Today I watched the country inaugurate Barack Hussein Obama as our 44th president. After the extended campaign, the election hoopla, and the vigorous transition period, in some ways the event felt more like an end than a beginning. People who support Obama have made him the favored vessel of our hopes and promises for almost two years. But now we are going to have to leave the gratifying, at times self-righteous world of ideas and rhetoric and get down to the messy business of policymaking. It won't be fun over the next 4-8 years to put our ideals through the sausage-grinder of politics. It will be hard to learn to criticize such an exceptional human being. So many people on the Mall today, a great many of them African-American, were so genuinely moved by what they saw, so authentically hopeful, that the coming compromises and falters are going to be especially bitter.
Would it be better if Obama never actually governend, and so could live forever as an untarnished ideal? Think about the past leaders he is most often compared to: Lincoln, Kennedy, King. Their acheivements secured their place in history, but it was their martydom that sealed their legacies in our minds. God forbid such a thing should happen again. Still, there is something powerful left in the void of a political project cut short or othewise unrealized. Never given a chance to be corrupted, it gains a higher status in our minds.
I want for Obama the trials and disappointments of a long political career, not the eternal glow of the martyr. But I'm not sure how many of his other supporters agree. Of course they don't want to see him harmed, but I think if they were given a choice between an ideal they could treasure for the rest of their lives and a living, breathing man who will make some improvements to their lives even as he dissapoints and deceives them, they would choose the ideal. Maybe Obama can be both. He is certainly going to try to be both. I wish him luck.
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