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The Greeks called it kairos. It's usually translated as "the opportune moment," but that doesn't really capture the fullness of the term. It means also the right measure, proportion, a sense of timing. It's the perfect witty comeback at a dinner party, or the right original proposal sent through at the right time. It means grasping the complexities of the moment and acting in a way that allows them to flow with you. Kairos. It's understanding that something that worked four years ago won't work now, and that something that didn't work six months ago will work now. It's untranslatable, but it's that feeling we get when a thing has gone off perfectly, when the occasion seemed to call for precisely that, and when we marvel at the person who recognized the correct response. A sense for the occasion.
Obama's got it by the bucketful. Kairos.
The usual political calculus about "moving to the center" for a general election is superficial. What Obama recognized for this election (they're all different, the first kairotic principle) had nothing to do with left, right, and center. It had everything to do with something far more basic: chaos and order. Chaos isn't bad. Indeed, more than one thinker has said that chaos is merely an order we weren't expecting to find (Bergson's entire philosophical project is staked on this premise, for instance). Chaos here means that feeling, that rush, that emotional attachment that Obama was able to invoke and evoke during the primaries. It wasn't about playing to the base, then moving to the center. Obama correctly diagnosed that we needed a little chaos to free us up from the chains of the conflicts the Bush people had built for us. The chaos. The open.
The general, on the other hand, required closure, order, calm. It required the construction of a new edifice now that the swirling crowds of the primaries had torn down the old. This was the kairotic understanding that none of the doomsayers of the Worry-Brigade quite understood in the aftermath of the GOP convention. The McCain camp missed it completely. McCain knows only one mode of campaign: frantic, frenetic, unpredictable. Chaos. But the time for chaos had ended. It was time to build, time to trace the outlines of the blueprint. This is why the debates are "boring," and lack any "knock out punch." This is why the zingers and sniping and Ms. Palin herself - a better symptom of chaos could not be found, even at the level of syntax - all fall flat against the growing edifice. Some order. Some calm. The closed. No drama, Obama. It's also why the pundits continually misunderstand the dynamics, why the debates appear to be a "tie" until the polls rush in, with Obama and Biden taking those by huge margins. And this is why the next two debates won't matter either.
The primaries were about movement. The general is about territory.
No drama, Obama: a sense for the occasion.
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