by Rushworth M. Kidder

Obama the idealist. The phrase trips readily off the tongue and for good reason. What was it that brought tears of joy to the faces in Chicago’s Grant Park during president-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last week? It wasn’t just his intellect, poise, oratorical skill, or political acumen. It wasn’t even his race. Powerful though those are, I suspect it was his idealism — his articulate conviction that goodness exists, that progress is possible, and that excellence can be attained.

During the campaign, that idealism was never far from the surface. In his acceptance speech it burst forth in his opening sentence, where he talked about an America “where all things are possible” and where “the dream of our founders is alive in our time.”

From the outset, it was clear that this speech wasn’t going to dwell on wonky policy detail or triumphal political celebration. While he thanked his supporters for his victory, he didn’t analyze it. Praising them as people willing to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day,” he never told them how to bend it. And when he sought to account for “the true strength of our nation,” he traced it not to military prowess or economic might but to “the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

But words are easy. What makes his idealism the sign of a real visionary rather than a mere dreamer? The answer lies in five words, buried deep in his speech, that echo the preamble to the United States Constitution: “Our union can be perfected.”

It’s a note he’s struck before, most notably in his March 18 speech in Philadelphia on the topic of race. There, he mentioned the idea of perfection eleven times. His opening sentence quoted the Constitution’s phrase, “a more perfect union.” His final sentence ended with the words “where perfection begins.” As the faces in Grant Park suggested, this simple conviction — that we can perfect ourselves around a moral ideal — may be the most powerful new force in American politics today.

For Obama, there appears to be nothing unnatural about perfection. That itself is remarkable. In the swirling currents of twenty-first-century thought, the idea that perfection can and should be sought is by no means obvious. We’ve come through a corrosive half-century of moral relativism, where the ideas of goodness, excellence, and perfection have been severely challenged. To imagine that goodness can exist except as wishful thinking, that excellence has any validity beyond the eye of the beholder, that anything might hope to be made perfect — to a postmodern age, what are these but irrational fancies?

This fashionable skepticism has deep intellectual and religious roots. It appropriates (mistakenly) Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to argue that moral standards are relative, negotiable, and subjective. As for idealism, didn’t Bertrand Russell famously describe man’s life as “brief and powerless,” where “the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark” as “omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way”? And those Biblical beliefs that Obama described in his March 18 speech as having such impact on the black experience — aren’t they (ask the skeptics) also suspect? Although the King James Version of the Bible — the translation in use as the Constitution was being written — used the word perfect nearly a hundred times, modern Bibles pretty much abandon that word. What eighteenth-century readers heard as “mark the perfect man” becomes, in the New International Version, “consider the blameless,” while Jesus’s imperative, “be ye therefore perfect,” is translated in the Message Bible as “live generously and graciously.” Don’t we all know, in other words, that our deconstructionist age simply can’t bring itself to contemplate the ideal of perfection?

In fact, it seems that Obama doesn’t know that. For him, perfection is not only worth seeking but is, in its way, attainable. His words give no hint that he regards the perfect as a quaint locution or a creed outworn. He apparently has no interest in settling for a more “blameless” union or even for a more gracious one. Instead, he sees perfection as a core, cutting-edge concept, essential for twenty-first-century political, social, and moral progress.

Which may explain his deep appeal. He’s not simply the first black president-elect, nor the first to galvanize such a massive turnout, nor the first to fundraise so effectively on the Internet. He’s also the first to reject twentieth-century moral relativism and to speak with authority about the need for perfection — and to watch millions agree.

Does that sense of perfectibility make him perfect? He’s not so naïve as to think so. Will it obscure his ability to see and challenge evil? Only if he wrongly assumes that, because perfection is attainable, we’re already perfect and don’t need to change. What it will provide instead is a basis for authentic, credible idealism — not spangled in hype and oratory, not giddy, glib, or gratuitous, but rooted in a sense of possibility lying beyond the merely probable. Of such conviction strong leadership can be made.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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