Point Austin: Fierce Urgency

Happy Valentine's Day!

Having just cleared the plates from your Thanksgiving Day leftovers, you're probably not quite ready to write out your valentines. Indeed, you're probably not ready for "Black Friday," that annual feast of commercial consumption, which this year, we're told, began somewhere around midnight Wednesday. And you're certainly not yet ready for Christmas.

But judging from the national political calendar, we're somewhere in the middle of February 2008 and expected to be at full speed on a presidential primary campaign that may well be decided before it ever arrives in Texas next May – and decided by a handful of states mostly distinguished by being less populous, less diverse, and less representative than the rest of the country, including our particularly cantankerous southwestern portion of it. It's a little like rooting for the Red Sox against the Yankees – I can yell at the TV all I like but ain't nobody up there listening.

Austin voters did get sort of an early Thanksgiving present last Saturday, as Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, reportedly polling second on the Dem side to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, paid his second public visit to these parts, stopping by the Backyard for a quick stump speech between private fundraisers in Houston and later that evening here. The Backyard appearance was not the emotional, exhilarating barn burner that his February Auditorium Shores rally turned out to be (although local rock favorite Fastball inevitably amplified its hourlong set as though we were 20,000 attendees instead of 3,000; tinnitus, here we come). The distance from Downtown, the paid admission (some 3,500 folks at $15 to $25 a pop), and even the frizzy weather restricted the numbers a bit, but it was a lively enough event – serving as much to emphasize how distant we are from the actual electoral decision as that Obama has a soft spot for Austin, where he polls and fundraises well.

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Stumped

One bit of distracting evidence was the candidate's slightly Austinized stump speech, which was understandably more polished than his February address but lacked thereby the passion that he then gave to his historical reconstruction of the American promise. Here on Saturday, he was walking his sound bites: "As president, I will end the war in Iraq. We will have our troops home in 16 months. I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. I will finish the fight against al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease. And I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says: 'You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.'" And he admirably echoed Martin Luther King's declaration in an equally desperate context: "I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called 'the fierce urgency of now.'"

I'd offer you a few more selections from my frenzied notes – except that right in the middle of the oration, the Statesman's sharp-eared Gardner Selby helpfully pointed out I could stop writing. Selby had heard Obama's Nov. 10 speech to the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner (thank God for C-SPAN), and the Backyard version was, with a few minor revisions, pretty much a verbatim reiteration (for your own personal transcript, see www.barackobama.com/speeches). It's not a bad speech (although on Saturday it could have used a passing local reference to "the Party of Yarborough and Richards"), and from that catalog you can tell it hit the high notes while ringing the inevitable changes on Obama's PR-bland campaign slogan "Change We Can Believe In."

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Why Wait?

Even setting aside the insider-forced hurry-up-and-wait timing, which has lent a premature air to the whole 2008 process, the primary campaigns now exist in a TV-fed headline bubble separate from ordinary human time. That was emphasized last week during the Las Vegas Democratic debate, when CNN's Wolf Blitzer repeatedly forced "gotcha" questions on candidates whom he stifled anytime they tried to explain a position. Blitzer tried hard to confine most of the discussion to the three designated front-runners – Clinton, Obama, and Edwards. In fairness, seven debaters on any subject is about five too many. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson provided a nice oppo-slogan version of the headliners: "You know, it seems that John [Edwards] wants to start a class war; it seems that Barack wants to start a generational war. It seems that Sen. Clinton, with all due respect on her plan on Iraq, doesn't end the war. All I want to do is give peace a chance."

That's cute enough, and let's hope Richardson gets serious consideration for vice president, along with all the second string. But it was left to an audience member, the mother of an Iraq veteran, to ask the most acute question: "All of you on the stage either have formal political power or significant informal power and have the ability to stop the rush to war [with Iran]. Please tell me how you are going to show us your leadership on this issue now – so I can decide who I think would be the best leader for tomorrow." For the record, Joe Biden, Edwards, and Obama all answered the question more effectively than front-runner Clinton, who was reduced to defending her indefensible vote (even from a realpolitik perspective) designating the Iranian Revolu­tion­ary Guard a "terrorist organization." "We've seen this movie," commented Edwards. "We know how it turns out."

I'd truly like to believe that any one of these Democrats – even the Chief New Arkansan Triangulator Herself – would provide better presidential leadership than the current crop of utterly incompetent, armchair macho, militarist yahoos. But like that veteran's mother, I also believe we can't wait until January of 2009 – they need to demonstrate that leadership now.