So Barack Obama decided to help George W. Bush dismantle FISA. OK. Many points lost. Painful tooth grinding. Moral high ground over his erstwhile opponent with her Machiavellianism and pandering, well, maybe somewhat eroded. Yeah. So thinking about this makes me wince—like, literally.
BUT:
I've grown to be excited about Obama the man himself, but I started out supporting him in Jun. 2007 because of my conviction that he was the candidate who was best equipped to win in Nov. 2008 [speaking of Machiavellianism]. To be unflatteringly candid, I would be supporting holy heart-snatcher Mola Ram of the colorful pate if I thought he was our best bet for the White House. Now, the things that make Obama so delightfully electable are, mostly, also things that make him great, the man himself—but of course he is in the end a politician, and the fact remains, or rather resurfaces, actually surprising me and coming almost as a kind of relief, that what makes him such an important figure is not that he's a saint, God's gift to politics, but rather that he is an incredible politician.
And especially after almost eight years of Mr. Bush, I am ready to swallow my pride and vote for just about anyone who will hand more control to the Democrats. Maybe it's the lesser of two evils; maybe anyone who would want to be president (as Douglas Adams suggests in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe [best of the "trilogy"?]) is pretty much bad news for the people and unfit to govern; maybe, maybe it's even true that the Obama phenomenon is made up more of substance-free image than people like me would like to believe. But—BUT—antipartisan hands-across-America rhetoric be damned, the Republican leadership of this country is dangerous and indeed already disastrous, and it has got to go. And whether or not Barack Obama is the dream candidate he's sometimes seemed to be—even if it turns out he's no better, in the end, idealismwise, than any other politician (which I actually don't believe, by the way, but even if)—I remain convinced that no one today is better suited or better prepared to sweep Bush-conservative Republican–Nationalism into the...what was it called?...oh, right: the dust-bin of history.
Go get 'em, tiger!
0 comments:
Post a Comment