The Voices of 3 AM

It’s deep in the night, and the children are asleep under flannel sheets and blankets. The rain is steady on the metal roof; a clock is ticking; every once in a while the oil furnace stirs.

The phone isn’t ringing, and no creepy male voices are whispering threats of any sort.

And still I cannot sleep.

Amazingly, it’s Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the news media keeping me awake.

When Michelle Obama said what she did about never having been proud before of the American public (or whatever it was precisely), I didn’t understand the fuss.

And that’s what I’m up thinking about. That I never understand. That I am forever alienated by the voices I hear on the radio (we don’t have any television reception; one must draw the line somewhere), by the framing of—well, almost everything—in the measured, self-gratified tones with which the wisdom of the day is trotted out by the hand-slappers and the naysayers and the sycophants.

Now, that wisdom—and oh, is the paper of the record relieved that their candidate is back!—is that tough-as-nails Clinton has persevered, has shown what every person of gravitas and influence and cultural superiority knew from the start: that the movement for Obama is itself a “fairy tale.” And then its reporting does its level best to make it seem inevitable that Clinton will win, with a number of tricks it’s too late in the night to enumerate or parse, from exaggerating her wins to slighting his delegate lead (“about ninety” says the article, even though the graph on the opposite page says that it’s 105) to making the delegate count itself seem petty compared to voting (as if the pledged Democratic delegates weren’t awarded based on people voting, in primaries and caucuses).

And then there’s the ad. The voice. Who are these people who think of such things, who condone them, who open the door to the creepy insinuations: Your children are safe, the man says—but the implication is NOT SAFE. NOT SAFE.

The night of the latest primary, I was in fact up at 3, putting a cool cloth on Amos’s feverish head, telling him he would be all right, that he wasn’t going to die, that chances were he’d be better in time for his soccer game in a few days. Since we don’t live in Gaza, I thought, where the 8-year-old boy was just killed by Israeli fire, while he was playing soccer.

But I digress. Now is not the time to consider the more considerable asymmetries in the Times coverage of violence in Israel and Palestine.

The very thought exhausts me.

So much is exhausting. Which brings me to what I hauled myself out of bed to try to say: I’m tired of pundits and know-it-alls and the sonorous tones of NPR commentators. Listening to all of this with Rosa and Amos, who at ten and eight are indefatigable in their capacity to ask questions and sniff out hypocrisy, demands something more than the snorting and eye-rolling—and despair—I’ve indulged in all these years with like-minded adults. It demands better listening, better retention, quicker responses, more thorough research, better writing. (Michael Chabon came up with an excellent sample of the latter in the Washington Post .)

But for now, at 3 in the morning, the voices.

Rosa’s hilarious imitation of John McCain folding his hands and saying during the New Hampshire debate, “I will never let you down,” made me realize how when he puts on that syrupy tone, he sounds precisely like Mr. Rogers, who was recently honored with sweater week. A lot of talk about Obama and the youth vote, but McCain seems to be pitching his message to those who haven’t yet learned to read.

“Who was that?” Amos asked, catching the end of a Hillary quote on the radio. When I told him, he scrunched up his eyebrows in puzzlement, said “she sounds different” and shrugged, as though he just didn’t care about any of it any more. True: her voice is never the same. If she answered the phone, you might be afraid you’d called the wrong number. Her voice cracks with the strain of too much bad living: too much power-seeking, too much money raising, too many efforts to match her message to the public mood.

And then there’s Barack Obama’s voice. I grant that he may need some new speeches (they all do) and that he’s doing plenty of the above, too. But his voice is beautiful. Deeply beautiful. And this is not a trivial matter, easily reduced to reporters having crushes on him or women fainting at rallies. It makes me think of the thesis of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty, proposing that the human capacity to admire beauty is linked to a quest for justice. He appears remarkably centered, astonishingly graceful and comfortable in his own skin; his voice comes from that. It is the voice of the man who wrote Dreams From My Father, a moving book whose writing necessitated a process of growth that is not usually embarked on by people running for president.

One night a few weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange feeling of some expansive, electric joy. My thoughts stumbled to catch up to the sensation—as if I were a child again, standing in the sunshine before the breadth of an ocean. Then I realized that I’d gone to bed reading Obama’s memoir, and that the feeling came from this: the man who wrote this book could become president. Of this country.

And it seemed a different world was possible. Sure: it would go back to the same old; yes, his health plan’s not adequate (nor is hers); no, his Iraq exit plan is not clear enough; why doesn’t he have a better response to the threat of so many foreclosures?

But to have a voice is a start. The first we’ve had in my lifetime, that’s for sure.

So, actually, I want to celebrate: Barack Obama has won. In the delegate count so far, literally. In getting so many people who’ve never been invested in the political process to become involved. In raising so much money from small donations. And in finding a way to give voice to the desperation so many of us feel: There must be another way.

I had a vision recently of him as an old, old man. (Such optimism!—it surprises me.) He’d been president, but we were so old and it was so long ago that it hardly mattered anymore. He’d survived. And I found myself thinking, Longevity has its place. And then the thinking turned into talking to him: Don’t let all this hype and all this ridiculousness get to you, Barack. Just keep being your brilliant self.

I hope that he finds a way not to be crushed by the inhuman test to which we put our political candidates. That he will keep trying to give voice in our public life to the integrity of his memoir.

I hope he is able to, and I hope we let him.