Why Obama matters
Photo by jurvetson
Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.
Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.
Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.
If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.
I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.
So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.
Agree wholeheartedly. Living in NH, I started supporting him nearly a year ago, and got some up-close time before the spotlights were turned on. In addition to being smart, thoughtful, willing to think out loud (on his feet), he’s also personally charismatic. Which could be good or bad, but in this case I think it’s good. Watching him handshake a few dozen people after a speech, my friend Kathryn noticed that every person, man or woman, blushed after the handshake. She said she could feel a strong energy flow from him to her. He looked her in the eye, and said, “thank you for your support.” And he meant it. The guy’s the real deal; we don’t get opportunities like this every day/year/decade.
Now, if only the Clintons could come to grips with their loss, and help everyone move on to the general election, we’d be in good shape. I think they can’t yet fathom that’s it’s happened, or how (that they’ve already lost).
Thanks Chris for your take on Obama’s masterful speech. I am with Michael J — I am so hoping that the Clintons are able to see past their overwhelming ambition now and throw their considerable energy and resources into doing what’s best for the common good.
At the end of his hourlong videotaped meeting with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama noted that the frustration with politics-as-usual in the US is what newspapers and the public express between campaigns as a cause of moribund democracy. And yet, he said, they fall right back into the old patterns of coverage during a campaign, which deepens the cynicism, and the pattern repeats again.
This is another reason his recent speech was visionary: it was directed at these media as a challenge to raise the level of the discourse. I think (with Jon Stewart) that Americans can handle being spoken with as adults.
I wrote to a friend the other day that if nothing else, Obama represents something. Wheter or not he delievers is almost irrelevent to me…the world has survived some pretty bad Presidents. I doubt that Obama could do more damage than Bush has even if he tried.
First and foremost, especially for many Canadians I know, Obama, should he become President, would change the way that many people in other countries see The United States. And likewise, I think Obama has raised the stakes because in advocating for this new way of working, he is causing a choice to be made, and in many ways lots of people I have talked to outside the United States see that choice clearly. America can choose Obama’s ideas or not. And the “or not” is just more of the same.
When Mandela was President of South Africa he did some cool stuff and also alot deteriorated on his watch. But the President is not God, and cannot do everything. And yet, wasn’t the world a more hopeful place when Nelson Mandela was the democratic choice of the people of South Africa?
i’m grateful for this story and for our looking at why obama is stirring the hearts and minds of people all over – young and old.
another small piece to add to this story of the power of obama and his potential role in shifting the role of american politics globally comes from this posting by tom atlee about the self-organizing within the los angeles campaign office. tom has a caveat and says that we don’t know if this is true for all the offices or if there is something about LA…and that’s good sage advice. but i sense that if it is happening in LA it is happening in other places. certain forms of leadership inspires this kind of action and collective leadership. this gives me even greater hope that perhaps once in office, obama would change the very nature of the presidency to be one where it is about tapping into the well-spring of collective wisdom and intelligence that would be available to him. and lest i dare hope for something as bold as a reminder of how earlier governance models worked on this turtle island, that the women elders would be looked to as well.
http://www.lists.opn.org/pipermail/org.opn.lists.poclad/2008-February/004510.html
i feel alot of hope. something is moving through the people of this nation…an energy i personally have never felt before. people are in conversation here…are dialoguing…and obama also invites that. who knows, maybe obama will find himself in conversation with the newly relected president of ecuador who is rethinking constitutions and participatory democracy. we are more global citizens than nation state citizens.
[…] April 11, 2008 Just a short little post to ask you to support Barrack Obama. I haven’t officially announced my support for Barrack (until now), but if you check out bartblog a bit you can read between the posts–though I haven’t heard yet from the Obama camp on any press conference around my announcement… There are events here in South Dakota beginning to come together. As Madville Times points out, SD seems to be worth Barrack’s time (you can still catch the grand opening of Barrack’s Sioux Falls campaign office on Saturday). Chris Corrigan wrote a great piece a few weeks ago on Why Obama Matters. My deepest hope is that “Hope” isn’t just a campaign mantra–please be the change. Vote Obama. Posted by joebart Filed in politics Tags: obama […]