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Why Barack Obama Should Run for President
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Candidate
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| Contributor | COSDem |
| Last Edited | COSDem Oct 22, 2006 06:02pm |
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| Category | Blog Entry |
| News Date | Sunday, October 22, 2006 11:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Though you probably know me as someone who's not a fan of Barack Obama, I do want the Senator to run for President in 2008. I think it would be good for him, good for the party, and good for the country. I'm big on process, on public debate, on public deliberation, and we need his voice in the fray. We need to hear from him, what's his vision? What are his principles? What kind of America does he support? How will he stand up to pressure when he is debating other Democrats? In other words, what, exactly is his voice? Is he the Barack Obama who criticizes our political system for its smallness, its lack of vision, as he puts it in his stump speech? Or is he the Barack Obama who praises George Bush, and goes along and gets along in the Senate, ruffling no feathers and making sure that the smallness of our system is what he embraces? Or is the Barack Obama that thinks that this country is not ready for the sacrifices he knows are coming, and so will revel in his symbolic emptiness?
I think there are two keys to understanding Barack. The first is to look at his formative political experience, the seering loss to machine politician Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary in 2000. Before Brand Obama emerged, the Senator got destroyed by bucking the system. Losing to a machine, as Cory Booker also did, does strange things to idealistic-appearing hyperambitious politicians. It makes them a lot more wary of picking fights and making enemies, and it makes them a lot more inclined to cultivate chits and work within a system they know isn't working.
And Obama knows America is broken. He knows it, he gets it, and that's why he is so aggressively dismissive of progressives. He feels that he is one of us, and so we should understand why he has to have contempt for us. |
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