On Obama
OK, not literally. But I thought I’d write a few words about Obama after the election, and then I ended up so busy that it sort of never happened. I could wait until the inauguration to write about this, in that most apropos of moments, but now is just as well, while the President-elect goes about the business of choosing cabinet members and managing “the transition”, as the robotic American news anchors keep regurgitating from the teleprompter.
It’s funny, I am extremely politically active, in that I engage in political debate and discourse with my friends almost constantly, although I would never work on someone’s campaign. I’m sitting in half a world away from my home country, but thanks to VoIP, talking to my friends back home costs very little, and we were burning through minutes and hours talking about McCain’s head-scratching tactics, about the Barbie doll vice presidential candidate, about the brawl between Hillary and Barack in the primary, etc. and so on.
Though those close friends who sat through my endless wind-baggery know full well my seemingly contradictory political beliefs (which are really only contradictory when viewed through the idiotic prism of American political theater), more casual acquaintances or business associates really don’t have a feel for my politics, because I usually play those cards close to my vest, so to speak. Therefore, it may surprise some that I am not a progressive.
Surprise, I suppose, only because I’ve spent my career often working on projects with crunchy, granola intentions, working with non-profits and documentary filmmakers and socially-conscious businesses, espousing beliefs like conservation, social justice, and so on. All things I believe in, to be sure, but few of which I think should actually be legislated by government. In the American political diaspora, I would most accurately be labeled a “libertarian”, which loosely means that I am fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Let government give people the freedom to do pretty much anything, and then leave them alone.
So where am I going with this? I could easily write multiple blog postings about any of a myriad of specific issues. The goal here, though, really is to give you an idea of who I supported in the election. If you guessed “Ron Paul”, you would be right. He is one of maybe three candidates in the primary (along with Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich) who would have ended the Iraq (and Afghanistan) war immediately (or as quickly as possible without risking the troops’ lives), and I believe that the Iraq war should end simply because I think it’s wrong to murder people. I don’t care about any arguments about oil, or WMDs, or Saddam, or “nation building, or “spreading democracy”; the Iraq war is wrong because it’s an illegal occupation of a country and because the USA is fucking with people’s lives, on both sides.
Paul also gets that the problem with the financial system isn’t capitalism, or socialism, or anything else: it’s simply corruption. He understands that the Federal Reserve is the institution really at fault for this economic meltdown, and he understands that the Fed and the corporations have a lot more to do with the dictation of American policy than any political group. The Democrats and Republicans largely exist to serve those masters, and they do it well.
But, OK, none of those anti-war, or otherwise “awake” candidates made it through the primaries (I suspect because everyone on both sides knows what we’re really in Iraq for…the oil…and no one’s ready to give that up just yet), and we were left with John McCain and Barack Obama. This means I was left without a candidate to vote for, since both of those candidates are in favor of continued U.S. murder of people in the Middle East, but between them, one was clearly a better candidate.
Barack was the better candidate not because he’s a “Democrat” (that word has no meaning anyway), and he wasn’t a better candidate because of his ideas about the economy (actually I believe some of his protectionist ideas to help U.S. unions are potentially dangerous in the long-term). No, he was the better candidate because he’s respectful in the ways he addresses people, because he was the smartest guy in the race, and because he’s able to digest a lot of contradictory information and come up with a reasoned response, which is what I believe the number one job of the President to be.
But there’s a bigger reason, and this I say as an expat: PR. He is a symbol. Nothing any candidate for President could have said or done could have done more to raise the standing of the USA than the act of him merely existing, and being elected. All he has to do is show up, and already the rest of the world’s opinion of the USA is improved.
And that it should. The demographics of the USA are changing, and Obama represents the future. A biracial guy with family ties to two other continents, he is an archetype of the future American. I am 37…probably just about exactly halfway through my life, which gives me 8-10 more elections before I die, and I wasn’t sure that I’d ever see a black (or half-black) president. And here we are…in 2009 (assassination notwithstanding), I will. This amazes me, and it makes me…dare I say it…a bit hopeful, at least for the future of race relations.
Will Barack bring about the “change” he says he will? The answer is: obviously not. He’s busy now hiring a bunch of cronies from the corrupt and morally bankrupt Clinton administration that went about its years in power doing lovely things like starving Iraqi babies, and playing a major role in architecting a financial raping of the former Soviet Union, for which Putin is still clearly angry and plotting revenge. He’s even apparently going to hire war-hawk Hillary Clinton, a woman who supports the continued apartheid against the Palestinians and has openly talked about “obliterating” Iran, to be the top diplomat of the United States, an appointment that’s so dripping with irony, the mess seeps almost all the way to China (where I write this). Barack talks a good game about attacking lobbyists, and corporate interests, and so on, but we’ll see just how far he gets with that. I’ll judge him only on what he does, not what he says. And I hope that I am as wrong as wrong can be with my skepticism.
So, real change? No. But to argue that is to miss the point. Obama is change. And though I don’t mean to demean the man, because he is clearly someone of substance and intelligence, that fact is more important than anything else…important to U.S. minority groups’ ideas of themselves and what they can attain, important to how the rest of the world sees the country, important to white Americans coming to grips with their still powerful, but obviously diminishing clout. Those realizations will ultimately help the whole American machine function better, and that’s a good thing.
If you’re wondering, I didn’t vote – for Obama, or anyone. Castigate me if you want, but this time around I could have voted in two different states, neither of which were going to vote for anyone but Obama. Elections might seem to be all about issues, but in reality they are just about math. And this time around, my vote was mathematically worthless, so I abstained.