By Michael Miner
But almost to his own embarrassment, Muwakkil has concluded there is no road: Washington just happened, and years later Obama just happened. “I had initially subscribed to the notion that the people produce the leadership,” he wrote in the March 18 ITT, “but my look back at the Washington years forced a change in my thinking. Washington’s success was largely a product of his personal dynamism and unique political virtuosity. Had he not existed, I concluded, Chicago would still be looking for its first black mayor.”
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Muwakkil agrees up to a point, but he observes that racism isn’t the only sore tooth the country’s nursing. “The discourse might have been that we need a feminine touch,” he reflects. “We’ve come from the era of Schwarzenegger”—of the Terminator variety, not the governor—”and now here’s Hillary—she’s the one for that.” The country’s waging two wars, one of them deeply unpopular, and a charismatic woman running as an alternative to default belligerence might have intoxicated young voters the way Obama has. But Hillary Clinton isn’t that woman. Does anyone expect Clinton to respond to men who can’t imagine voting for her with a 37-minute speech on the tangled history of men and women together?
The magazine is published in Santa Barbara, California, by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, a foundation created by Sara Miller McCune, founder of SAGE Publications. The magazine’s problematic title is Miller-McCune. Its editor in chief is John Mecklin, a former editor of High Country News and alternative weeklies in San Francisco and Phoenix.
Fallows likes the idea. It reminds him of something the Atlantic published long ago on Vietnam by the late China scholar James Thomson. “He wasn’t mainly saying it was a mistake,” Fallows recalls. “He wasn’t saying what they should have done. Instead he mainly said: It was this combination of personalities, that collection of institutional biases, this reading of history, and that set of deadlines or outside pressures that led to the result. . . . There is far, far too little of this sort of analysis—and maybe I shouldn’t use the word ‘analysis’ at all, since that can be misunderstood as meaning something dry and abstract. I mean a chronicle with gusto. Human characters; narrative drive; the details that convey how real people saw the real world; and then of course the most insightful conclusions the author and editor can draw. Journalism is chronically short of these chronicles.”
Sat 4/12, 1-5 PM, Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, 312-409-4802. F
