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Obama Has "It"
Posted 5-8-2008
Voting for President of the United States is
certainly a subjective exercise. After seeing who has taken
office after the last two presidential elections that fact is
painfully obvious. So in explaining why I am for Barack Obama I
will not list policy positions of his that I agree with
(although I agree with most). My support is based not only on
his sound policy judgments, but also the feeling I have about
what an Obama presidency could mean for our nation, our culture
and the world.
This will be the ninth presidential election in
which I get to vote. The first person I voted for in 1976, Jimmy
Carter, was and is a man of great virtue. He was likely too
thoughtful and complex for his times and was unseated by a
second-rate actor who began spreading the message so bought into
by today's "ditto-head" culture that government is the problem.
I believe government is the problem only when people who
philosophically believe it is bad control it.
By 1992, a truly charismatic but relatively
unknown southern governor emerged as the first president of his
generation. Bill Clinton not only led our nation through a
period of unprecedented economic prosperity, he also oversaw the
only federal budgets that had surpluses that allowed us to begin
to pay down the national debt.
Along came 2000, and perhaps as a nation we
believed the good times would last no matter who was president.
Remember how the media and Ralph Nader would say, "There really
isn’t much difference between Bush and Gore?" Does anyone think
that is the case now? I cannot comment on presidents before my
time, but this guy now is truly an embarrassment. For him to be
the face of the USA to the rest of the world speaks poorly of us
all. But thankfully his time is up.
So this year we have a choice between John
McCain, the Republican who a year ago was written off as having
little chance to be the nominee, and Democrats Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama. While their policies do not differ
dramatically -- except for Hillary's recent, and shameless,
pandering on the gas tax issue -- they both represent huge leaps
forward from the "white guys" club of U.S. presidential history.
Yet there is something dramatically different about the images
they project.
Simply put, Obama has got "it". "It" is what
JFK, RFK and MLK had. "It" is an ability to inspire. "It" is an
ability to give people hope of a better nation, of a better
society, and on a more personal level, of a better life. The
obligation of our government is not to make the comfortable more
so; it is to give those at the bottom a chance to bring
themselves up. And argue whatever case you want, these last
eight years have divided us greatly. Whether it is in economic
terms, the war in Iraq or on matters of social justice.
The history of our nation shows that change
rarely happens willingly for all. Less than a hundred years
after our founding, we were jerked forward by the Civil War.
Those troubled times took a leader who had "it", Abraham
Lincoln, to give conscience to preserving the Union and
abolishing slavery. While legal slavery ended, discrimination
did not and it took another hundred years and an effort led by
Dr. King to imagine a better society and work toward it.
Now along comes Barack Obama. Not perfect by any
means, but all great leaders with "it" have flaws. He represents
a new generation born of our country's melting pot. A man who
gives hope and represents another huge step forward in breaking
down those unspoken barriers that still cause uneasiness and
mistrust in our society. We are more than 230 years old as a
nation, yet for all our technological progress human frailties
and prejudices still hold us back from becoming the true model
for domestic and international peace and social justice.
The resistance is and will continue to be great
toward an Obama presidency. It is a consequence of an
uncertainty about change and the unknown. While my fellow
Westmoreland Countians and many in Pennsylvania did not support
Senator Obama, I am inspired by the fact that more and more
Americans do. Whether we elect Barack Obama as president or not
will be as much a referendum of the USA as a progressive society
as it will be on his own capabilities. But for me it is easy;
I'm going for the guy who has "it".
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