The Cynic and President Obama (beautifully written for Nov Issue) By Charles P. Pierce The Cynic an

The Cynic and President Obama



By Charles P. Pierce

Published in the November 2012 issue

The cynic looks out the window and across the river at the great white city that is the nation's capital, and wonders how it came to all of this. Over the past two weeks, the cynic has attended the national political conventions of the country's two major political parties. The cynic has attended the workshops, and he has spoken to the people inside the hall and out, the people who feel a part of the process and the people who feel left out of it or left behind by it, and he has listened to the speeches. The last speech he heard came from the president of the United States.

The cynic feels as though he has passed from one country to another, from one time and place to another, a place where history is inverted and turned against itself. The first convention was of the party founded in opposition to slavery, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Union, and that party spent its convention arguing quite clearly in favor of states' rights. It flirted, and not entirely delicately, with nullification. The second convention was that of the oldest political party in the world, the party of Jefferson and Madison and Jackson, the party of John C. Calhoun, who was the intellect behind the philosophy of states' rights and of nullification, but which had come together in 2012 in convention assembled to nominate a black man, Barack Obama, for his second term as president of the United States.

One party had prospered by regression, abandoning all of its original founding ideals in favor of bathing in the foulest muck of the country's history. The other party rose from that same muck and picked up those abandoned ideals and helped write them into law, finally, fulfilling most of the broken promises of Reconstruction. The great inversion of the country's history, however, came to benefit the first party and to break the second, over and over again.

The persistence of this dynamic played out in the two conventions. The first convention — the convention of the party whose most famous president in his most famous speech described the government, the national government, as the final monument to the dead at Gettysburg — began with a complete thematic rejection of the idea of a political commonwealth. (The apex of the hilarity came when the governor of Oklahoma attempted to write the national government completely out of the history of her state, which would not even exist without the Homestead Act and the work of the U. S. Cavalry.) The cynic watched in a kind of awe as arguments that had failed in Philadelphia in 1787, and at Appomattox in 1865, were trotted out as revolutionary new concepts in freedom and something vaguely defined as "liberty." A week later, the party that had originally been on that side of all those arguments down through the years threw its convention as a kind of three-day rebuttal.



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Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/cynic-president-obama-1112#ixzz29O8fogqi