The Bad Plan Early

We sit in a small apartment in Cambridge, Mass., an old friend and I, talking about politics, as usual. A film is on television: The Bad Sleep Well by Akira Kurosawa, which retells the story of Hamlet in the corporate halls of postwar Tokyo. We are exchanging thoughts on the campaign.

Not this year’s campaign. Enough ink has been spilled over the nonsense spewed in the last week alone. Our own opinions were backed by the facts we carried, and an overflow of information kept our lives at a comfortable distance from our candidates and opinions. We had become so removed from the boots on the ground, the mysterious creatures called “the electorate,” that we ourselves wouldn’t be called for a Gallup poll if they found our names in the phone book under “strongly opinionated.”

Not that either of us are in the phone book. Or even in possession of land-lines. But it’s almost beside the point—we are discussing the elections in 2010, and our opinions on the current long slog will only be “I told you so” in two years’ time, pipe dreams like those of a pair of former Kerry staffers I knew who snuck out of their local office to smoke weed during their lunch breaks in the hot summer and ruminate on how good it all was in February of 2004.

Why the elections of 2010? Because we’ll both be finished with our undergraduate educations (if I manage to pass the swim test), and local politics in Cambridge might be just right for my friend to run for a seat on the city council. Our own “strong opinions” could easily become his campaign positions, with a little light makeup and personal polish.

We would be 24 years old in November 2010, and two years is a long time to wait—not just on account of it being an eternity in which we would need jobs that’d pay enough to give us a few months’ extra rent money, raise a war chest for a local Democrat without being known to “the establishment,” glad-hand around, and establish ourselves as friendly-neighborhood candidate and shadowy campaign manager types, but because the bitterness that plays out on our screens in 2008 is already getting to us.

“We can easily run you as an up-from-nothing story,” I tell him. “A kid on hard luck whose mother, like Obama’s, valued good education and sacrificed to put you through good schools. You’re level-headed but not boring. You support Israel, of course, but go out of your way to mention those poor Palestinians. You shake your head and wonder about what went wrong in Iraq, and you can name the governor of New Hampshire while boasting about not having a car to drive up there to dodge the sales tax like the wealthy do with their Costco cards.” The initial thought of the sentence itself hangs in the air long after the explication: we can run you. “I” am already “we,” heading a fanciful shoestring campaign operation. The candidate, “you,” is consigned to the passenger seat, giving the speech while the local campaign mouthpieces dish out the dirt.

One of the lines that any observers of the campaign this year—and Barack Obama in particular—like to trot out is, “Whatever happened to the audacity of hope?” You could argue that it either exists despite all this mess or that it never existed at all, but the fact remains that the vicious reality of what it means to sanitize and slice-and-dice a candidate for office into a package deal, especially at the local level where party primaries live and die on name recognition and loyalties, is always present. In Obama’s time as a Chicago organizer, his own beliefs clearly meshed well enough with the busywork of building a grassroots network, and it won him a ticket into local politics. Did it turn him into a bad guy, too, or at least reduce him to a political caricature?

Do you have to be as single-mindedly driven as Koichi Nishi, the Hamlet character in The Bad Sleep Well, to translate your strong opinions into a campaign? How much of your own soul do you give up when you decide to become a player in a larger political machine? At what point between the conversation in 2008 and the election in 2010 will my friend and I, in 2011, look back with either the clear-eyed regret of the weed-smoking Kerry supporters in 2004 or the jubilant hope of Obama supporters after Iowa in 2008 and say, “On that day, we became ‘the bad,’ the sellers of a political package deal”? Can we win if we don’t?

It’s still not clear. But we’ve got time, at least, until 2010.

Chas Carey is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science and American studies. What Where runs alternate Wednesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com