Trains, Planes, and Automobiles

Life can be a bumpy ride sometimes. Certainly the last two years have been rough. Unless of course you work for Goldman Sachs or one of the other Wall Street titans. Goldman, in particular, we've found, is Doctor Manhattan - indestructible, omnipotent, able to refashion the world around it according to its preferences. Goldman has cruised along, barely slowed, while the rest of us have been left behind, trying to get our old jalopy out of the ditch.

On Saturday, while 200,000 or so attended Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity, I walked down the street and attended Barack Obama's much more modest rally on the Midway, on the campus of the University of Chicago. Maybe 20,000 people showed up, a disappointing turn out, in my view, after the 300,000 or so who attended Obama's election night rally two years ago. Clearly some people have gotten off the bus.

Americans love their cars, so perhaps it isn't surprising that both Obama and Stewart turned to automobile-based metaphors to describe our current political dilemma on Saturday. Stewart, standing before a video screen with images of cars moving slowly in heavy traffic, said:

Look on the screen. This is where we are, this is who we are. These cars. That's a schoolteacher who probably think his taxes are too high, he's going to work. There's another car, a woman with two small kids, can't really think about anything else right now. A lady's in the NRA, loves Oprah. There's another car, an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car's a Latino carpenter; another car, a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan.

But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief, and principles they hold dear - often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers'. And yet, these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze, one by one, into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel, carved underneath a mighty river.

And they do it, concession by concession: you go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. "Oh my God - is that an NRA sticker on your car?" "Is that an Obama sticker on your car?" It's okay - you go, then I go.

Because we know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land. Sometimes, it's just New Jersey.

In Chicago, several hours later, Obama said:

Around the country I've been trying to describe it this way. Imagine the American economy as a car. And the Republicans were at the wheel and they drove it into a ditch. And it's a steep ditch, it's a deep ditch. And somehow they walked away.

But we had to go down there. So me and all the Democrats, we put on our boots and we repelled down into the ditch. And it was muddy down there and hot. We're sweating, pushing on the car. Feet are slipping. Bugs are swarming.

We look up and the Republicans are up there, and we call them down, but they say, no, we're not going to help. They're just sipping on a Slurpee, fanning themselves. They're saying, you're not pushing hard enough, you're not pushing the right way. But they won't come down to help. In fact, they're kind of kicking dirt down into us, down into the ditch.

But that's okay. We know what our job is, and we kept on pushing, we kept on pushing, we kept on pushing until finally we've got that car on level ground. Finally we got the car back on the road. Finally we got that car pointing in the right direction.

And suddenly we have this tap on our shoulder, and we look back and who is it? It's the Republicans. And they're saying, excuse me, we'd like the keys back. And we've got to say to them, I'm sorry, you can't have the keys back. You don't know how to drive.

Why is this? Why at two rallies, 600 miles apart, are audiences asked to think about our economy and our politics through the all-American experience of our automobiles, and the trouble that can befall us when we set out for a pleasant ride? American middle class families have always cherished their cars. It is a persistent symbol of stability and, as one does better and can afford a luxury sedan, a sign of success and comfortable indulgence. Growing up in Cleveland, in a working-class suburb, I think about the neighbors who had succeeded in the construction industry, or had risen up from the shopfloor to work in management. They often lived in the same house they bought when they started out, but the car in the driveway was a Cadillac or some other high-end Detroit-made chariot.

About a year ago I wrote this:

My mother-in-law has always thought I believed Obama was a savior of some sort. That's not true. At least I never thought he was a messiah. We use language in flexible ways sometimes. You know how you might say to someone, "Oh! You're my savior!", when all they've done is stop to help you fix a flat tire and get your car out of a ditch, when your kids are in the back seat miserable and hungry, and it's getting dark? Obama's that kind of savior, helping us pull the nation out of the ditch the Bush administration steered us into.

If it's an image I can conjure up out of the buzzing white noise in my head, it's an easy image to imagine. Surely, Obama could do better than this. And a moment or so later, he did:

In the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, we also believe that government should and must do for the people what they cannot do by themselves individually. We believe in an America that rewards hard work and responsibility for everybody and creates ladders of opportunity. We believe in a country where we look after one another, where we say, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. That's the America we believe in. That's the America we know. That's the choice in this election.

It's about time. Where has this simple rhetoric been throughout this election? Why are Democrats so frightened to say: We believe people shouldn't be left to suffer, to be overwhelmed and ground up by the gears of a global economy they don't engineer? Why can't they say: we owe the unemployed a new chance, through education, and stimulus spending, and every other opportunity government can provide? And even: we failed you because we haven't done enough, but we pledge to do what we can.

Almost two years ago I said:

I see people turning away from a Republican party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems.


Like many, I'm disappointed that the Obama administration didn't achieve much of what it promised. It hasn't dramatically reengineered public education, we are still pointlessly wasting lives and resources in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My euphoria was naive, or perhaps premature. But can anyone really believe that the Obama administration doesn't believe the core principles behind these aspirations? Or that Obama represents our best chance in two generations to achieve something transformatively different? Today's election will map out the short-term fate of these efforts to build an America that is humane and decent, committed to social justice and equality. Yet I think, just as the 2008 elections seemed to promise, that more Americans want to live in that America. Getting there is just going to get a little harder.