Anyway, I’m thinking about this here because I don’t mean to say that the Obama money is enough, especially if all it buys is more Obama money. What we want is for that money to buy a political will for a serious reorientation of US economic, legal, and administrative resources toward fairer economic and legal justice. In re the law, all I meant was that from all I’ve read, he’s not going to maintain the strong executive presumptions of the republicans (which I predict HRC would, since she’s so authoritarian and hierarchical, as we see in the centrality of a culture of loyalty and deference in her political practice, and also in her hawkishness, which I fear is not just political compensation but actual).

Obama believes in a strong constitutional law tilted toward the progressive side, and so would issue, I feel confident, a more balanced set of relations between the three governmental branches; not rely so much on extra-juridical practice, etc. It might also provide alibis for lack of political courage: In *The Root* last week, for example, Michael Dawson berates him for not condemning the police in the Sean Bell case on the grounds that the law had decided, and we have to respect the rule of law. I agree with Dawson: Obama could have had it both ways by respecting the rule of law in given instances while talking about interfering with the pattern of racially motivated excessive force. At the same time, I believe that while the current administration sees law as a tool and a weapon, Obama would return it to its rightful place as mediating institution that protects citizens from the state as well as each other, that *ought to* have a politically inconvenient relation to governmental will.

I really do think he’s going to matter a lot to rehardwiring the law back to a state of liberal balance.

I would need clarification on this as I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what it means for the law - of all things - to have been hardwired for “liberal balance.”

I agree with Reed’s comments on Democracy Now!: Obama’s base is more fan club than movement (his calls for it to step up and be otherwise, notwithstanding). There is currently nothing analogous to the progressive and radical grassroots movements which pushed FDR and JFK in progressive directions after taking office. Rather, Obama “fever” embraces another post-political presidential candidate who would fold cheery grassroots activism into the presidency itself.

An incident put things into stark relief for me over the winter: one afternoon I witnessed a desperate, really crazy-seeming African-American woman ranting to a bus full of passengers in southside Chicago. She was screaming at the front of the bus when I boarded. I think she had a small child with her (seated near her). It seemed that her fare card was a dollar short of the needed fare and the driver had told her so. She had silenced the entire bus with her shouts that this was a conspiracy, that the card was to blame, that everyone in the bus needed to stick together on this, that otherwise we would all be next. She ranted for blocks, the driver long-since having dropped the matter, and just before I exited the bus she began to chant, “O-bama!, O-bama!, O-bama!, O-bama!”

But it is also worth saying that the forms of optimism about surviving the grittier zones of life can still produce anxiety: for example, when people make fun of the kitschification of disease (breast cancer or AIDS ribbons, New Age spirituality, secularist splenetics against the religious, therapy culture, etc); or when people make fun of the Lifetime channel or Oprah.

As for “believing” in Obama: I never believed. He’s not as empty as Adolph Green says, but he’s not radical or all that progressive on most things. The health care plan isn’t good; on the environment and immigration he’s mixed; he’ll return the US to a centrist-liberal jurisprudence (a relative relief from where we are), and dismantle the strong executive that Bush has constructed; he won’t be a hothead hawk; he won’t get goaded into cowboy diplomacy; Robert Reich works for him, so he won’t be the worst neoliberal; but Sam Nunn has just signed on, which is pretty scary. But to me when someone actually creates institutions for political organizing (the Obama fellowships) to turn a generation of politically engaged 20 year olds into politically identified workers, I have to be happy: after 30 years of political parties that wanted apathetic voters, that wanted the political to be delegated to them, we have a mainstream politician who wants people to build their political skills for activism. OMG! But this is what I mean about the shaky ground, the contradiction, of ambivalence/attachment.