Why Dylan was right on Obama

Looking back through posts I put up here a couple of years back, I was intrigued to find this comment by Bob Dylan dating from April 2009. 

Asked by Newsweek's Bill Flanagan for his thoughts on Barack Obama, Dylan came up with this reserved response: "He'll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men. Johnson would be a good example of that … Nixon, Clinton in a way, Truman, all the rest of them going back. You know, it's like they all fly too close to the sun and get burned."

The thing to remember is that at this point Obama had been inaugurated as US President only three months earlier and was still the blank screen upon which all progressive, small-'l' liberal and George W. Bush-hating Americans were projecting their wildest hopes and dreams. 

It seemed clear to relatively few at the time that all this Obama-mania - encouraged by the man's own soaring rhetoric - was bound to result in chronic disillusion. That's not to disparage the man, who I'm sure has had good intentions all along. But after promising the Sun, there was no other place top go other than back down to Earth, as Dylan so perceptively noted.

Conclusion: sometimes the most perceptive statements about politics come from artists, whose field of expertise is outside of the political system. Having begun as a protest singer, Dylan started to question his youthful certainty as early as 1964 with the song My Back Pages, with its "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" refrain - as memorable and profound as anything found in Shakespeare.

It should be no surprise that Dylan related more to Obama as a writer than as a politician. "His writing style hits you on more than one level," he told Flanagan re. Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. "It makes you feel and think at the same time, and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He's looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people, and he's wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors."

Asked by Flanagan what in the book would make Dylan think Obama would be a good politician, he replied: "Well, nothing really. In some sense, you would think being in the business of politics would be the last thing that this man would want to do. I think he had a job as an investment banker on Wall Street for a second, selling German bonds. But he probably could've done anything. If you read his book, you'll know that the political world came to him. It was there to be had." (see here for more of the interview).

Dylan's reluctance to jump aboard the Obama-is-God bandwagon at the time would have appeared suspiciously apolitical to many Americans at the time. In retrospect, his assessment, while supportive of Obama's intentions, seems not only realistic but uncommonly wise - a note of pragmatic sense at a time of jubilation verging on hysteria. 

Who now recalls that Obama, whose drone-targeting of Taliban operatives has resulted in the deaths of 100s of innocent Afghanis and Pakistanis, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 9 October, 2009 - only two years ago?  

None of this is to condemn Obama so much as to draw attention to the limits of presidential power in a liberal democratic system. Real power resides elsewhere. As Dylan implicitly recognised.