Dreaming of Obama

America is so looking for something different -- for change -- and they voted recently in Iowa for change. Barack Hussein Obama answered the call of a demoralized, distressed and cynical America. America has taken a look at the candidates before them, and saw just more of the same -- embarrassment -- except for Obama. In Obama there lies hope -- America sees hope -- even through his missteps, chalked up to naivety and inexperience. The guy actually appears to be genuine. If there are flaws, America will not see them -- that is the state of the American public. So abused by their democracy, Americans are pinning dreams on Obama. It's an infatuation; a state of hero worship.

So what can go wrong with this love affair? Obama could totally screw it up by making a huge political mistake. Clinton could still whip his ass in the primaries and take the pole in the Democrats race to the White House, although she would have to thread carefully, as an all out attack on Obama could backlash on her. This is politics, and a surprise that no one predicted could still happen. I've read in the press evocations of Bobby Kennedy when hopes for Obama are discussed. I suppose that's the other thing that could go wrong -- Obama could be shot. And that would totally suck for America and the rest of the world.

Updated: January 6, 2008.

The Star's columnist David Olive has an excellent commentary on the Iowa results, and why Americans are chosing Obama over Clinton.

When the history of this campaign is written, it will be noted that Obama's message hewed more closely to Bill Clinton's winning 1992 formulation of unity and hope than Hillary Clinton's did.

Despite her gender, Hillary Clinton blends into the pack of her fifty- and sixty-something white rivals on both sides – all experienced pols who, in varying degree, are held responsible for a country that Americans consistently tell pollsters is headed in the wrong direction.

Obama came back with a variation on Bill Clinton's 1992 assertion that "Americans are sick and tired of being sick and tired." Obama then evoked one of the least-cited but most important lines uttered by Martin Luther King Jr. on the Washington Mall in 1963: "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now."

Obama is the son of a Kenyan economist and a Kansas mother with slave-owning ancestors. He chose to be a black American rather than a multiracial one. But Obama is conspicuously impatient with adversarial politics, racial and otherwise. He frames poverty, chronic unemployment, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy not as issues of racial victimhood, but as a betrayal of founding American ideals of fairness that has been no less punishing to Appalachian whites than inner-city blacks. Obama also bluntly chastises his audiences for substituting video games for parenting.