The Symbolism of Obama and Mandela

Last New Years Eve, much to my girlfriend’s chagrin, I fell into a heated debate with a mutual friend, where I took the position of criticizing Nelson Mandela (I know), by apportioning him some blame for the current economic travails facing South Africa i.e 40% unemployment and a greater chasm between wealthy and poor than before apartheid.

Now, as I understand the general rule of thumb for criticizing figures like Mandela, one should be sensitive to the audience’s reverence for such persons before launching into a critique. Well, I wasn’t and as a result I was solely responsible for creating an atmosphere that was decidedly uncomfortable and certainly not in keeping with New Year’s Eve jollities.

I have since learned my lesson and acknowledged that in order to have a good time (and friends), I need to be sensitive to their, well, sensitivities. At 27, I should have known better. However, despite starting 2008 breaking down friends’ heroes I walked away feeling justified that overall my position proved correct.

Simply put, my position was that it is very dangerous to deify people like Nelson Mandela. Instead, Mandela (like all other leaders and elected officials), should be judged on their policies and actions and not their symbolic capacity to engender hope, especially when those policies directly conflict with their version of hope. I have held this position for a long time and is often my recourse when defending my criticism of hero-praising people like Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair, and to my more militant-leaning friends Che Guevara. So in response to my friend’s assertion that “Hope is so important, his Presidency symbolized the end of Apartheid”, I countered “But his policies have been detrimental to the very people the ANC has claimed to represent.” By the way I must insist here that I am no apartheid apologist.

Then, last week, after the whole episode had faded into the ether, my criticism for Mandela suddenly came to the fore again when I found myself applying it to my strong support for Barack Obama. The argument looked awfully applicable to Obama, and I needed to take a look at why I felt differently about the two men.

Obama supporters, like the candidate himself for the most part, have routinely stressed his agenda as rooted in a reconciliation style politics. Although not as grand, urgent or transformative as the abolition of apartheid, the kind of change that Obama aspires to is not unlike the trajectory set by Mandela and is comparable in that it attempts to usher in a new era of politics by flushing out the old, typically characterized as adversarial or dominated by special interests.

The problem for Mandela though, was that he was a symbol and not a politician. Unfortunately, the symbol of a black African leading the country alone was not enough to pull poor black South Africans from the townships up from the lower strata of society. Moreover, it was not enough to counter strong business interests from pushing Mandela, with Mozambique’s white flight well in mind, to liberalize the economy and thus send more blacks further down the echelons. It is also worth mentioning only four years ago that the ANC passed substantial affirmative action legislation under the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, ten years after the birth of the Rainbow Nation. Let us not forget that Mandela’s credentials as a leader were gained as commander of the ANC when it was still a military organization. He lacked the necessary politicking skills of a statesman and appears to have to deferred to his European educated deputy Thabo Mbeki.

Obama conversely, is a politician, and judging by his reputation in Illinois, a pretty good one at that. This difference in itself could have been enough to leave the Mandela argument alone but I found myself wanting in needing to articulate my position on Obama. Many politicians in the past have promised abstract ideas like ‘change’ and ‘hope’ only to renege. What makes Obama so special?

The question then that provides us with the acid test for Obama is ‘Do his policies, and his record suggest that his mantra of change can be at once symbolic and pragmatic? And moreover can they be accomplished?’ The answer I came to was yes, and it is best looked at in the context of the Democratic Presidential Race.

There are two related fundamental differences between Clinton and Obama and they are consistency and vision.

Obama in stark contrast to Clinton, and most of the Democratic field for that matter, has been consistent in his beliefs from from his days in the Illinois State Senate and has proven to be true to his word especially on the war and on government transparency. This issue of transparency in particular has been a pet cause of Obama’s; along with Russ Feingold Obama was one of the main architects of the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007.

Throughout this primary season it is often mentioned that the two Democratic front runners differ very little (although David Leonhardt differentiates the very real nuances between their economic positions in this article from the New York Times a month ago). But the major policy difference is that Obama’s policies are congruent with a vision, Clinton’s are not, and cannot be.

When analyzing Obama’s policy proposals, one can begin to identify a connected thread of reasoning, from economic to foreign policy, from health to the environment. Obama seeks to provide a united America through fairness and by engaging everyone in the democratic process. Clinton on the other hand, whose positions vary often in accordance with the Clintonism doctrine, approaches each policy as exclusive unto itself and its time e.g her anti-war statements and her support for Kyl-Lieberman. It would be, for her, impossible to knit a patchwork tapestry resembling a vision. Whereas she has shown she intends to make life better for defined groups by breaking down the population into voting blocks, he intends to make American’s better off as a community.

Obama has shown that he works toward defining his Presidency with policy congruent to a vision of conciliation and unification with politicking to achieve that, and in this sense Obama was right to indirectly compare himself to Reagan recently rather than someone like Mandela . For all the foreign atrocities sanctioned by Reagan and the disastrous domestic legacy of his so-called voodoo economics, Reagan proved that through charismatic leadership with a vision defined by policy the country was able to gather round right wing economic values dressed as American values. Just imagine what Obama could do with progressive values as American values.

Symbolism, obviously, is not some panacea, it is merely a supplement. Obama appears to understand this and in order for his symbolism to succeed as a tool to improve people’s lives it must be undergirded with consistent policy initiatives. Competent governance doesn’t require symbolism to work but it is essential that symbolism have competent governance to survive as a motivator. South Africa is now realizing this.

~ by oddlyamerican on January 26, 2008.