Obama For President
My choice on the Republican side is Mike Huckabee, but I'll talk about that on another day.
On the Democratic side, Barack Obama gets my nod. In making the choice generally, I want to choose someone who can be a president, not some who seems to be running to make a political point, such as Kucinich or Paul. I also want to vote for someone, not against someone. As much as I dislike Hillery, I don't want my vote to be for the person who is running against Hillery. Finally, I want to vote for someone who represents a genuine change, not just with the Republican administration but also with the way politics is conducted today.
David Brooks, in The New York Times, best articulates for me at least why Obama would make a good president. Obama would be a good president because of his moderation, his centeredness, his vision, his integrity, and in his yearning to reduce the politics of attack and division. In a previous post, I mentioned how how children can rise above their backgrounds and bad parenting. And I am especialy impressed that Obama has made the kind of chocies that has allowed him to rise to where he is today.
"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.
"Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.
"Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.
"But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.
"Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.
"Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.
"Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation."
Let me finally end this post by trying once again to put to rest the silly lie that Obama is the educational product of an Islamic madrassa. Of all people, Christians should stand for the Idea of Truth. But it is they who perversely seem to be jumping on this dishonest bandwagon. Here is a column I did earlier this year on this so-called issue. But ignorance and expediency being what it is, I expect this lie to continue to have a long life.
www.mymallandnews.com/2007/04/why-i-dont-watch-katie-couric.html
On the Democratic side, Barack Obama gets my nod. In making the choice generally, I want to choose someone who can be a president, not some who seems to be running to make a political point, such as Kucinich or Paul. I also want to vote for someone, not against someone. As much as I dislike Hillery, I don't want my vote to be for the person who is running against Hillery. Finally, I want to vote for someone who represents a genuine change, not just with the Republican administration but also with the way politics is conducted today.
David Brooks, in The New York Times, best articulates for me at least why Obama would make a good president. Obama would be a good president because of his moderation, his centeredness, his vision, his integrity, and in his yearning to reduce the politics of attack and division. In a previous post, I mentioned how how children can rise above their backgrounds and bad parenting. And I am especialy impressed that Obama has made the kind of chocies that has allowed him to rise to where he is today.
"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.
"Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.
"Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.
"But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.
"Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.
"Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.
"Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation."
Let me finally end this post by trying once again to put to rest the silly lie that Obama is the educational product of an Islamic madrassa. Of all people, Christians should stand for the Idea of Truth. But it is they who perversely seem to be jumping on this dishonest bandwagon. Here is a column I did earlier this year on this so-called issue. But ignorance and expediency being what it is, I expect this lie to continue to have a long life.
www.mymallandnews.com/2007/04/why-i-dont-watch-katie-couric.html
Labels: Obama
posted by My Mall and News at
5:48 PM
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