I’ve been saying to Mary for most of this year, “I love Obama and hope we can elect him president. But if we do, the peace community will be in for a rude surprise, he is not nearly as progressive as he appears.” I’m not sure why I thought that, but my gut tells me it is true. That’s part of what may make him appealing and electable in a general election. The right paints him as a wild lefty, but he isn’t.
Well, the disillusionment starts today. Obama released a statement on FISA that certainly disappoints me. I want Obama to lead the charge against this hijacking of our rights and awful precedent of retrospective immunity for breaking the law. Instead we get this:
It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.
He does say that he will “work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.” But it is clear he will support the bill even if that attempt to remove immunity fails.
Boo, hiss. But my eyes were open when I started supporting Obama, and I will continue to enthusiastically support him. Even though my heart hurts a little bit right now.
I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work on a few campaigns, and I’ve loved them. The tone of this video is so intimate and so authentic that it is easy to recognize as “real,” whatever real is. In Saint Paul we saw the public kickoff of a new campaign, but this is the real kickoff. This team and the work they are doing is in my prayers. Their candidate, our candidate, is extraordinarily gifted, but we win because he is not alone. We win because we have a team like this. We win only if we each play our part on this team. And we have no choice but to win.
One further thought… At one point Obama says that he was not sure he could be the best candidate, but he was sure they could build the best organization. That’s the heart of my reason for supporting this campaign. I believe this is not just about building a good campaign, but it is about building good government. After the demoralizing success the Bush administration has had demolishing the federal government, I think we have to have someone like Obama who is focussed on rebuilding it. There is potential to make something great out of the Bush housecleaning.
Last week I asked: “If this social network he is building can attract cash to a campaign, just imagine how effectively it can attract talent to an administration. You don’t imagine they will just throw that network away if elected, do you?” This week Marc Ambinder answers in The Atlantic:
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
Today Obama is like a brand, his campaign like a $250 million company, and the voters like customers; the persuasion flows one way. If he becomes president, then power, authority, and legitimacy will flow in both directions; voters who are now keen to support the idea of Obama may push against his initiatives in office, sometimes unpredictably.
Not quite. I think, actually, Obama has run a campaign that is remarkably two-way, especially for politics. Not only has he kept everyone in the drivers seat rhetorically (”this campaign” or “our campaign” he usually says instead of “my campaign”), but he has also accepted the impromptu assistance of his supporters by using their campaign offices and their videos. Granted, the goal is simply to get him elected, but I think he has begun to demonstrate that he is ready to engage the nation like no other recent president. Once governing the goal becomes much more complex and our continued engagement and commitment critical to success.
It is always hard to say “I don’t know.” Some of my most difficult supervisory challenges have come from supervising staff who cannot seem to say these words. I’ve got to imagine it is even harder for a presidential candidate to admit not knowing something, but I find it very comforting. Witness:
It looks like I’m not alone in finding this a decent thing to do. Candidates are real people. They can’t know everything. But they can know their limitations and ask for help. I’m glad Obama seems capable of this very important act.
Of course, he’ll still catch hell for saying “I don’t know.” I just hope the American public knows how lucky it is to hear those words from someone in power.
A brief, but very nice interview with Brad Bird at Gigaom last month. Among many bits of wisdom: “there are some [things] that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.”
The apartments are connected to the Internet at 100 megabits a second, a speed that contrasts sharply with the normal high-speed Internet service offered by telephone and cable companies, which is usually less than 6 megabits a second. […]
“We are pleased to be the first nonprofit organization to bring public housing online,” Mr. Kahle said. “We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology.”
Scott Horton writes a wonderful column/blog for Harpers called No Comment. Unfortunately the RSS feed for this blog is terrible (only headlines, no content), so I often miss what he has to say. But today he had an entry called “The Speech” and I was lucky to catch it:
[…] as the speech unfolded, I realized that it was nothing like what I had expected. I stopped my work and started to focus on it. The voice was level, unagitated but still intensely personal. The speaker tackled issues that by common wisdom could never help his political cause; that could only damage him. He spoke the unspoken truths about racial divide in America, and he spoke with a strong sense of wrongs, yet with no anger, and a clear vision of justice. The vision he presented was more than simply compelling in a political sense. It rang of dangerous truth.
[…]
This speech puts Obama on a level above his critics, and it is something that will speak over time and that should be heard over the vacuous chatter of the political punditry. It is something sublime.
If you still have not listened to the speech, do so now. Really.
Barack Obama today asked us to care for one another in a political speech that illuminated race in this country as none other in decades. Please, whoever you support for President, if you live in the US give this speech 40 minutes of your time.
Obama accepts the contradictions of life, he owns them. He does not back away from his family (including Rev. Wright) just because they have an ugly aspect. Yet he call on himself and all of us to do better. I find myself asking: Can I accept this call?
I have no idea if we can really elect this man to the Presidency. But I am so thankful we have elevated him enough to make his voice heard even now. And if we can elect him, I hope it means that we can learn to elect, with open eyes, other imperfect souls trying to make the world a better place without forcing them to masquerade as infallible. For this is leadership: not taking us where we say we want to go, but showing us where we really need to go.
These past few weeks I’ve begun to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish. Sullivan writes for The Atlantic, and it says much for this publication that it values the mix of his many contradictions. (Side note, I couldn’t be prouder of James Bennet, someone I played with as a kid, who has grown up to become an extraordinary journalist and the editor of The Atlantic.)
I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man’s explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger. And I would think much, much less of Obama if he had never opened himself to this subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments. That he has done all this - while still attempting to reform and explain it - is a remarkable achievement. Maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. But the promise of Obama is that his campaign appears poised to show that America is ready for this - and the immense healing it would bring.
And so we are suspended between the old politics and the new, between a Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready and may never be ready for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defense - and an Obama who offers all of us a chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.
He may fail; and the Clintons may be proven right. But he may also succeed - and what a mighty success that would be. These things are never easy; and we were lulled perhaps into an illusion that they could be. So now the real struggle starts. And it will not end with an Obama presidency; it ends with a shift from below that makes an Obama presidency possible.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disagreed with my pastors, sometimes enough to walk out on them, almost never enough to walk out on the community around them. Recently I have walked out, finally bent past breaking by a deceitful man shepherding our parish. Rev. Wright said some things worth challenging and throwing back at him, but from what I’ve read and seen he said many more things that would nourish my soul and keep me coming back if I lived in his neighborhood. I love the thought of a President who can hold such tensions in his spirit and still lead with hope and vision.
An election season like this one will get you talking. You may talk with family, friends, even strangers about what you think about your candidate or cause. Mary points to a diary on DailyKos that takes a stab at helping us all be more persuasive in our rhetoric. It is a tough, fairly academic read, but I highly recommend it. It reminds us that if we really want to persuade someone we should consider who they are and where they are coming from.
