The Difference Between Cameron and Obama (the artist and the bureaucrat)

Perhaps it is unfair to place these two men side by side. They are entirely different kinds of men, almost different species. But if pressed to summarise the heart of the difference I would say simply this: one man is self-made while the other is a product of a system. Obama defined for himself the man he wanted to be, his own identity, the direction he would take. The answer to his life's riddle was not given ready made. He had to sweat and bleed for the answer. But from the struggle the answer finally came, that is, after years of searching, reading, living alone, getting sidetracked, sometimes getting high, often falling deep into introspection. For Cameron things were different - in his biography we detect no struggle at all, no strain or self-inquiry beyond the pedestrian, or even the superficial. He knew who he was from the outset; his family in the Cotswolds told him; a message consolidated by his schooling, by his university trajectory, by his choice of friends, lovers, associates and employers. Cameron, unlike Obama, is an entirely predictable creation of conventional circumstances - he is an untarnished and faithful product of where he is from. A polished artefact of the upper-middle-class establishment. His values, aims and beliefs are not exactly his own, they were not creatively fashioned by himself, they were simply inherited by default, as were his range of choices, which were narrow: Eton or Winchester, Oxford or Cambridge, the Civil Service or Chambers, Kensington or Notting Hill, Sally or Samantha. In the end, all lines tend in the same direction. For Barack, however, his choices were as complex as they were diverse: State College or Private College, basketball player or novelist, Junky or community activist, college professor or journalist, corporate lawyer or politician, writer or teacher, white wife or black wife. The path was not already lain, the range of possibility far from circumscribed or provincial, as it was for Cameron. Each step for Obama was uncharted and experimental - each step for Cameron had been walked by a thousand others before. Each conviction for Obama was gradually, individually and thoughtfully fashioned, each conviction for Cameron was predictably and communally instilled. It is in this sense that we can say that one man is largely a product, while the other, comparatively speaking, is his own creation; a creation that could have gone any way. One therefore seems curious and exotic, the other commonplace and entirely known; one intrigues and surprises us, while the other is someone we have seen before, who stands next to someone we have seen before. For me, one difference between the two men with respect to their characters, their passion and their the capacity to inspire is that in one we sense the inspiration born from true individual searching and experiment, while in the other we sense that oddly dogged and old-fashioned conviction that their upbringing was true and right. The fact that one man thought individually, while the other followed faithfully, can be illustrated by the following contrast: at Columbia Uni Obama spent his spare time reading the core works of the Civil Rights Movement and writing poetry, while at Oxford Cameron spent his spare time watching Neighbours and the game show Going for Gold!? If anything captures the difference between the activities of the 'self-made man' and 'the product of convention', it is this illustration. For a man who follows the well-travelled road does not need to search in his spare time. But it is precisely what Cameron lost from not searching, from always being the prefect, if you like, that I feel constitutes the heart of their difference - and which more broadly always seems to constitute the difference between the artist and the bureaucrat.