The Obama campaign, fictionalized

To paraphrase an online saying: you’re not nostalgic for Obama’s first campaign, you’re nostalgic for the age you were during Obama’s first campaign. From the very beginning, it was disorienting to watch his sudden rise from unknown to inevitable. With hindsight, it can seem as though he was uniquely positioned to claim the central, near universalizing place in American politics for almost a decade: the son of one Black and one White parent, one native-born and the other an immigrant; an adoptive son of the Midwest, the crucial confluence of New England Puritanism, the Great Migration, and pan-European immigration and the onetime stronghold of small farming, unionized industry, and land grant universities; Protestant, but of a rhetorical rather than a confessional flavor; someone who walked the halls of elite institutions but only as a newcomer. He could not merely code-switch; he could speak in different registers to different people using the same words. He made space for belief, although in what and for whom were always left open to interpretation.

When he ran for US Senate in Illinois in 2004, I was worried that his name and his liberal profile would make him hard to elect. He won 70 percent of the vote. Still, it all looked like a roll of the dice as his national profile rose during the second Bush term. For many people, it was the first time they engaged in politics. For progressives who came of age during the Bush years, it was the first time they engaged in politics out of anything other than fear, anger, or hostility. For many, young and old, it was probably the last.

Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel Great Expectations, a bildungsroman-cum-campaign memoir, begins at the very moment Obama launches his presidential campaign. The narrator, David Hammond, sees him on television making his announcement in Springfield with a rhetorical flourish straight out of the Black church tradition: “Giving all praise and honor to God for bringing us together here today.” David is, and remains, something of an ironist throughout the action of the book (at least where politics are concerned), but he feels “almost flattered” to be pandered to in this way by a politician who wants something from him. It makes him feel “bright, disconnected, and experimental.” He imagines Obama’s speech as the “melody” developed from the original theme of John Winthrop, who, speaking to the Puritan arrivals, became a “paganizer” and secularizer of Christianity by making it literally political.