Why Isn't Barack Obama Doing Better?

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

This famous riddle first appeared in Lewis Carroll's absurdist masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland, and has since inspired many fairly uninspired answers: "Because they both stand on sticks," "Because Poe wrote on both," and, my personal favorite, "Because they both taste terrible." Carroll offered no answer within the tale, instead writing only the following exchange between Alice and her enigmatic tea party companions:

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."

This unanswerable riddle, Alice's rather American response, and the need for Carroll's readers to create an answer where none logically exists is on my mind because a similar, modern riddle is making the political rounds. No doubt you've heard it and, perhaps, offered some answers of your own: In this seemingly slam-dunk year for Democrats, why isn't Barack Obama doing better? Sure, people say, he's now leading in most national polls; but, others counter, only by a small margin. Sure, people respond, he appears poised for an electoral college victory should his support in Pennsylvania and Colorado hold; but, others reply, why is he struggling so with so-called Reagan Democrats? By all accounts, given the depths to which President Bush's approval ratings have sunk and the extent to which Americans self-report feeling worse off than they did four or eight years ago, any Democratic candidate should sweep into office on a mandate. Yet, the election remains perilously close; and that's a riddle to rival Carroll's.

Is Obama suffering because of racial divisions? Is it because he appears too cool and professorial when speaking on the stump? Is it because the McCain camp somehow successfully stuck him with the labels of "celebrity," "unprepared," and "naive"? There MUST be an answer, you see, because without one, the riddle runs the risk of ruining a once sure-thing.

Were I to posit an answer to this riddle (which I am, of course, about to do... after all, Alice, what is a blog if not time well-wasted asking riddles to which the answers elude?), it would be this: Obama, himself, is a riddle. He has lived a life so safely tethered to the unobjectionable, so as to become a spectre of himself. It can't be as simple as to say he suffers for race, as he is, factually, biracial ("half-white" in crude vernacular), and displays none of the so-feared (read: unknown and misunderstood) attributes of Black America that inspires such reactions in White America (save, perhaps, for Reverend Wright, who's greatest flaw may be his arrogance, but who's greatest sin was certainly not rightly claiming that America's "chickens had come home to roost."). He didn't even denote himself as a student of color on his Harvard Law application! It can't be as simple as to say that he's too cool and professorial, because he is best known for his soaring and inspirational prose. Nor can it be as simple as to say that McCain's trickery, of smoke and lipstick-smeared mirrors, has displayed any lasting power - courtesy primarily of two women McCain dragged into the race: Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin. No, it can't be as simple as all this at all.

Americans like their leaders flawed, "like them," in recognizable ways. Look only to the phoenix-from-the-ashes successes of Bill and Hillary Clinton as proof - reviled and beloved and as likely to survive a nuclear holocaust as Cher once said about herself and cockroaches. They survive - and all politicians like them survive - because they are real and human and messy and fight with every breath for their right to "keep going," as Hillary now famously echoed Harriet Tubman, however blind to their own flaws they may be. They don't lead unobjectionable, intangible lives; rather, they present themselves as fascinating riddles with a plethora of even more fascinating answers.

Obama isn't doing better because, like Alice, Americans can't help but think he must have had better things to do with his time.