Barack Obama and the Importance of Change

A year after his high moment in 2004, Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” fell into utter disgrace. His privatization scheme fell flat; the Iraq war proved to be unwinnable; Hurricane Katrina; Harriet Miers; and Bush´s poll numbers dropped lower than any president in history.

It turned out, Rove was appallingly inept at turning his visions into reality. And this illustrates a simple piece of political wisdom: getting into office and governing once you're there, are two different skills indeed. Dividing the country proved effective campaign strategy, but terrible governance principle. Karl Rove´s fall reminds us that a great politician is not always – and not often – a great leader.

- -

Hillary Clinton, by all consensus, is a great politician. She and her husband control the machinery of the Democratic party, and insiders from the outset believed her nomination to be inevitable. If the measure of a president were, as Clinton wishes us to believe, a matter of experience as a politician, then she deserves to win. And Barack Obama, by that standard, could have waited to run for presidency.

However, the case for Obama rests on the assumption that he could not wait to run. That his skills are not as a politician but as a leader and that this specific moment in American history, when the world and our role within it is shifting – “the urgency of now” as he likes to say – uniquely calls for a world leader, rather than world politician.

- -

For fifty years, the politics of the Baby Boom generation has defined our political discourse. From the creation of a capitalist, democratic world-order after World War II, to the advances of Civil liberties and the triumph of West in the Cold War, the post-WWII generation´s particular brand of optimism – that the evil can be and must be combated – has wielded force with great success.

But its fallout has fragmented our country. Our fervor and vitriol much less reflect the substance of our differences than the rigid moral framework that we define ourselves within. Bill Clinton was a moderate, but to many he was a pot smoker and draft dodger and a sexual deviant. He epitomized one side of cultural worldview that – incredibly – was formulated during the Vietnam war, and forty years later still defines the terms of our debate.

Hillary´s candidacy is situated firmly within this context. In foreign policy, she holds onto Cold War mantra that ideology is king and at a time when we need to integrate the emerging world she refuses to even talk to it. And domestically, few public figures derive so much of their legislative and political strength from the their base, and engender so much animosity from everyone else. Her world view harks back to the political divisiveness of the past. Even her last name exhorts us to believe in the strength of the status quo.

- -

It is true that Barack Obama´s personal atributes are impressive. Yes, he is probably the most intellectual candidate in the race. In a time when our executive branch has expand enormously in unitary power, and wielded that power to spy on its own citizens and torture detainees without habus corpus, I feel reassured by the prospect of man who has taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And as an orator, he is unmatched. Of course also, he is a black man who came from nothing and therefore, there is reason to believe he knows how to fight and knows how to survive.

But Clinton is smart and politically agile too.

Obama matters, instead, because he is the candidate best equipped to reach beyond the generation-old cultural divisions that have pitted us against the world and fragmented us at home. And it is now when we need this most.

This fact is at the center of Obama´s biography. His race is at once two stories of hope: hope that the black American has a place in our government and the hope that the immigrant who holds onto the dream that America is for everybody can succeed too. And this message is at the center for the narrative of his candidacy. While all other candidates have chosen fear – slandering, fear of immigrants, anger at the powers in Washington, fear of what might be – Barack Obama has chosen to run on hope. Clinton represents legacy; Obama, breaking barriers. One candidate asks us to look backwards, at the achievements of the past; the other asks us to look forwards, at the potential for the future.

- -

All my views, as they must, begin with the personal. A caterpillar looks at the world differently than a giraffe and so must I look at the world from my place within it. Above all, I am boy who is standing at the gates of his future, and seeing its challenges and its opportunities for the very first. Perhaps it is not a coincidence then that I believe in the message of hope. I am understanding Barack Obama´s relationship with the world in the same way that I understand my own.

But this is not meant to discredit: an adolescent believes in change, because he must. The demands of youth are once again the demands of America: we must recognize and reconsider our role within the world. At the heart of Obama´s importance is not only his message of hope, but that America, like an adolescent, is a juncture when it must hear it.

- -

We live in a critical time. A time when developing states struggle for cultural resilience against the forward march of modernity. It is in this context that China rises to power, and must choose – in what may be the great drama of the 21st century – whether to play within a rules-based capitalist and democratic system lead by the United States, or to subvert it. It is here that globalization promises to increase world interconnectedness and overturn cultural difference. And it is on this issue that America itself struggles with the role of faith against the dual forces of technology and science.

So what does he offer? To start, Obama´s foreign policy expresses willingness to forge a new role for America – his readiness to talk with outlier states is a move towards integrating gap states into a Western systems; his vow to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and the Al Queada cells in Pakistan, against the the wishes of the illegitimate and terrorist-harboring Musharaff, is in decisive contrast with Clinton cold-war politics of political allies; he opposed the Iraq war from the begining, with prescient accuracy.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, one of the most important foreign policy thinkers alive, maintains that “There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs...And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world."

But it goes beyond these issues. Obama´s experience is derived from the ground upwards, and for this, he has the potential to be the face of a new America. Barack Hussein Obama grew up in the largest Muslim nation in the world, so he can talk to a leader in the Middle East; He knows struggle, because he spent his life organizing impoverished communities and fighting for civil liberties; When he talks about global economic injustice, he thinks of his grandfather living in an African town without water.

And at home, his own struggle to find faith was “a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey.” He believes in belief, but he is not paralyzed by dogma. “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts” he says. And from this, you can glimpse at his world view.

By the accident of age, and by the strength of his character, he is not a member of the Baby Boomer generation. He does not lash out at enemies or fixate on hostiles or believe in a world where values are mutually exclusive and one must swing singularly “from naïve idealism to bitter realism.” At his core, he believes in a world system not defined by the ideological struggle between good and evil, but by that very struggle within oneself.

- -

Bill Clinton said voting for Barack Obama is a roll of the dice and it is. But voting for Hillary Clinton is a gamble too. It is the gamble that at this moment in which we can decide the course of American history, we ought to look towards the same solutions – the same political divisions between good and evil – for very different problems. A vote for Clinton is the gamble that we should look to the past; Obama is the gamble that must look to future.

Labels:



4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope anyone out there who thinks socialism and communism are the answer to mankind's problems, would only take just a few minutes to gaze at the all of the wrecked civilizations of history to see that it will only lead to totalitarian and bureaucratic control of every aspect of our lives - It's unthinkable and extremely ironic that the first African American President is leading us all back into slavery to the government!

3:31 PM  
Anonymous cj2020 said...

"It turned out, Rove was appallingly inept at turning his visions into reality. And this illustrates a simple piece of political wisdom: getting into office and governing once you're there, are two different skills indeed. Dividing the country proved effective campaign strategy, but terrible governance principle. Karl Rove´s fall reminds us that a great politician is not always – and not often – a great leader."

I agree with the "...two different skills..." statement and now, one year after he took office, that is what we are seeing with Obama. He is not a good decision maker and gets a pass when continuing to blame past administration at almost every turn. He and his minions then make up stats like "saved" jobs.

1:35 PM  
Anonymous cj2020 said...

"But this is not meant to discredit: an adolescent believes in change, because he must. The demands of youth are once again the demands of America: we must recognize and reconsider our role within the world. At the heart of Obama´s importance is not only his message of hope, but that America, like an adolescent, is a juncture when it must hear it."

Spoken like an adolescent. Read the history books. You will see that the socialists of history were generally big failures and killed millions and millions of their own citizens.

1:37 PM  
Anonymous cj2020 said...

"The Reagan administration's stalling at the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons has thus already caused severe tension and could ultimately bring about a dangerous rift between the United States and Western Europe. By being intransigent, Reagan is playing directly into the Russians' hands."

Dear Mr. Liberal adolescent the author of the above is President Barack Obama. He was 180 wrong. What a visionary.

2:05 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home