It figures something like this would happen while RWB is on vacation. I woke up late this morning and thought to idly check the Drudge Report, so that I wouldn’t be totally out of touch with the news. It took me a few minutes before I noticed the headline, “Bob Dylan backs Obama to change America.” Curious. Following the link to that story, I then followed the link to the actual article and interview by Alan Jackson.

My first reaction, as I read through the long piece, was that it’s a real shame that here we have this fascinating and unprecedented talk with Dylan about his drawing and painting — also touching on his memoir-writing and “Theme Time Radio Hour” — and apparently all that anyone cares about is a mention of Barack Obama.

It still hadn’t sunk in to me what a big deal this would be until I signed in to my email and saw a stream of messages from friends and foes alike. There was also a reporter from ABC News.com seeking the RWB response. Does Bob have any idea how much his offhand remarks can shake the world and interrupt the mighty news-cycle?

So, I guess the best place to start is to quote the relevant passage:

My time with Dylan is up and we stand in preparation for my leaving the room. As a last aside, I ask for his take on the US political situation in the run-up to November’s presidential election.

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.

The writer is to be commended for setting the scene of these remarks, knowing, I’m sure, the kind of attention they would likely get. The two men had stood up to leave, and whatever question Jackson asked about politics was “a last aside,” coming at the end of a long and apparently very friendly talk on nice subjects, like painting and radio shows. Was Bob even sure he was speaking for publication at this point? Well, he’s not naive, but it’s a question. The other question is regarding the complete context. What words did the journalist actually say to Bob? What was his full response, including that omitted by the “…” before Obama’s name? I’m not saying the writer is distorting the import of Dylan’s words, but in trying to understand exactly what Dylan means here, it could help to see the full picture.

That said, one has to concede immediately that it’s surprising to hear him talk about a candidate for election by name. It’s out of character. It’s something he’s not supposed to do (kind of like doing TV commercials for Victoria’s Secret and Cadillac). But what’s life without the occasional detour?

After that initial surprise, it then becomes — to me anyway — somewhat less surprising to hear him say some gracious and positive things about Barack Obama. I tried explaining this to the nice ABC News guy on the telephone this morning, and I hope I didn’t garble it too much. But look at where Dylan has been and what he has lived through. Look at his deep affinity with black American culture, and black American people. His involvement with the civil-rights movement in the early nineteen-sixties was something that came from and reflected his heart, and it’s the only political stand he’s ever really taken, although it’s one that of-course goes far beyond party political labels. You can go on through his work and see him continue to highlight and pay tribute to the gifts black Americans have given to the nation and the culture, never forgetting the furnace of oppression in which these were forged. Go from Hattie Carroll through Hurricane, Blind Willie McTell, High Water (for Charley Patton), and beyond. It’s a huge part of who Dylan is. And it’s not only his musical family, as we know: it’s his real family, including his daughter by Carolyn Dennis. There is every reason for the man called Bob Dylan to be glad of certain pages being turned (hopefully, anyway) in America and in American politics. Even yours-truly — who hasn’t seen a fraction of what Dylan has seen in his life — wrote of feeling a certain gladness when Obama won the Iowa caucus. It wasn’t about supporting his specific policies for the country; it was about seeing tired old molds of racial politics beginning to crumble.

When Dylan, in the quote from the Times, says, “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor”; what exactly is he talking about? Absent greater context or follow-up questions, it’s impossible to be sure, but it seems to me he’s probably alluding to the kind of stubborn poverty that especially afflicts segments of the African-American community in the United States. And one thing that is objectively good about Barack Obama’s candidacy is the extent to which he is making the old racial demagogues and charlatans seem old-fashioned and redundant. There’s a reason why Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were slow to jump on Obama’s bandwagon. It’s because they’re not going to be anywhere near the driver’s seat. Obama seems to have changed politics to that extent already, simply by virtue of his success so far. He’s “redefining what a politician is” to a substantial number of people in the black community.

Another way in which Obama has already brought change to politics is in the way to which Hillary Clinton could certainly attest today. Things have not gone in the drab, predictable way of recent elections, where the nominees have just had an aura of inevitability about them, or have been the default, safe-seeming candidates. Obama’s has been an insurrection of sorts, which most observers ( certainly including me) did not predict. It has indeed been from the ground up, although not without the media’s influence as the phenomenon grew.

And, to the extent that Obama keeps his promises about running a different kind of political campaign — which could be helped by his possible agreement with John McCain’s proposal for joint town-hall meetings across the country — that too would be a positive thing.

So, I can give much the same credit to Obama that Dylan is giving, and be glad of what he represents in a number of ways to many people, and yet at the same time I can look coolly at his proposed or likely policies and decide that I don’t agree with them. I don’t like the idea of higher taxes, government control of health care, gun bans for law-abiding citizens, staunch protection of existing abortion-on-demand laws, the nomination of liberal activist judges, a withdrawal from Iraq regardless of consequence, and on and on. I’m not going to vote for those things. There are things I don’t like about John McCain’s likely policies too, but I’ll make my voting decision based on whose policies I agree with most. Character is an issue too, of-course. Personality much less so.

How Bob Dylan makes up his mind on these things is up to him. I don’t even know if he votes. I also don’t know to what extent he has looked at the details in this election, and to what extent he is just making a comment based on the ephemeral perception that Obama has changed some things that needed changing — which indeed he has.

Would Dylan agree with Senator Barack Obama’s policies, if he went down the list one by one? Well, it would surprise me a great deal, and many of my reasons for thinking that have been covered ad-nauseum in previous writing that had nothing to do with Obama in particular. But then, did he agree with everything that his “favorite politician” Barry Goldwater believed in the early nineteen-sixties? Goldwater even opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1963; not out of racism, I think most people would accept, but out of what he understood as allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Dylan likely respected Goldwater’s principles and his integrity and liked how he carried himself like “Tom Mix,” as he says in his memoir “Chronicles.” It’s possible Dylan likes how Barack Obama carries himself, too, and that’s with confidence, calmness and eloquence, appealing more often than not to people’s better angels. Dylan would not be alone if he likes those things about Obama, while not necessarily agreeing with many of his policies.

Finally for now, I’d just quote the segment of last year’s interview in Rolling Stone, where Dylan is asked by Jann Wenner about global warming. He responds with some comments about what people ought to expect from politicians. I’d just ask: Are these the remarks of a liberal Democrat? Answer truthfully and you need have no fear.

Wenner: What do you think of the historical moment we’re in today? We seem to be hellbent on destruction. Do you worry about global warming?

Dylan: Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.

Wenner: It seems a pretty frightening outlook.

Dylan: I think what you’re driving at, though, is we expect politicians to solve all our problems. I don’t expect politicians to solve anybody’s problems.

Wenner: Who is going to solve them?

Dylan: Our own selves. We’ve got to take the world by the horns and solve our own problems. The world owes us nothing, each and every one of us, the world owes us not one single thing. Politicans or whoever.

Wenner: Do you think America is a force for good in the world today?

Dylan: Theoretically.

Wenner: But in practical fact …

Dylan: The practical fact is always different than theory.

Wenner: What do you think the practical fact is now?

Dylan: With what’s going on? Human nature hasn’t really changed in 3,000 years. Maybe the obstacles and actualities and daily customs change, but human nature really hasn’t changed. It cannot change. It’s not made to change.

…

Addendum: Chris Francescani’s article on the subject on ABC News.com can be found at this link. It’s a pretty thorough and fair take — read to the end for a few quotes from yours-truly.

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