‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for Obama, believing that with him as President real change was possible in America, but since then she has become less sure of his ability to make any difference. Having just lost her job, her fears for the future have been realised. Would she vote for Obama again?
Hart was talking to Gary Younge, who reported on the Obama election campaign for the Guardian. He’s been wondering what happened to all that enthusiasm, all that belief, all that hope, and in the second of his two-part series Performance Notes on a Presidency on Sunday (produced by Peggy Sutton) he puzzled through the past couple of years, which have seen Obama’s popularity slide, his effectiveness as President dwindle. The cool intellectual has become a cold thinker, paralysed by analysis and out-of-touch with his voters. How has this happened? Will Obama be re-elected next year?
‘Right now, we’re not listening,’ explained one American commentator. ‘Eloquence only gets you so far.’ Obama’s agenda once he was in the White House was based on the assumption that the recession was not so bad, that it was not going to get worse. But actually it’s become deeper, gone on longer than any of the experts predicted, turned into the worst economic mess since the Great Depression of the 1930s. ‘He can’t perform his way out of this.’
Drew Westen, a psychologist who wrote a book, The Political Brain, which seeks to work out why people vote as they do, says Obama is too calm, too rational. He just doesn’t do anger, concludes Westen. ‘But if you can’t be angry when Wall Street speculators just gambled away the livelihood of eight million of your fellow citizens…?’ Westen says it’s not normal, ‘There’s something wrong with him.’ But that’s far too simplistic an explanation for the decline in support for Obama’s presidency.
Only Hart, a mother, a black woman and a veteran (with a great voice for radio, mellow and measured yet purposeful and direct), had the common sense and the willingness to admit that she, along with many others, had ‘got whimsical’ in 2008 and had forgotten about the ‘day-to-day realities’. Obama has let us down, she says, ‘he raised our hopes’. But she also knows, ‘We invested too much hope in one person.’ We failed to remember the ‘realities of politics’. You can’t just walk into office with a new strategy and expect everyone to embrace it. Those irritating, but essential day-to-day realities will get in the way.
On The Essay this week on Radio 3, a quintet of writers have been talking about books that have changed them and led them into writing. Thinking about that question has left me wondering which book I would choose, only to realise that it was listening to radio which really led me to appreciate words, for it was from the wireless that I discovered the horrors of the imagination while listening to dramatisations of Grimm and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. I also began to hear words put together in rhythmic cadences, to recognise that magical alchemy when sound turns into meaning.
Stevenson in Love, by Mike Harris (and produced by Clive Brill), cleverly wove together Robert Louis Stevenson’s fictions, travelogues and his letters and diaries in a two-part drama (Radio 4, Wednesday and Thursday) that could only have worked on radio. Stevenson’s love of words, and the way they can be put together to say the opposite of what you might think, shone through this dramatisation. Best of all the writer and traveller was played by David Tennant with such enthusiasm and energy that his presence crackled through the air.
In September 1878 Stevenson buys a stubborn mule, Modestine, whose coat is ‘the colour of a mouse’, and sets off on his journey across the Cévennes in search of adventure, ‘something to write about’. He’s nursing a broken heart, having just been abandoned by the American woman, Fanny Osbourne, he met in Paris. Not much happens to him, of course, as he struggles to tame Modestine, investing her in his loneliness with all the human qualities. It’s all in the telling. After 12 days he’s had enough.
When Fanny writes to tell Stevenson she is pregnant, he sets off again to join her in California, sailing to New York on an emigrant ship, arriving in New York and then following the Gold Rush to the West. As his train rumbles across the plains of Nevada, he observes the Indians at every station, ‘dressed in the sweepings of civilisation, staring without expression at the dregs of Europe come to steal the last remnants of their land’. With action, Stevenson had at last found his voice, and his audience.
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