Promises, Promises
Soaring expectations collide with harsh political realities. How Barack Obama looks from Chicagoland.
Joseph Epstein
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 23, 2009
On Tuesday, this past Nov. 4, I voted for John McCain for President of The United States. On Wednesday morning, I woke feeling glad that he lost. Had McCain won, a spirit of gloom would have spread over the land, a deadening feeling of "Oh, God, business as usual," part of that business being that a man tied to failed economic policies was once again at the helm and a nonwhite candidate for president still hadn't a chance. But Barack Obama was our new president. Great day in the morning; a new age in American politics is upon us.
Or is it? Like Augie March, I am an American, Chicago-born, but unlike Augie—a follower of Leon Trotsky—I have never been able to take politics with an entirely straight face. So often, I find my antipathies divided; faced with two equally outrageous candidates, a plague, I usually pronounce, on both their condominiums. The source of this is genealogical. When I was a boy, my father remarked that the aldermen of the City of Chicago, who were then paid an annual salary of $20,000, were spending as much as $250,000 to win election. "The arithmetic doesn't quite work out," he said, pausing, as if to say (though the phrase hadn't yet been invented), "You do the math."
Politicians, my rich Chicago heritage tells me, are all guilty until proven innocent. When the great Rod Blagojevich scandal broke a few months ago, I, like most Chicagoans, wasn't in the least scandalized. All I found remarkable in it was the now former governor's efficiency, in the realm of corruption, in eliminating the middleman and asking for the money himself.
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