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THE CHOICE FOR AMERICA IS CLEAR / IT'S OBAMA !
Barack Obama walks to greet local residents at a house where his great-great-great grandfather lived in Kempton, Indiana, May 3, 2008. Photo: Dunand/AFP/GETTY
At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama : The New Yorker / Editorial
As an author and online columnist ~ I appreciate the courage it takes to write not only a daily column, dedicated to the truth as I see it, but a book which entails much more time, editing and introspection.
Barack Obama has written two books but it is his first book,"Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" (1995), that offers a rare insight into the man who most likely will be our next president. A president who finally reflects what is the best in ourselves and America as a whole.
Everything in Obama's life has prepared him for this moment in time and he will rise to the occasion in much the same manner as another young Congressman from Illinois ~ Abraham Lincoln.
The New Yorker wrote an editorial, to be published on October 13th, that picks up this important thread and declares that America now needs a leader, in this time of economic chaos, that reflects its deep moral values and spiritual roots and that man is Barack Obama; " The election of Obama - a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America - would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks."
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/10/14.html
THE CHOICE
The New Yorker | Editorial http://www.truthout.org/100308N
Monday, October 13th, 2008
Excerpt:
" Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama's books are different: he wrote them. "The Audacity of Hope" (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre's usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches.
But it is Obama's first book, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama's first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. "Dreams from My Father" is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama's own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests - personal, spiritual, racial, political - that bear on his preparation for great responsibility. |
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama - a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America - would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama."
The choice for America is clear / It's Obama !
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