My
grandmother tells the story of when she met John F. Kennedy.
It
was back in 1959, as Kennedy was still gearing up for his presidential run.
Grandma and my grandfather, an active Teamsters Union member and a Democratic
precinct committeeman in Kankakee, traveled to Chicago for a labor event
featuring JFK.
Kennedy,
the story goes, was working the room and when he made it over to my
grandparents he put his arm around my grandmother, kissed her on the cheek and
told my grandfather that he had a "beautiful wife."
Grandma
swooned, of course, and decades later when I asked her how she reacted she
joked that she didn't wash that kissed spot on her face for two weeks. To this
day, you can't say a bad word about JFK in front of Grandma for fear of risking
the evil eye.
I
dearly love my grandmother, and I owe my storytelling ability to her genes and
her example, but it's impossible to say that Grandma's love for JFK is
rational. Good looks, extraordinary charisma and a unique personal contact that
left a lifelong impression fuels her undying loyalty.
I
told you this story because it seems to me that a sizable chunk of this country
is embarking on a similarly intense love for our very own Barack Obama. Our US
Senator's announcement last week that he was considering a run for president
set off an explosion that had been building for months. Grown men wept. Hard-boiled
political reporters gushed exuberance. I've never seen anything like it.
This
Obama phenomenon is not rational in any form. It is, in fact, almost completely
irrational.
As
the skeptics continually point out, the average Obama supporter knows very
little about the man they adore. But I've noticed that the more exposure he
gets, the more people swoon over him. In some ways he's been able to accomplish
on a fairly wide scale what JFK did with my Grandma at that union gathering in
Chicago. Millions are personally smitten, and, at least for now, there's no
reasoning with them on this topic.
He's
inexperienced? That's a good thing. He's black in a nation that still has a lot
of bigots? It won't matter and may actually help. He's politically untested?
He'll get all the seasoning he needs on the campaign trail. On and on it goes.
The
question everybody - including his fans - asks is, "Will this last?"
Of course, we have no way of divining the future. Lots of things can happen.
National campaigns in this country have been exceedingly brutal, near-libelous
affairs almost from Day One. And that old saying has been whispering itself in
the back of my mind lately: "The bigger they come, the harder they
fall."
As
far as Obama's immediate political future goes, the only thing we may have to
go on here is recent Illinois history.
Obama
is as popular, perhaps more so, in Illinois today than he was when he was first
elected to the US Senate in an historic landslide more than two years ago.
His
style doesn't seem to wear thin. His schtick still seems fresh. His local
enemies, amazingly few in number, haven't been able to make a dent and manage
only to look petty and mean when they do speak. His Tony Rezko real estate
"scandal" appeared to deepen his respect among the populous when he
owned up and publicly apologized. I thought he had deftly apologized for the
wrong thing, distracting from the real issue at hand, but because nobody ever
apologizes for anything in American politics, the swoon continued unabated.
I
can't tell you if Obama will win the presidency or even the nomination. Who
knows what those oddball Iowans and those idiosyncratic New Hampshireites will
do? His liberal voting record - both in Springfield and Washington, DC - won't
be much of a problem in the primary, but perhaps the Republicans can use it to
break the spell in the fall if Obama makes it that far.
And
then there is our hopelessly juvenile and inane national press corps, which
will take a single sentence - even a single word - and gleefully attempt to
define an entire lifetime of work, like children in a school yard.
Even
so, if my grandmother can still be in love with John F. Kennedy after almost 50
years, maybe Obama can make it through the next 22 months.
-30-
Rich
Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and
thecapitolfaxblog.com