Tipping Point

by Stephen Fleischman

“Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

–William Shakespeare

I hate to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, who said: “You fight with the army you have, not with the army you want”, but allow me this: “we work with the candidates we have, not with the candidate we’d like to have”.

Barack Obama might not have been born great, might not have achieved greatness, but he’s standing in a place where he may have greatness thrust upon him.

Most great leaders in world history did not spring full grown from the rib of Jove. They were molded by the confluence of historical events, unexpected circumstances and the pressure of the people behind them.

George Washington. He was caught in the maelstrom of an insurgent movement, pushed forward by the farmers and landowners of the 13 colonies to take on the British redcoats of George III and beat them with his rag-tag army of freedom fighters, much as Ho Chi Min and the Viet Cong did in Vietnam with a guerrilla army fighting with bamboo spears against the tanks and helicopters of the American invaders.

What are the freedom fighters of Iraq doing right now?

If the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds could get together, instead of fighting a centuries old religious war, they’d have the American invaders out of there in a New York minute, probably by helicopter from the top of the US Embassy building in Baghdad. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani is probably working on that right now.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the aristocratic former Governor of New York State had greatness thrust upon him by the Stock Market crash of 1929. Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act added to that greatness in the elections of 1932, plunging Roosevelt into the depth of the Great Depression when he took office in 1933. The Republican right-wing also thought tax cuts for the rich would be a good way to crawl out of the depression using a stimulus package.

As the story goes, Pelle the Conqueror, achieved greatness by learning how to speak Danish, whereas Alexander and Peter did it just by calling themselves “the Great”.

Jesus Christ was born great, whereas Babe Ruth did it with his bat and Barry Bonds with his bat and a little help from a yellow submarine.

Revolutions don’t come along very often but when they do they produce a lot of greatness. When Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were guillotined, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and his Jacobin friends had their moment in the sun, called the Reign of Terror. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité did not emerge directly from the Reign of Terror, but eventually the great Napoleon Bonaparte did.

Napoleon’s ambition was to conquer Europe (if not the world). In 1804, he crowned himself Emperor of France and proceeded to knock off one country after another until he got to Russia. There, the great Russian winter smothered him, as it did another would-be world conqueror a century and a half later.

We won’t mention Hitler and Stalin and we’ll go right to the wanna-be great George W. Bush. Now there’s a man who would like to have greatness thrust upon him. If his Democratic opponents had any “cojones”, any at all, even a wee bit, they would thrust him and his puppet-master the un-great Dick Cheney right out of office.

We had a president who was tossed, not too long ago, within the memory of most of us—Tricky Dick Nixon, in 1974. His high crime and misdemeanor was authorizing a second-rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in order to steal some election campaign strategy from the office of the Democratic National Committee. Too bad. His burglars got caught red-handed. No greatness thrust upon Tricky Dick.

And we had a president, even more recently who was impeached by the House of Representative in 1998, President Bill Clinton impeached, not for the real crimes and misdemeanors that he committed, like bombing Iraq on a regular basis for over a year; for supporting sanctions on the Iraq people that resulted in the death of more that a half million Iraqi children; for keeping in office a Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who said the deaths of these children were “worth it”. No, he wasn’t impeached for any of that.

Bill Clinton was impeached for denying that he had sexual relations with “that” woman—Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. The US Senate didn’t have the guts to put him on trial (as impeachment protocol called for) and, if found guilty, evict him from office. No greatness there.

Now, Bill Clinton is on the campaign trail, aiding his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Dem. New York) in her ambitious drive to become President of the United States. No greatness there but lots of Chutzpah.

The tipping point seems to have come with the Obama victory in the Wisconsin primary.

When young people come out to vote, you know the thrust of greatness is on the move.