One of the most stunning sentences in the NYMag article is how people are begging Barack Obama to run for President. People will walk up to him, hug him, and then beg. "Please, you need to run!" Now I don't consider myself to know anything about politics (nor do I care to) but I generally get the sense lately that the only people who think that the United States is doing GREAT are lunatics, the freak religious people (also lunatics), and the incredibly rich. A great friend of mine was his teacher at Harvard and knew when he was a "boy" that he was going to do great things. I hope that we are about to be on that threshold of greatness.
Obama (if you don't know his name, you absolutely should be ashamed of yourself) is the freshman Senator from Illinois who creates hysteria in most places he appears at. His speech at the Democratic Convention in Boston awhile back brought him eyes and ears from around the country because he was the rockstar we should have been voting for. The NYTimes calls him that "rare politician who can actually write." In 1995, he wrote a memoir before he entered politics trying to trace his familys roots and his attempts to come to terms with his father abandoning him as a child. He acknowledged youthful struggles such as pot, booze, and maybe a little blow. He wrote, "could 'push questions of who I was out of my mind,' flatten 'out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.'" Senator Obama recently published a new book titled "The Audacity of Hope" which supposedly reads as a stump speech and outlines his stance in a lot of issues.
Obama may be a straight shooter. But there’s one question he has a hard time answering these days, and he gets asked it a lot. At the town hall in Effingham, it takes exactly eleven minutes to
come up. It’s whether he’s interested in a certain job. Candidates who are interested in it tend to attend certain dinners in Iowa, where Obama would go the following month. “I’m looking for an intelligent, highly educated man,” says a Democratic precinct committeeman from a nearby county. “Someone who hasn’t been around long enough to be labeled by the opposition in ’08—”
Obama tries to cut him off. “Uh, I think this is a setup—”
“Someone,” the committeeman plows on, “who was not from the Northeast for a change, but from, say, a large midwestern state, someone who was opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning, someone who’s not afraid to discuss his religious experiences—”
“Um—”
“Someone who’s charismatic—”
“Uh—”
“Someone who could unite his party, unite black and white, who’d have the unwavering support of his own state. Do you know anyone like that?”
“I don’t,” said Obama, smiling but looking mildly relieved. “But if I run into the guy, I’ll let you know.”
And then he just continues with sentences, paragraphs, speeches, and acts (like the ones that follow) that pretty much are so head on and splendidly perfect that they give me chills. I would vote for him in a second. He is the only politician that I can name that comes across as "real" to me. But Obama, thankfully, also comes across as a smart, strong, leader who can change the direction of this country and bring it back to greatness.
"We have seen the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation play out over the last 40 years,” says Obama as we’re driving through ravishing acres of corn and soy. “When you watch Clinton versus Gingrich or Gore versus Bush or Kerry versus Bush, you feel like these are fights that were taking place back in dorm rooms in the sixties. Vietnam, civil rights, the sexual revolution, the role of government—all that stuff has just been playing itself out, and I think people sort of feel like, Okay, let’s not re-litigate the sixties 40 years later.” He rattles off some of the familiar dichotomies—isolationism versus intervention, big government versus small. “These either/or formulations are wearisome,” he says. “They’re not useful. The reality outstrips the mental categories we’re operating in.”
Another of Obama’s political advantages is authenticity, that overused term which, for Obama, seems exact. “He’s real,” says Senator Jay Rockefeller, Obama’s colleague from West Virginia. “He knows who he is. And he’s someone who, I assume, would vote the way he feels.” For a party that just ran Al Gore and John Kerry—two men fundamentally estranged from themselves, terrified of saying anything that hadn’t first been printed on index cards—this trait has enormous appeal. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Obama on the Senate floor: He was telling a story to his colleagues when suddenly, quite theatrically, he struck a runner’s pose, like Jesse Owens at full tilt. It was such a strange, un-Senate-like moment to witness, totally unself-conscious and free of pomp. The other senators started laughing wildly. Later, I asked what he was doing, expecting he’d fudge an answer. Obama grinned. “Uh …” he said slowly. “We were talking about, uh, the strategy that I’d observed among some unnamed senators for, uh, ducking out of boring hearings.”
“I don’t think that those two are necessarily opposing,” says Obama. “I don’t want people to pretend I’m not black or that it’s somehow not relevant. But ultimately,” he says, “I’d want to be a really great president, you know? And then I’d worry about all the other stuff. Because there are a lot of mediocre or poor presidents.”
“Name me a state he can’t go to,” he says. “John McCain can go to New York all he wants, but it ain’t gonna happen. New York ain’t gonna vote for him. Or George Allen, for that matter”—a Republican senator from Virginia, also a presidential hopeful—“or Mitt Romney.” (The governor of Massachusetts.) “But I think Barack could be a player in all 50 states, if he wants to. Or 40. There are states we have lost, historically, that he’d be a major player in.”
And if you need a sorta weird reason to vote, read on. It just seems ironic given the abombination we are in now.
So much hope and so much fuss. All over a man whose father was from Kenya and whose mother might have been a distant relation of Jefferson Davis. Whose meals in Indonesia were served, for a time, by a male servant who sometimes liked to wear a dress. Whose first and last names inconveniently rhyme with “Iraq Osama.” And whose middle name, taken from his Muslim grandfather, is, of all things, Hussein.
And if you need another reason to come to the conclusion that our "president" is a horses behind:
He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”)
Obama all the way. I.Love.Him!
Posted by: Juan | March 12, 2007 at 11:03 AM
HELL YES! I about pissed myself when I heard he was gonna run--I'm so excited for (1) an african-american to run and (2) someone who's not a Texas dumbass!
Posted by: Lucas | December 07, 2006 at 09:16 AM
You're right Frank -- I'd vote for him in a heart beat!!! Reminds me of a young Colin Powell
Posted by: Rocky | October 18, 2006 at 06:34 PM