Obama Speaks With Our Voice

The Obama phenomenon is not about Barack. This is not about him. This about us: about our need to turn the page on eight years of a vicious downward spiral. And on a significantly longer time of allowing a single generation, the Baby Boomers, to control the country’s politics. The Boomers have always thought everything was about them. This is not.

In Barack Obama, a new generation has found a vehicle. A vehicle to channel, carry, articulate our message, our philosophy, our world view. We are tired of the battles of the late 60s and early 70s being re-waged in every political dust-up. We know skin color is utterly meaningless (except perhaps to the sunscreen and cosmetics industries). We are tired of the silly (and false) belief that being liberal means being anti-troop. We are tired of the bluster, the sabre rattling, the bullying, the bigotry, the scurrilous questions about whether someone is patriotic enough as a means to distract attention from incompetence and corruption. We are tired of the demand that Americans see the world through Republican-Rose colored glasses, and that any other viewpoint is somehow foreign, and thus bad.

The world is a real place, and pretending it is anything other than what it is does noone any good (except, perhaps, the Oil Barons, like Bush, like Cheney). It demands an open-eyed vision, and a willingness to bring all the varied tools we have at our disposal to bear on solving its problems (or at least lessening them).

We believe economics, psychology, sociology, regional planning, architecture, science, all of these and the many other disciplines to which Americans have dedicated their careers, must be harnessed to address the issues we face.

And there are enough of us of voting age that we can finally make our vision known. Barack brings our message to the country and the world in thoughtful and eloquent tones. So far, Barack has proven to be worthy of the charge we have given him.

But it is not about him, it is about the message, the vision, the method of approaching issues. That is why those who try to poke holes in Barack’s persona will not succeed. We don’t care if he is flawed, who of us is not. We care that he stay true to the message, the vision and the method. And there has never been anything to indicate he would not.

Please note, I use Senator Obama’s first name to indicate the affinity I have for his vision, his message and his method. He is familiar to me, reminds me very much of several of my closest friends. I like that type of person. So do you.