Change We Can Believe In?

By Zaid Jilani

It’s 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning at the University of Georgia and I’m up. That would make things bad enough, but it just so happens I have a terrible cold. To top things off, I’m being dragged into a road trip to a town in Central Georgia, Macon, to see Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama give a pander-filled stump speech to an evangelical audience at Harvest Cathedral Church.

Staff writer Keela Palmer sits down next to me in the O-House lobby, equally perturbed that she has to get up; third and final road trip member, staff writer Daniel Payne, is dragging us to a Barack Obama campaign event.

Keela and I supported Congressman Dennis Kucinich in the Presidential race, whose inability to assemble corporate fat cats and media bigwigs forced him to withdraw from the race a few days earlier. We are both very cynical about Obama’s candidacy.

I hear a chorus of birds twittering away outside. I can’t quite understand why birds are so happily reacting to a cold winter morning I’m so miserable in. “Change the birds can believe in,” I offer as an explanation to Keela, spoofing Obama’s messianic campaign slogan.

Eating breakfast, I wonder what exactly it is we are searching for in Macon. Is it “change,” as Obama’s campaign and the media that has adored him since his 2004 Democratic Convention speech have promised us?

I decided long ago that Obama was more or less the same old thing in a new package. His welfare-for-HMO’s healthcare plan, his tepid proposals for drawing down troop presence in Iraq, his policy team consisting of bevy of entrenched special interests are a major turnoff. An example of this is top advisor Moses Mercado, who spent a lifetime lobbying on behalf of wonderful people like the NRA, Monsanto, Pfizer, and the Carlyle Group – all of these facts deflated any optimism I had for the freshman Senator from Illinois.

Yet Senator Obama has accrued an enormous following over the campaign season. As I write this, he is pulling in over a million dollars a day in donations; he’s speaking to crowds of 10,000 or more wherever he appears. It’s easy to chalk this up to media hype generated by a press more enamored with the candidate’s gravitas than policy proposals, but part of me really yearns to find out what it is that Obama possesses that excites people so much.

The drive to Macon is long. It clocks in at well over two hours, and the terrain isn’t pretty. Central Georgia was hit hard by the last recession; as farms and factories closed, entire communities fell into the hard squalor of poverty. Betrayed by a Democratic party that had sold its soul to the corporate-subsidized Democratic Leadership Council (which Howard Dean once called the “Republican wing of the Democratic Party”), the citizens of this region of Georgia have delivered stunning victories to Sonny Perdue’s GOP in recent years. Looking at the abandoned shacks and shattered farms that litter the road to Macon, it’s not hard for me to understand why. If both parties fail to put food on your table, you’ll at least vote for the one with whom you socially identify.

Macon is a city where two-thirds of the population is African-American (in a virulently white-dominated state) and a quarter of the city’s residents live in poverty. I once brought up the poor state of the city to a resident assistant I know who hails from there. She promptly told me, “I haven’t been home in two months!” with a wide grin on her face. Her happiness showed me that if there’s any city in the state that could use some “change,” it’s Macon.

We park at a rival church up the street from Harvest Cathedral. Irony is alive and well this morning: the church’s message board proudly beams that the word of the week is “commitment,” but only a couple of cars are in the parking lot with us.

The three of us exit our car and start walking towards the site of Obama’s speech, which has been fortified by dozens of police officers and barricades. Daniel starts to walks across the road straight into the police encampment, but I freeze.

He looks at me, giving me a very clear “Why the hell are you just standing there?” look. Gripping Keela tightly, my panicked expression responds with, “As a person of color, I’m not going to commit suicide by jaywalking into a barricade staffed by fifty trigger-happy white policemen and federal agents.”

After very cautiously walking through the police and entering the cathedral, we are greeted by hundreds of people in the lobby. Every age, gender and race is well-represented. Many people are standing; others are in chairs; some are even straddled along the floor.

Their eyes are transfixed on high-definition flat screen monitors set up across the area to televise the senator’s speech; Obama is speaking in the inner auditorium – all these people out here arrived too late to be let in. Surprisingly, they don’t seem to mind much. The crowd is almost completely silent, hanging on Obama’s every word.

Keela and I whip out our notepads, frantically writing down blurbs from the speech. I jot down “Told story about ‘hope and faith and the love of Jesus Christ’.” The word “pander” or some variation of it appears in my notebook many times as I write. It’s not that I think Obama is completely insincere; it’s just that his speech is too full of clichés, too full of ridiculously overblown rhetoric to be the honest words of a former president of the Harvard Law Review.

That’s when Keela walks over and tells me, “This is the same speech I saw him give at another church [on C-SPAN]” – confirming my often overdone cynicism.

As I begin to contemplate ways of financing an expatriation to Sweden – maybe I can file a libel lawsuit against the Guard Dawg and use editor Andrew Widener’s 401 (k) – a very serious-looking woman walks over to us.

“Are you with the press?” she asks, looking at the notebook and pencil squarely in my hands.

“Yes we are!” I respond promptly, not missing an opportunity to exaggerate the clout of Stand Up.

The woman takes the three of us into the auditorium where Obama is. She hands us press badges and sits me with The Washington Post, Newsweek and the The Macon Telegraph. We hit the jackpot.

I am sitting with the same folks I always go on angry tirades-that-no-one-wants-to-listen-to-in-8-a.m.-INTL-class about. In my mind, these folks are morally somewhere between Lucifer and Herman Goering – shills for the plutocracy, nihilists trapped in horserace reporting in the face of perpetual national crisis – and I’m plopped down right next to them as they tap away on their MacBooks and Blackberries.

The one thing I notice that stands out the most about the reporters I’m sitting with is how incredibly bored they are. Every now and then one of them wakes out of his or her stupor to jot down a buzzword into his or her laptop or notepad, but even moments of sustained applause and laughter from the crowd brought nothing more than a yawn from the national press corps.

I see that many of the journalists have traveling press badges, which means they basically just follow Obama around wherever he goes; their most difficult task must be thinking up new ways to transcribe the same old clichés.

The woman from the Post has a U.S. Senate press badge; I feel sorry for her – I’d probably commit suicide after the third day of watching focus group-crafted statements spewed all over the Senate floor by legislators whose campaign contributions decided their votes long ago.

Daniel, a devoted Obama supporter, darts to the senator after his speech concludes. Keela and I are more interested in local reactions to the senator’s sermon.

I talk to a middle-aged woman from a military family who works during the day and goes to school at night, tells me that while Obama gave a “good speech,” she was disappointed that he didn’t tell the audience what he “plans on doing for our wounded warriors.” Her husband is less critical, telling me that he liked “what [Obama] had to say” and that he liked how the Senator’s speech wasn’t “political.”

The thing that stuck with me the most about our trip to Harvest Cathedral that day was not anything Senator Obama said. No, what made the deepest impression on me was the people who had come to see him. They were a perfect microcosm of working-class America – the young, old, white, black and everything in between. What I saw in the faces of those people was a burning desire for something different than the status quo – something different from an America run by the ugly elitism of Clintons and Bushes.

The movement of citizens coalescing behind Senator Obama wants us to be able to collectively look in the mirror as a nation again and like what we see – not turn away in embarrassment or shame. Sadly, I doubt that Obama or any viable candidate left in the race possesses either the policy ideas or the political courage to make that happen. Yet there is something that keeps me optimistic.

I ask myself this: What if all the people who have donated to Obama’s campaign or have volunteered for him or voted for him – an army of people numbering in the millions – decided that they’d continue being active citizens beyond just voting in the occasional election? What if, instead of looking to politicians like Barack Obama or John McCain or even Dennis Kucinich, they started looking to each other for change?

What if they organized into civic groups, labor unions, and a vibrant alternative press? What if they decided that no matter who won the election, they’d hold their feet to the fire and demand that the politicians in Washington listen to us – an engaged and outraged public? It would be the greatest populist citizen uprising in history. Maybe all those things the people running for president won’t give us because they’re beholden to special interests – like a single payer universal healthcare system, public financing of all elections, and a foreign policy center around something other than the demands of multinational corporations – would suddenly be in our grasp. That kind of change I can believe in.