A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Chapter 3: Mestiza Poetics: Walt Whitman, Barack Obama, and the Question of Union

Mestiza Poetics: Walt Whitman, Barack Obama, and the Question of Union 59 WHEN IT CAME TO identifying with famous antebellum figures, Barack Obama chose early. Declaring his candidacy for the presidency from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois assumed the mantle of one of America’s greatest presidents: Abraham Lincoln. Delivered in Lincoln’s hometown on the weekend of Lincoln’s birthday, Obama’s speech was audacious in its use of analogy and allusion. The candidate described Lincoln as “a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer” who showed America that “there is power in words.” Invoking Lincoln ’s famous “house divided” speech at the start of his announcement,1 Obama spoke of the “unfinished business of perfecting our union” before concluding with echoes of the Gettysburg Address (“Let us finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this earth”).2 The candidate strongly linked the appeal to Lincoln and his legacy to questions of union. For Obama, “Lincoln’s legacy was his effort to bring the country together.” Despite governing during a time of slavery, civil war, and secession, Lincoln “had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people.”3 Running to be the first African American to lead a major-party ticket, Obama sought to redeploy Lincoln’s vocabulary of union, challenging the idea of divided America and claiming instead that “beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people.”4 Obama’s paeans to union appeared to be more than the usual platitudes of a candidate running for national office. Indeed, his campaign and election seemed to spark genuine moments of civic unity and national CHAPTER 3 Cristina Beltrán 60 Cristina Beltrán euphoria—from the massive campaign rallies to the spontaneous electionnight street celebrations across the nation to the unprecedented crowds that flooded Washington, D.C., for his January 20 inauguration. Yet in Obama’s first few months in the White House, the ideological conflicts and bitter partisanship that gave rise to such unitary rhetoric engulfed his administration . By the first anniversary of his election, the language of unity that once charmed an electorate no longer inspired. Instead, anger and frustration over the bank bailouts, the continuation of two wars, and compromises over health care, immigration, energy, and civil rights for gays and lesbians led voters to respond to invocations of unity with anger, disappointment, cynicism , and despair. Whether Obama can emerge from his presidency as a Lincolnesque figure who leaves the nation more united than when he began remains to be seen. Much has been made of the Lincoln-Obama connection—with, doubtless , much more to follow in the coming years. Yet in trying to understand Barack Obama as both a political phenomenon and a figure of union, this essay recommends shifting our gaze away from Lincoln and toward a different figure of the antebellum era, the poet Walt Whitman—a man whose own relationship to Lincoln has already been the site of an enormous body of scholarship and analysis.5 In trying to understand the political implications of Obama’s attachment to union, I find Whitman to be a particularly valuable interlocutor.Like Lincoln, he was deeply committed to the idea of national unity, but his poetic vision also emphasized democracy as a spectacle of diversity.6 It’s my contention that this synthesis of union and democratic spectacle offers important insights into the power of collective display and the significance of aesthetic response to the election of America’s first black president.7 In this essay, I argue that a deeper understanding of the 2008 presidential election requires such enhanced attention to the event’s aesthetic and affective dimensions. In suggesting that the 2008 election can best be understood as a political and sensory event, I draw on Nancy Rosenblum’s reading of Whitman and her claim that political theorists often give insufficient weight to the binding power of aesthetics.8 In contrast to democratic theory’s oftenmoralistic and procedural logic, Rosenblum argues that the significance of Whitman’s poetry for political theory lies in its ability to activate “strong feelings of attraction to democracy”; this creates “a poetic vision . . . in Mestiza Poetics 61 which democracy appears as a dazzling spectacle of diversity...