Op-Ed: An Obama reflection from a different perspective

The last weekend of January was the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency. Commentators on networks from MSNBC to Fox tried to argue about the total success or abysmal failure of the president using a period as superficial as a year, and metrics as superficial as grades.

Instead of stressing out about the Nobel Peace Prize or C-SPAN, I decided to close my browser and reflect about the campaign itself. What’s with the Nobel Peace Prize?

Why aren’t the health care debates on C-SPAN? I’m neither qualified nor interested in taking on those issues. I hope none of you, regardless of your political views, lost sleep over what the president’s “grade” is according to 24-hour news networks.

However, I do think it is a nice time to reflect on how he got into office in the first place. Hopefully, I can spur your nostalgia with some of my own reflections.

It was 2007, and the good democratic candidates (I’m talking about Richardson and Kucinich, obviously), had been trimmed out pretty fast.

In their absence, all that remained were Edwards, Obama, and Hillary; vassals of homogeneous policies. All we liberals had left to decide was which smiles shone brightest and which handshakes felt the strongest. Obama’s ethos — his swagger, his charisma, his rhetoric — ended up being the strongest, and I’ll tell you why.

Unlike Clinton or McCain, he had no established political heritage on which to ground his persona. It made him seem more accessible. His personal story foreshadowed the challenges that I would soon face “a year out of college” in a city where I too would be “without money or family connections.” I liked that.

He was an outsider reaching out to outsiders, and I wasn’t alone in feeling like he was speaking specifically about me.

Obama’s ethos as an outsider is by no means unique. Politicians as far back as Cicero (think 60 B.C.E.) have dealt with being from outside social elite. Unlike Cicero’s ancient Rome, where being an outsider was frowned upon, the contemporary climate of American identity politics allowed Obama to turn his “new man” status into an electoral weapon.

Those of you who have read my blog recently know that I’m sometimes concerned that my name, Cedar, might somehow limit my social mobility. My irrational fears were consoled by Barack Hussein Obama’s remarks at the 2004 DNC conference about “hope [for] a skinny kid with a funny name that believes that America has a place for him too.” Yes: in Obama’s America, funny-named people, immigrant kids and atheists like me would have a place at the table. Other aspects of my identity, like being atheist, were tackled in other speeches, like his 2006 speech on religion.

Not all of Obama’s advantages in the election were fair. His youth (he was 46, younger than my parents), which I’ll talk about more in a minute, really helped him against McCain. In his campaign against Clinton, Obama benefited from the sexist atmosphere. Clinton was caught in a double bind: she was expected to have a motherly focus on family but the grit of a future commander-in-chief, feminine appeal without showing cleavage and sensitivity without crying. She lost me when she reacted to these expectations in a similar way as Condoleezza Rice (of whom I had a very negative opinion), by overcompensating in masculinity. Her incendiary threats to Iran (“we will obliterate them”) are one of many examples. Meanwhile, Obama was free to be as outwardly empathetic and kind as he liked.

Most importantly for my blue-collar 19-year-old vote, he showed an appreciation for so-called “low-culture,” such as hip-hop. I first heard him speak on the subject in a context-less interview on YouTube.

After being asked which rap artists he listens to, he said with completely natural language, “lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Jay-Z and, I mean, this ‘American Gangster’ [album] is tight.” He even went on to analyze the style while simultaneously showing his personal relationship with the widely known artist: “as Jay would say, ‘he got flow.’”

Even though his opponents labeled him an elitist, young people recognized his ethos of understanding. Where Bill Clinton pioneered — “I experimented with … and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale…” — Barack Obama perfected — “I inhaled, that was the point.” In contrast to Obama’s appreciation of hip-hop and students on scholarships, Clinton’s rhetoric on “young people” seemed to lack substance. I was put off by her comment that people my age “think that work is a four letter word.” Obama may have criticized apathy, but never through blame. He was no elitist. He may have graduated from Harvard Law School, but he understood our reality and his ethos still recognized our potential.

Obama didn’t get here randomly. He stirred up the politics of the left in a way that pasty prunes like Kucinich and Gore never could. The genius of Obama’s campaign was how he constructed a persona that embodied American pluralism. Everyone could find a niche in his vision of the American Dream, especially if they were sick of the status quo. In closing, I hope that weeks of superficial punditry does not stop anyone from reflecting on the only plausibly tangible element of the anniversary: the culmination of an election that you won, lost, or missed while watching “Grey’s Anatomy.”