McCain versus Obama: "placelessness," faith, and dreams

Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled The End of Placeness. Although more often lately I have found myself disagreeing with her political observations, I remain a fan of her prose, in part because it has a vivid and authentically consistent voice even on the printed page. And she herself is sensitive to such things, as yesterday's piece reflects when she describes the attending "a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage":

Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people — Mizz-izz-DEHLT people — and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae.

She's not talking only of dialects and accents and language, but more broadly of local cultures. She laments the modern flattening down of such distinctive indicators of people's distinct local roots. Of how this connects to this year's presidential nominees, she writes:

Messrs. Obama and McCain are not from a place, but from an experience. Mr. McCain of course was a Navy brat. He bounced around, as members of the families of our military must, and wound up for a time in the suburbs of Washington. Mr. Obama's mother was somewhat itinerant, in search of different climes. He was born in Hawaii, which Americans on the continent don't experience so much as a state as a destination, a place of physical beauty and singular culture. You go there to escape and enjoy. Then his great circling commenced: Indonesia, back to Hawaii, on to the western coast of America, then to the eastern coast, New York and Cambridge. He circled the continent, entering it, if you will, in Chicago, where he settled in his 30s.

The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness....

I think she's half-right here, or rather, that her observation is only wholly true with respect to one of the nominees. About the other nominee, in the most important way, she's wrong. And it's the part she's wrong about with one candidate, along with what she's wholly right about with the other, that actually matter a great deal in this election.

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John McCain has a temper, and even though he struggles to control it, he's nevertheless famous for showing it. Often he's at his most authentic when he does, which is not necessarily his most appealing, because a hot temper flatters almost no one. But one of the charges he faced in 1982 in his first run for Congress was that he was a "carpetbagger," someone new to Arizona who'd come there not long before the election and who had no roots in the state. According to a biographical series about him published in The Arizona Republic, McCain "snapped" when he was confronted about his recent Arizona residency "for about the thousandth time" at a political rally:

Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

That's a pretty sharp comeback, and it was an effective one at the time. But the annoyance with which it was spoken came, I believe, from at least two distinct sources, albeit related ones. The obvious source was his frustration that he could be so criticized in a political race on the basis of his personal adult career choices that had put duty, honor, and country first while he served in his country's uniform. Thus did John McCain, naval aviator and long-time POW, react to the carpetbagger charge: a single place-name, Hanoi, was, with all it implied, sufficient to heap recrimination upon his accuser.

But another source of the emotion in this sharp retort was, if you will, something that can be heard in the voice of John McCain the Navy brat, the grandson and son of Navy admirals whose family's postings circled the globe. The carpetbagger accusation also brought up painful memories of a scrawny boy who learned to be tough and cocky and, yes, a smart-ass and trouble-maker, because that was the best persona he could devise for dealing with his family's constant relocations even before he ever donned the uniform of an Annapolis cadet. The family members of career military personnel, no less than those personnel themselves, face ever-gnawing doubts that their joint familial sacrifices for duty, honor, and country are taken seriously and properly appreciated by the countryman they're protecting. And so combined with the resentment that the questioner didn't show proper appreciation for McCain's own military service was a sincere statement that, yes indeed, McCain often did wish he'd had the good fortune to grow up with traditional ties to a single geographic location. His and his family's sacrifices for their country certainly didn't start when he was shot down over Hanoi.

Constant moving can easily result in a longing, a growing hunger, for place and permanency. And indeed, the strongest similarity between  their two first autobiographical memoirs — McCain's Faith of My Fathers and Obama's Dreams from My Father — is their telling of the authors' continual boyhood struggles to fit in, to belong, while their respective family circumstances were bouncing them from location to location amidst a constantly changing cast of secondary characters. Reading these two books back to back — as I did, and as I highly recommend — will leave you with strong feelings of sympathy and, perhaps, empathy for their two protagonists. (If you follow the first of my links above, you might look for Amazon's "Buy Together Today" button offering both books in paperback at a special price of $18.16.)

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But what Ms. Noonan misses — what's so different between McCain's and Obama's respective geographic "placelessness" while growing up — has to do with the vastly different reasons for their families' constant moving, and what those reasons entailed for the people they grew up amongst. Barack Obama's young life, and the people around him then, were filled with unconnected randomness. John McCain's young life, and the people around him then, were filled with deeply shared purpose.

McCain knew both his father and his paternal grandfather very well as real-life men — men who were often physically and sometimes emotionally distant, but not truly absent. Indeed their metaphysical presence in his life was constant and obvious. Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama's life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter.

And the contrast continues with the other adults in the two candidates' young lives. While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his maternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother — hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing — and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative "step-child," someone whose main self-identity came to be in his apartness, someone who was continually trying to find himself, someone whose struggle for even a racial self-identity was far from the worst of his self-identification problems.

Is it possible that anyone could be more unlike Obama's mother, with her dizzying moves from husband to husband and country to country, than McCain's mother, who was always the quintessential "Navy wife," wholly integrated into an American military-family culture that is proud and vast and long-standing? However often Roberta McCain and young John moved, they were never alone, never strangers, never "lost" — and they never had to flail about trying to "find themselves." Rather, from birth to adulthood, McCain was surrounded by people whose lives were dedicated to a clear set of ideals and a clear purpose. All those people continuously reinforced and reminded him of the faith — the dedication to duty, honor, and country — that he inherited as a legacy from his grandfather and father.

Even the portions of Obama's book about his extended trip to meet his father's "other family" in Africa are as much a story of disassociation as they are of finding oneself. Oh, he's sensitive, and he's articulate, and however much of it is actually true, it's a moving and thought-provoking story. But Obama couldn't miss the contradictions, the rifts, the betrayals and bitter feuds and loneliness in his father's and paternal grandfather's lives. Indeed, much of the merit of his memoir comes from Obama's telling of the tensions and paradoxes in his own life that derived from his remote father's and grandfather's histories. And those things not only became increasingly troublesome and painful to Barack Obama, they apparently have still never actually resolved themselves — neither for him, nor for the various uncles and aunts and cousins and other extended family members from Kenya who he introduces in the last fifth of his book.

We none of us pick our parents, and I'm not suggesting the lack of a coherent, consistent, and neatly directed family history is something blameworthy on Obama's part. But upon reaching the end of his book, despite its intimate tone and thoughtful nature, I have no clue what (other than ambition) actually motivates Barack Obama, either in his daily life or his long-term aspirations. His book does indeed show us dreams — chaotic, frightening, and often contradictory ones that he can't quite sort out, despite his struggle. Of faith, in anything, there doesn't seem to be much — and such faith as there is, is in isolated individuals acting as loners and as migrants.

Even if one concludes that they share a certain superficial degree of geographic "placelessness," the candidates' respective book titles thus point out a trite but fundamentally true comparison:  McCain got a rock-solid and abiding "faith" from his grandfather and father — faith in them, in himself, in the U.S. Navy and the other U.S. military forces, and most importantly, in all of America — while at best, Obama got only "dreams" from his.

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So here we are, with one candidate who (when he's feeling a bit prickly, which is fairly often) will remind us of his years in the Hanoi Hilton, and the other who (when he's trying to snow us, which is every minute of every day) will run television commercials implying that he grew up in Kansas, when he's never lived there at all. Does that make the two men indistinguishable from one another with respect to their sense of home, homeland, or "placeness"?

Peggy Noonan seems to think so. But I think she's seriously underestimated the extent to which one can still have a real, if non-geographic, "home" among the uniformed members of the U.S. military and among their families. Even frequent transplants can have healthy roots in that extended and non-geography-based culture.

John McCain is the first to tell you that it was when he was in the dank, dark cells of the Hanoi Hilton — first in almost unbearable isolation, and then in the comradeship of his fellow POWs — that he came to truly appreciate America and what it means to be an American. And that heightened appreciation in a time of crisis and deprivation was only possible because he had, indeed, soaked up so much of America even bouncing around as a "Navy brat" and a young Navy officer. Whatever other doubts I have about the grumpy old man in the race — and I still have many — I don't doubt that he's deeply imbued with fundamental American values. In a sense — the one connected with my vote and its potential effects, broadly writ, upon the future — I'm willing, given the available choices, to bet my children's lives and futures on his values and the judgment those values inform.

But when, exactly, did Barack Obama come to truly appreciate America and what it means to be an American? Does his eloquence when speaking with a Teleprompter translate into heartfelt values? And where's the evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that his values — whatever they are (besides the seemingly transcendent value of electing Barack Obama) — are my values too? He's certainly learned, and demonstrated, that even the rootless can prosper in America; "my story," he frequently says, "could not have taken place anywhere but here!" And that's true and fine as far as it goes. But there is still much in this man's history that troubles me, that mystifies me, and that makes me unwilling to gamble anything important upon him.

Ultimately McCain doesn't suffer from what Noonan characterizes as his "placelessness." It's true that there's no single American place to which he's historically or temperamentally rooted — no ancestral manor, no distinctive accent. But John McCain is not rootless. Rather, McCain is rooted to the entire United States — and in exactly the same way that he and his father and grandfather weren't fighting as U.S. Navy officers for Ohio or Texas or Nebraska, but for all of America. We should recognize that as a source of strength, not a defect in his upbringing.

Roots actually do go a long way, I believe, as a predictor of presidential reliability and performance, and as a source of values and faith. And whether you call it "roots" or "placeness" or whatever, I'll take any random U.S. military base over all of the places that young Barack Obama ever lived in, briefly and tenuously, even put together.