Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Obama Wama Ding Dong

Yesterday’s big political news seemed to be centered around Barack Obama, who might, or might not, declare to run for president in 2008.  Many of the articles I quickly perused, which noted this, presented this supposed news as, well, news.  I find this as rather disingenuous since every article I’ve perused on Obama over the past year or so has presented Obama as sort of a reincarnation of Camelot themed graciousness in African American packaging.

Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, notes Obama’s maybe, maybe not, 2008 presidential campaign trial balloon in a piece titled Why Not Obama?

The opening paragraphs of Cohen’s piece initially seem to imply that Cohen is skeptical of Obama’s worthiness for the high office of president.

Ancient Rome had a term for a certain political process: cursus honorum, the honors race. It was, I am told by Anthony Everitt in his new biography, “Augustus,” the process by which politicians moved up the ladder. Along the way, they were evaluated until, finally, some made it to the top. Nowadays, the system is different. All you have to do is appear on “Oprah.”

I am referring, obviously and insidiously, to Barack Obama, who announced Sunday that he might run for president. This followed, of course, the aforementioned appearance on “Oprah” which I, diligent in pursuit of truth, watched. This is how I learned that Obama loves his wife and she loves him and they both love their children. Cursus honorum this is not.

But Cohen’s skepticism regarding Obama only lasts for the first three paragraphs of his piece and then oh so subtlely shifts gears.

And yet I cheer his announcement that he might announce he is going to announce—something like that. I say this not just because I have been following his career out of the corner of my eye—my, my, ain’t he a natural!—but because I’ve actually been reading his speeches. The one he gave on the role of religion in politics was as smart a speech as I’ve ever read. It’s the sort of thing John F. Kennedy could have given, only his would have been written by someone else, probably Ted Sorensen.

In the remainder of Cohen’s piece, he exhults Obama’s heritage (American mother, African father - ain’t that American?) and the message his “complexion” sends, and his stance on Iraq, both now and prior to the actions which commenced over there, and then Cohen ends his piece with a full on acceptance of Obama as a contendor.

But if he could sharpen the focus of the other candidates about Iraq, if he could somehow disengage the United States from Iraq—if he could, in other words, stop wasting American (and other) lives—then his candidacy would hardly be an insult to the system, as some insist, but a gift.

I, for one, accept.

Let the Obama Wama Ding Dong in 2008 begin.

Posted by John Venlet on 10/24 at 06:49 AM
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