Plasma Pool

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Obama’s rhetoric is wildly successful because it opens up an ambiguous but positively charged space into which we can insert whatever we please. This ambiguity is a major element of his success, but it is his intelligence and solemnity, steady in the face of uncertainty and absurdity, that ensure it. He instills us with confidence despite the rhetorical vacuum he creates, and so allows us to populate that vacuum—to gradually, with our collective, positive, abstract effort, create for it an atmosphere and make of it a safe space for guarded generic optimism. It becomes then less a vacuum than a compost pile: heterogeneous deposits of disappointment and dismay recombine to create a new, protean force that despite its ambiguities, despite its grossness, is undeniably positive in its strictly generic ability to promote life.

That we have come to accept such radical ambiguity can be linked, ambiguously, to the Bush Administration’s justification for its fumbling invasion of Iraq. The embrace of positive ambiguity represented by the embrace of Obama makes sense if we regard it as a backlash to the debunking of the hyperspecific certainty embodied by the administration and the president himself, one which has been discredited in the national consciousness at least in part by the implosion of the Bush Administration’s motive to invade Iraq.

That motive (Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s ostensible possession of weapons of mass destruction) was, recently, further discredited when it was revealed that the evidence supposedly confirming the administration’s suspicions was not only bad intelligence (which the British insisted at the time; Bush ignored them), but had been wholly falsified by the CIA on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney. At the time, skepticism of this evidence did not expand sufficiently beyond the intelligence community and the punditry for an effective opposition to cohere. With so many Democrats in Congress voting to give President Bush the power to invade, it was possible the media to portray accounts of antiwar activism by the American and global left as nothing more than an effectively leaderless, populist, allegorical reenactment of the rascally radical sixties—which of course, it is presumed, we all, constitutionally, demand to be rid of. Silly worldwide antiwar protests! How ‘68 of us! How socialist! How blasé! How immature!

President George W. Bush

The administration was thus permitted, under little scrutiny, to set its own standard for what counted as proof. It set the stage, gradually and pragmatically, for the public acceptance of whatever evidence it eventually submitted. When it found no evidence, it was little work to manufacture it by casting it in the mold of existing public speculation and expectation. Evidence of Saddam’s seeking WMD, however contested, thus became, through its hyperspecificity, sufficient proof of Saddam’s intention to attack the United States in the eyes of the American public to justify—in tandem with the simultaneously tailored Bush Doctrine—a preemptive U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Almost six years later, we know that the administration’s hyperspecific certainty sprang from a deeply held conviction, an pseudo religious certitude, to the United States would, simply would, invade Iraq—which is precisely the action that the administration’s evidence, its hyperspecific justification for certitude, purported to vindicate. It is not simply that the Bush Administration was incorrect; it is that they premised their claim to correctness on a hyperspecific assertion that was soon proven to be hyperbolic and later, only recently, proven to be entirely fabricated. For Bush and his administration, action flowed from a conviction to conviction; and is from this, and from the complementary public valorization of the impulse to act, that Bush drew his public and private strength. (Or, rather, as John Powers points out, which fueled the hubris we and he alike mistook for strength.) His philosophy, his fetishization of conviction, has come to be known, in shorthand, as cowboy diplomacy. It has killed thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign civilians; it has alienated our western allies and ruined the reputation of the United States in the world. And so we are through with cowboys. As Simon Critchley says (in an essay that is deeply skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric):

Against the messianic certainties of Bush II, Obama promises a return to a beatific liberalism whereby everything is seen sub specie consensus. This is a world where good old democratic deliberation replaces decisionism and where the to and fro of civil conversation replaces religious absolutism. Democracy is not a house to be built but “a conversation to be had.” After eight disastrous years of gross mismanagement, secrecy, and lies, it sounds like an absolutely blissful prospect.

Indeed, Obama’s intelligence is one that concertedly rejects the cult of the cowboy, one that disdains the notion of conviction as an unalloyed virtue. His retrospectively vindicated opposition to dumb war in the face of supposedly airtight evidence for launching it has proven a victory not just for Obama, but for the legitimacy of ambiguity itself as a space for positive thinking in the making of serious decisions by individuals and societies. With the discrediting of certitude undergirded by the hyperspecific comes the complementary embrace of an ineluctably abstract, indefinable hope—a hope we have espoused, often reluctantly, because the sober and steady hand of the man who has become its global symbol checks its pesky quixotism.

That so many find Obama’s rhetoric welcoming despite its vacuity is evidence not of its bankruptcy but of its promise—evidence of the American people’s willingness, our desire, to embrace an abstract good. Whether Obama will keep this ambiguous promise is still to be determined. Strictly as a matter of possibility, it is difficult to believe that he can.