Web video that shows pictures of an African who lives in a shack, identified as Obama’s half-brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama. Hint, hint.

And at a Washington state fair this week, the Republican booth distributed $3 bills depicting Barack Obama with Arab headgear and a camel.

This is just the stuff on the surface. McCain will not bring it out directly. He has others — legions — to do it for him. Imagine what is out of sight and less organized. But it speaks to one of two big issues that Democrats are trying to resolve during this week’s convention: Can a majority of voters get comfortable with the son of a Kenyan of the Luo tribe?

Obama himself spent much of his life trying to fit into his identity. His father, Obama writes in his memoir, “was black as pitch” and thus “looked nothing like the people around me.” He also abandoned his American family before Barack ever got to know him. On Obama’s mother’s side are ancestors of Scottish and English stock, and Obama writes of staring at an old sepia-toned photograph from a Kansas homestead. “Theirs were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins.”

The dissonance that Obama felt growing up is now shared by many voters. Where does he fit in their lives?

Democrats started to answer this question with the knockout speech by Michelle Obama on Monday. She could not have been more likeable, and the story of the father with multiple sclerosis who worked 30 years at the water filtration plant, the family that sent two kids from the South Side of Chicago to Ivy League schools, the girl allowed only one hour of television who memorized every episode of “The Brady Bunch,” was designed to take “different” off the table.

On Thursday night, we’re likely to hear more about “Toot,” the Midwestern grandma who helped raise Barack, from the Dunham family that produced a free spirit — Obama’s mother Ann, never more than a step away from poverty. That’s his first challenge — connect. Then he moves on to what Franklin Roosevelt did with his forgotten man speech: define the campaign from the anxious voter’s perspective.

It was largely overlooked, but the former Republican congressman from Iowa, Jim Leach, now an Obama supporter, framed it well in a speech on Monday. “Nothing is riskier than more of the same,” he said.

Two months from now, people may remember Teddy Kennedy’s heroic effort to hold onto life long enough for one last speech, and Hillary Clinton’s tangerine pantsuit. If her supporters vote for McCain they were never Democrats anyway, or they’re clueless, like the former Clinton supporter in the Republican ad who mistakenly thought McCain was pro-choice on abortion.

Those vignettes, all part of convention drama and filling cable television’s vacuum, will last no longer than a Rocky Mountain thunderstorm.

What people will remember is whether the stranger in the stadium sounded like someone who could lead them to a better day.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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