Thursday, November 8, 2012

My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore

Barack Obama

My hero: 

Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore

'Could a black man be elected president twice? Many voters thought not'


Lorrie Moore
Thu 8 Nov 2012


T
he sheen is often off a second-term US president, even if the question of his being re-elected (or ever elected to begin with) has been put to rest. This has happened with ostensibly unthinkable candidates such as Ronald Reagan: once an ageing right-wing ex-movie star crashes through the gates of one's imagination into the White House and sets up shop there, perhaps anything at all can occur. Can a black man be elected president of the US? Well, yes! Can it happen twice? Many American voters thought not.
"Especially in this economy." That's a phrase voters have heard repeatedly in the past year in almost every context, from online dating to real-estate speculation. It has been noted that the second term for a president is almost always won by a larger margin than his initial win – he has already proven himself presidential and so that hurdle in the public mind has been overcome; sea-to-shining-sea acceptance can proceed like a warm bath of mixed metaphor over the electorate. But this did not happen for Obama – although, unlike Carter or Bush Sr, he also did not lose.
In his campaign against Romney, Obama seemed up against someone who already looked more like the president than he did, or at least looked like an actor playing the president on a TV show – albeit one from the last century. These telegenics appeared to give Romney an advantage in the debates over a reserved, thin African-American who is trying not to smoke. With all that money thrown into the competition, might Romney win?

Yet money, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending, did not seem to have the final word, since there was so disgustingly much of it that campaign ad oversaturation caused many voters to mute the television and avoid the phone. And yet they still headed to the polls on election day. Substance won out. Even if the charisma, the aura, the unreasonable expectations, the heroic dimensions have tumbled away and left an actual human citizen, it is a citizen who is calm, high-minded, principled, practical and intelligent. It all means a real person was elected. (One who instituted some barebones national health care and is looking to reform Wall Street and the tax system; perhaps one who is even thinking about giving Romney a job.) The drone attacks on American citizens in Yemen, the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead lilt to the national foreign policy discussion, the hang-gliding off the so-called fiscal cliff will all be set aside for now. Nothing is perfect. One has to rejoice in the pretty good.


THE GUARDIAN



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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