Quarterly Essay 32

American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama

Kate Jennings

Release Date:
December 2008
RRP:
$15.95
ISBN:
9781863953115
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Where were you when America elected Barack Obama? Kate Jennings was in New York, eyes wide open, completing her take on an amazing time: "the run-up to the election ... a time when every day felt like a year and we became slightly crazed from worry but also mesmerised, unable to switch off the cable news stations, obsessively tracking the DOW, VIX, LIBOR spreads, polls in red states. So much at stake."

American Revolution is a dazzling and perceptive look at the United States between hope and despair: an election-year kaleidoscope. Jennings describes how and why the US economy fell off a cliff and how an apparently endless run of primaries and an increasingly rancorous campaign culminated in a world-changing victory. She surveys the characters - Obama, Palin, McCain and the Clintons - and conveys the concepts - derivatives, bailouts and moral hazard. This is an essay that shows America in fascinating flux: it is witty and poetic, acute and evocative.

"The television networks are justifiably in raptures about the historic election of an African-American as the president. All the same ... to reduce Obama to a label, to 'African-American,' does him - and us - a disservice. He wasn't elected for the colour of his skin; he was elected because he offered the hope of a wise, steady and healing leadership to a country bullied and battered in the name of patriotism, plundered and pillaged in the name of free markets, neglected and abandoned in the name of small government." —Kate Jennings, American Revolution

Correspondence

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE31 Now or Never by Tim Flannery. Correspondence relating to QE32 American Revolution will appear in the next issue.


About the Author

Kate Jennings is a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Both her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times notable books of the year. She has won the ALS gold medal, the Christina Stead prize for fiction and the Adelaide Festival’s fiction prize. In the 1990s, she worked as a speechwriter on Wall Street. Stanley and Sophie, a memoir of life in New York City, where she has lived for the past three decades, was published in 2008.