Category: Obama

“I played basketball and I’m skinny but the people I play with will tell you I don’t mind going down low and throwing elbows.”

From ABC News last week. I just hope it’s true.

Now this is a bit too good to be true:

[digg-reddit-me]I have been anticipating this piece for a while now – Andrew Sullivan’s cover piece from The Atlantic on Barack Obama, his argument for Obama’s candidacy. His argument is not the same as mine, although we share a number of common themes and particular positions.

Some choice excerpts from this very good piece which I recommend everyone read:

On Hillary Clinton and Political Fear

Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness…He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.

On the Essential Struggle of Our Time

This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots, the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam, the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place.

You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps

Quoting Obama on His Religious Conversion

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

On the Necessity of an Obama Presidency

In dangerous times, popular majorities often seek the conservative option, broadly understood.

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.

[digg-reddit-me]On ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, Senator Obama discusses the hubris a person needs to believe that he or she can be president:

I think if you don’t have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you can be president then you probably shouldn’t be president. . .There’s a slight madness to thinking you should be the leader of the free world.

Watching this reminds me of half of the reason I support Barack Obama: the less important half which involves his personal appeal and charisma. I can’t imagine another candidate in the present or past speaking like this, providing a genuine insight into the campaign process and himself on purpose. Most of the time when the “real” candidates are revealed, it involves them making mistakes – either in front of a camera, or mistakes so serious the matter ends up in court. The definition of a gaffe in Washington is when a politician is accidentally honest.

Obama talks in a way no other politician does. Not because he is an inherently better person but because he is of a different generation. The lessons of the past 20 years of cultural warfare don’t seem to apply to Obama; he transcends them because he lived through them. Somewhere in this is the core of Obama’s appeal.

The video is after the jump.

According to Noam Scheiber of TNR, the Obama campaign is pretty confident about their current position. Three weeks ago, the national finance board of the campaign met and was divided into two camps:

In one camp were the people relatively new to the world of high-powered fundraising, who seemed rattled by Obama’s standing in the national polls and the media narrative about Obama stalling out. In the other camp were veterans of previous campaigns, many of them former Kerry fundraisers, who felt comfortable–even encouraged–by Obama’s Iowa numbers and shared an overall sense that the campaign was on track.

In the end, Scheiber says, the newbies were comforted by Barack’s appearance and talk with them.

The University of Iowa’s newest poll shows John Edwards and Bill Richardson slipping in the polls and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the top two places in a dead heat.

CNN has an article by a political analyst describing what Obama needs to do in order to gain ground on Clinton.  He needs to “get tough” and “show some fight.”  Or as Obama has described it, to “throw a few elbows”.  Obama’s political team certainly is ready to fight and fight back; and Obama himself has said he knows he needs to, and that he’s willing to.  I do not quite buy the premise that many in the media seem to have that Obama has not wanted to “get tough”. I still maintain my position that this is part of the Obama campaign’s strategy to wait, and then begin, late in October or early November to make his move.  This seems to be precisely what he is doing, hitting Clinton harder on Iraq and Iran, calling her out by name, and by suggestion.  The press will need a story to write about in the next two months until the election.  The “coronation” story will get boring, and with a quick succession of primaries and most voters still undecided, momentum could be everything.  Only a ruthless political machine and a lot of money could stop the momentum an Obama win in Iowa would generate.  And of course, this is precisely what Hillary brings to the table.  If Obama wins Iowa, and currently, he is not leading, the question will come down to this: can Obama’s campaign fight dirty enough to take out Hillary’s machine and sink her candidacy.

A harsher critique of Clinton, highlighting her current hawkishness and her Bush-like views on executive privilege, continuing to harp on her divisiveness; a Gore endorsement; one or two more Clinton mistakes; a few strong sound bites that get play; and a bit of luck.  With these on his side, Obama takes Iowa and sets up the real contest: where Hillary and Obama slug it out and all sorts of stories about Obama are leaked to Drudge, The New York Post and Fox News.  How Obama would respond to this hypothetical onslaught – that undoubtedly would become real in the event he wins Iowa or New Hampshire – will determine if he becomes president.  I believe this will be the real test.  If Obama’s “politics of hope” can survive and not be tarnished by “throwing a few elbows”, and if he is able to thwart Clinton in this, he will have proven he has the stuff to win the general election.

He will have proven that he is a candidate the Democrats can accept, as the piece in CNN said:

Democrats are tired of being bullied. They want a candidate who will punch bullies in the nose.