The Answer Was 'Yes'

I found these comments in a pre-2008 election issue of the New York Review of Books (not the New York Times) by Russell Baker. In hindsight, they seem to have been right on target.

Despite his seventy-two years, McCain has a giddy, impetuous quality more commonly associated with youth than Obama’s pensive gravity.

Watching McCain is entertaining. He seems never to have got over being a bomber pilot and notorious bad boy of the Naval Academy. It was the giddy, impetuous, bomber-pilot McCain who gave America Sarah Palin as the best possible right-wing Republican to be the next president of the United States and thus—to the delight of leading political wordsmiths—galvanized, electrified, and energized his party’s famous “base,” its indispensable army of Christian churchgoers.

Though he has sometimes worked well with Democrats to get legislative results, McCain also has the amateur chess player’s weakness for making an impulsive move just to see what will happen: thus his eleventh-hour intervention in the Wall Street crisis negotiations. In chess what almost always happens after the impulsive move is doom.

Obama lacks impetuosity, giddiness, and the zest for demagogic combat, or maybe he has simply been too well brought up to talk back to a man old enough to be his father. Or perhaps he is just another one of those cool Harvard Law Review cats who can’t field-dress a roasted chicken, much less a moose.

Obama seems to me very much like the Jack Kennedy who ran for president in 1960. Kennedy was the young candidate speaking for a new generation, insisting that it was their turn, pressing the old to get out of the way and let the earth turn.

At first everything seemed wrong about Kennedy. His speeches were too short. His accent was funny. His tailoring was too elegant. Above all, he was simply too young for a nation that thought presidents should look like Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, or Hoover. He was forty-three years old. Many thought it amazing that a Catholic could be elected president.

The fascinating question this year is whether a black can be elected president.

And the answer, amazingly, was yes.