Dreams from Barack

I've been thinking about the upcoming election. Thinking about it when I wake up in the morning, thinking about it when I fall asleep. Even dreaming about it (which shouldn't be surprising - when you watch upwards of 3 to 4 hours of MSNBC every day, the content is bound to end up swimming around in your unconscious). Obviously, I am not alone in caring about what will happen on November 4th, who will win. The suspense, as they say, is unbearable.

But beyond the polling stats, the back-and-forth noise on talk shows, the spin and the fury of politics and the media, there is a real decision to be made in this country. For this country, and for the world. It's easy to lose sight of why we are here, many million dollars' worth of campaign advertising later, glued to the television, gleeful to see our candidate in the lead. The whole thing starts to have a certain horse racing quality about it (quite literally, in fact, for those folks who are betting money on the election results).

But what does it all mean? What does our faith in this one man say about him, about us, and the kind of world we want? Does it say that we are just eager followers, swept up in the excitement of a charismatic personality? Or are we just dreamers, like the folks in the 60s, thinking that all we need is love (or Barack)?

Hmm. I don't know. Is it really so naive to think that one person can change the world? Doesn't history show us all sorts of examples of exactly that? Can't we all agree that George W Bush has changed the world decidedly for the worse, in the eight years he has been in office? Isn't it possible that another person, another kind of person, with another kind of thinking, could help reverse some of the negative, damaging things that have happened over the course of this presidency? Couldn't we have four years - or eight years - of positive, enlightened changes designed to benefit humanity and the planet, not just corporations and certain individuals?

I've believed in Barack Obama since the beginning, when I first heard him speak. It wasn't just what he said, but his whole demeanor and how he said things, how he responded to questions in interviews. Here is a person who listens and actually responds to what is being asked, in a thoughtful way, who doesn't seem to need to prove himself with every single statement he makes, or attack his questioners for challenging him. Here is someone who looks before he leaps, who seems both confident and humble about his personal power, a quality whose importance can't be overstressed after so many foreign policy disasters by our leaders. Think of Nixon, trying to show his "manliness" by staying in the war in Vietnam, or Bush himself, playing cowboy with American (and other) lives. I think if Sarah Palin were President (perish the thought!) she would follow exactly in those same bellicose, paranoid footsteps (she actually might be worse). It's not about gender. It's about having a chip on your shoulder and having to prove how "tough" you are, overcompensating for basic lacks in intelligence and capability by constantly attacking other people. It's about being a bully. And that is something that Barack Obama decidedly is not, thank goodness.

Maybe because I've known so many crazy, angry bullies in my life (and seen the havoc they wreak on a small scale), I am more invested than the average person in having a leader who is psychologically at peace with himself, and not out to "get somebody" because of some past trauma which has never been corrected in his mind (which I deeply sense is the case with McCain). My gut feeling about Obama is that he is really, really grounded and sane, in the best possible sense of the word. The good news is that this gut feeling seems to be shared by people very different from myself (thus bolstering my own claim for sanity). Read what David Brooks wrote recently about Obama (and note that Brooks is a conservative, not liberal, columnist in the New York Times):

"...it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem."

Wow! Thanks, David, I didn't know you cared. Or look at the recent New Yorker article by Nicholas Lemann about the differences between the candidates' foreign policy attitudes:

“ "There is a degree of self-reflection, self-awareness, and psychological wholeness he [Obama] arrived at after going through a period of working through his identity as the son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas," Richard Danzig, a Secretary of the Navy during the Clinton Administration, who was the last member of the Obama foreign-policy high command to join up, in the spring of 2007, said. “Having worked for two Presidents and with many Presidential candidates during the last thirty years, I have not seen one as psychologically well balanced, and as good about not injecting his ego into a problem.” "

Again, wow. Doesn't that sound like the kind of person we'd like to see sitting in the most powerful seat on the planet? Isn't it about time we had some sanity and reflection in the White House? Wouldn't that be refreshing?

Finally, going back to the kind of country we want, the kind of concrete changes one man could make, consider this from Sarah Vowell's op-ed piece in the New York Times this past August (yes, I've been saving these articles for the moment when I want to use them to make a point!):

"When Barack Obama talks about an America as it should be, I’m guessing the best of all possible countries he imagines would look awfully similar to the ideal America just about every registered Democrat would dream up. Picture this: a wind-powered public school classroom of 19 multiracial 8-year-olds reading above grade level and answering the questions of their engaging, inspirational teacher before going home to a cancer-free (or in remission) parent or parents who have to work only eight hours a day in a country at war solely with the people who make war on us, where maybe Exxon Mobil can settle for, oh, $8 billion in quarterly profits instead of $11 billion, and the federal government’s point man for Biblical natural disasters is someone who knows more about emergency management than how to put on a horse show. Is that really too much to ask? Can we do that?"

Both the dreamer and the realist in me cry out, Why not?