Prose and Poetry

Monday, 08 November 2010 01:48

Written by Neric Acosta

A political campaign – especially of the sort that is powered by overriding messages of hope and soaring oratory of change – is based, it is said, on poetry and the seduction of language. But governing or running – if not reforming – a bureaucracy and taking painful policy initiatives towards political and economic reform is prose and hard-nosed rhetoric. Nowhere is this more clearly highlighted than in Barack Obama’s America – in 2008 and in 2010.

Obama’s phenomenal rise to the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth was the stuff of legend. Born to a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Nigeria, and raised in part in Indonesia, growing up in the diversity of Hawaii, and settling in and becoming a politician in Chicago, Obama was the quintessential embodiment of an increasingly multicultural America, and his narrative of beating the odds and inspiring a whole generation of young voters captivated the imagination of the world.

That was two years ago – when the melodious strains of campaign “poetry” dominated a national campaign, emanating from a lanky young senator from Illinois who told a mesmerized public: “yes we can!” The stirring speeches he gave from state to state were the sort reminiscent of the iconic American leaders like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And in an unlikely span of two years, armies of young volunteers and ordinary Americans marched to his music, transforming like never before the landscape of American electoral politics.

This week, in a similarly passionate and even more dangerously polarized mid-term elections, Obama and his Democratic Party-controlled Congress took a rather severe beating. Voters directly affected by the economic downturn and frustrated with the slow pace of a recovery sliced his party’s majority by over 60 seats in the 435-member House of Representatives and almost tipped the balance in the Senate to the Republican side of the political divide. The game-changer in this redrawn arena is the so-called Tea Party, a movement on the farther right of the conservative Republican Party, that has spewed incendiary anti-Obama rhetoric and energized millions with a radicalized anti-Washington message.

All told, it is a pendulum swing yet again for the world’s most celebrated democracy, the much-touted “shining beacon on a hill” for many other nations in the developing world. The heady victory of grassroots organizing and precedent-setting Internet-driven campaigning and pioneering online fundraising of two years ago has given way to the crushing repudiation of the so-called Obama agenda – particularly on universal health care and the aggressive introduction of a multi-billion dollar economic stimulus package in the wake of a global financial meltdown – by millions who see it as a menacing expansion of government. The shift from the lofty poetry of the 2008 campaign to the predominant nasty prose and blisteringly negative attacks of 2010 could not be more stark. The Tea Party became increasingly shrill by calling Obama “socialist,” with shockingly large segments of the movement spreading the insidious, if preposterous, claim that he is Muslim and not even American by birth.

What is instructive in all this is the age-old truth in politics: nothing is ever immutable. The vagaries of the political realm leave much to luck, chance, fate and destiny – despite all efforts at careful planning and attempts at controlling the flow of events. Any unforeseen occurrence or happenstance can well be the monkey wrench thrown at some of the best-designed or most-strategically placed political or media communications plans.

Some circles foresee that in the country, the Aquino administration, catapulted on a wave of people power, might face a similar predicament in the near future – how very high expectations for change and reform could go the way of widespread dissatisfaction or disillusionment. The President, we gather, knows this all too well – and will have to take close heed of how best to walk the tightrope on this most unpredictable and volatile of human activity. Taking careful notice – and practicable lessons – of how his head-of-state counterpart and generational cohort on the other side of the Pacific has dealt with the highs and lows, the poetic and the prosaic elements, of national campaigning and holding high office.

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