11-09-2007
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Joint Chiefs of Staff Member
Stop the ride, I want to get off!
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Member Since: Jun 2004
Location: Kentucky
Posts: 1,864
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Thoughts on Obama
There’s a lot of time left before the election, and I’m not ready to make up my mind about candidates this early in the race. But from the get go, I’ve hoped Obama would emerge from this thing as the victor. In other words, I WANT to want to vote for him, and hope he gives me and others reasons to do so. Not so much because of what he says, what he promises, or where he stands on issues, but because of the striking change in the course of our political system he would represent just by winning. I was planning to break down his potential more specifically, but then I came across the following opinion piece that mirrors my own thoughts. I think the author gives a balanced assessment of the man—both qualities and flaws.
I’m looking for a substantial change in direction that marks the beginning of a new political era. Like the author of the piece, I think Obama is the only candidate who has the potential of bringing this about. Anybody else feel the same way?
Quote:
Is Iraq Vietnam? Who really won in 2000? Which side are you on in the culture wars? These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics. One candidate could transcend them.
by Andrew Sullivan
Goodbye to All That
The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.
Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.
But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.
Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo*mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
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Much more (long article)
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