Saturday, December 8, 2007

More Obama Propoganda

Andrew Sullivan states it more articulately than I can here. To underscore the article a bit, Sullivan is a conservative who regularly pseudo-worships Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher--as any conservative English immigrant to the US should, I suppose.

I really like the article, but the parts that get me most are:

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum 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."

And, in speaking of Obama vs. Hillarah:

"The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama."

It's not that Hillarah might be "fine" as a president, it's because--at best--she will be "fine" as president. Predictable, practical, triangulating, safe, and, in the end, potentially dangerous for us by being all the latter. Politics as a board game is not what is needed *if* you agree that we are in uniquely challenged times, as I believe we are.

I don't think Obama is anything close to a panacea and, if I read him right, neither does he. But he represents an entirely new chapter for the US in policy, party, foreign relations, race relations, and--perhaps most importantly--what the American Dream and what America really is today. 50 years ago the US was arguing about whether or not a man like Obama should be allowed to stay at a hotel, eat in a restaurant, walk down the sidewalk, or go to school with white people. Now he may become president of this same nation despite not having the support of much of Black Congressional and Civil Rights leaders. What a country. What a country, indeed.