[Dialogue] Run, Barack, Run

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

He is wonderful but, will America vote for a Black Man?  What do y'all  
think?  Cynthia
 
 
Run,  Barack, Run  
By _DAVID BROOKS_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , NY TIMES 
Barack Obama should run for  president. 
He should run first for the good  of his party. It would demoralize the 
Democrats to go through a long primary  season with the most exciting figure in the 
party looming off in the distance  like some unapproachable dream. The next 
Democratic nominee should either be  Barack Obama or should have the stature 
that would come from defeating Barack  Obama. 
Second, he should run because of  his age. Obama’s inexperience is his most 
obvious shortcoming. Over the next  four years, the world could face a 
genocidal civil war in Iraq, a wave of  nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism 
and a demagogues’ revolt against  globalization. Do we really want a 
forty-something in the White  House? 
And yet in his new book, “The  Audacity of Hope,” Obama makes a strong 
counterargument. He notes that it’s time  to move beyond the political style of the 
baby boom generation. This is a style,  he said in an interview late Tuesday, 
that is highly moralistic and personal,  dividing people between who is good 
and who is bad. 
Obama himself has a mentality  formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With 
his multiethnic family and his  globe-spanning childhood, there is a little 
piece of everything in Obama. He is  perpetually engaged in an internal 
discussion between different pieces of his  hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas 
with the South Side of Chicago — and he  takes that conversation outward into 
the world.  
“Politics, like science, depends  on our ability to persuade each other of 
common aims based on a common reality,”  he writes in his book. He distrusts 
righteous anger and zeal. He does not  demonize his opponents and tells audiences 
that he does not think George Bush is  a bad man. 
He has a compulsive tendency to  see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of 
Time counted 50 instances of extremely  judicious on-the-one-hand-on 
the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems  like the guy who spends his first 15 
minutes at a restaurant debating the  relative merits of fish versus meat. 
And yet this style is surely the  antidote to the politics of the past 
several years. It is surely true that a  president who brings a deliberative style 
to the White House will multiply his  knowledge, not divide it. 
During our talk, I reminded Obama  that at some level politics is about 
power, not conversation. He pointed out  that he’d risen from nothing to national 
prominence in a few years so he knew  something about acquiring power, but he 
kept returning to his mode, which is  conversation, deliberation and 
reconciliation. 
The third reason Obama should run  for president is his worldview. At least 
in the way he conceptualizes the world,  he is not an orthodox liberal. In the 
book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian  tradition that calls not for big 
government, but for limited yet energetic  government to enhance social mobility. The 
contemporary guru he cites most is  Warren Buffett. 
He has interesting things to say  about the way culture and economics 
intertwine to create urban poverty. He,  conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks 
the U.S. may have no choice but to  improvise and slog it out in Iraq.  
The chief problem in his book is  that after launching off on some 
interesting description of a problem, he will  settle back, when it comes time to make a 
policy suggestion, into a familiar and  small-bore Democratic proposal. I’d 
give him an A for conception but a B-minus  for policy creativity. 
Obama, who is nothing if not  honest about himself, is aware of the problem, 
and has various explanations for  it. And what matters at this point is not 
his platform, but the play of his  mind. He is one of those progressives, like 
Gordon Brown in Britain, who is  thinking about the challenges of globalization 
outside the normal  clichés. 
Coming from my own perspective, I  should note that I disagree with many of 
Obama’s notions and could well end up  agreeing more with one of his opponents. 
But anyone who’s observed him closely  can see that Obama is a new kind of 
politician. As Klein once observed, he’s  that rarest of creatures: a megahyped 
phenomenon that lives up to the  hype. 
It may not be personally  convenient for him, but the times will never again 
so completely require the  gifts that he possesses. Whether you’re liberal or 
conservative, you should hope  Barack Obama runs for president.  


Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
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