My New Guy
Perhaps later rather than sooner, I hope to cast a vote for Barack Obama shown here, with his wife, taking an AIDS test near his father's home village in Kenya. As the hometown hero, he was trying to show that real men take AIDS tests.Perhaps I'm merely flush from just finishing his book "The Audacity of Hope" but I'm getting a Bill Clinton feeling from him--real smart guy, real savvy politician.
I don't know if he's "ready", a one-term US Senator who, although he's lost races, has never faced a really dirty one, but, in the spirit of bipartisanship, he beats the hell out of the douchebag who won last time.
His ideas seems sound, so far, and his personal story is compelling: white American mother, black Kenyan father, he lived as a child in Hawai'i, and in Indonesia, with his Indonesian step-father and half-Indonesian sister, and came to adopt Christianity in the African-American style rather late in life. His brother-in-law is Chinese and his nephew is International Soup. I know race doesn't matter, except when it does, but it seems that his multi-racial, multi-cultural background makes him genuinely broad- and fair-minded.
Maybe later I'll regret writing this; anyone is bound to be eventually diminished by this kind of admiration, but right now I'm feeling the audacity and the hope. Could it be, could it really be?
posted by Corresponding Secretary General at 3:22 PM
2 Comments:
The Democratic Party, I state simply, tends to win with rock stars like Clinton and Kennedy. Carter was running against GERALD FORD, and nearly lost. We tend to lose with scoldin' oldies.
Forward Obama, forward Edwards, get them into the soup now and see what happens. Clinton can win, and so can Gore, but the practical consideration is that their negatives are still higher than their positives among recent polls. Not true with Obama, who, in his personal story, seems to embody the America we all recognize, and has yet to be anything other than warm and inspiring and hopeful - the guy is whip-smart, witty, and likeable, Bill Clinton with a little more gravitas. And like Clinton, he projects optimism, a quality whose value in politics cannot be overemphasized.
I suspect - just suspect - he'd clean up the floor with McCain, who is looking these days like the old lady next door whose cat was just shot. It is Giuliani that gives me pause, but I am unconvinced he'll make it through the gauntlet of right wingers, who are now absurdly convinced that the election was a validation of the idea that they weren't ideological enough.
Edwards/Obama? I'd commit a felony to see that happen!
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