I freely admit that in and of themselves these qualities are not enough reason to vote for somebody, but taken together I believe they are, and this is written free-form so they’re in no particular order or priority:
Obama is extremely photogenic, charismatic, and eloquent. This sounds like an “added bonus” to a candidate rather than something important to base a candidacy on, and certainly it’s not reason enough in and of itself to vote for someone, but because 1- we live in an age of 24-7 media and 2-we’ve had experience with inolequence, lack of charisma, etc., and 3- our next president has to bring people together here at home and abroad with our allies, this is not a bonus but a near necessity.
Obama is extremely intelligent and hard-working as evidenced by the fact he went form a working class family to Harvard (true, his father had gone there, but his record far surpassed his dad’s and he certainly received no financial support from the man). His intellect and work ethic are evidenced by being selected for editor for one of the most prestigious law journals in the nation.
As a Harvard Law School graduate and as a professor of Constitutional Law for 12 years at an extremely prestigious law school (U Chicago) Obama is an expert on the Constitution. This is quite important in light of certain affairs of recent years.
Obama is extremely analytical. For example, his infamous-to-some stance on the partial birth abortion bill, for instance, was not because he’s gung-ho for infanticide but because he saw the law was innately flawed and would be overturned upon its first appeal, and he convinced but Republican and Democratic fellow legislators about that.
Obama is new to D.C., but that also means that he does not have a history of antagonizing the Republicans and doesn’t belong to a particular cause or faction. It is absolutely mandatory that our next president be able to cross party lines for alliances and support, and I believe that he has a much better chance of doing this than do other possible presidents.
Obama is a walking exercise in American semiotics: born of heartland stock (Kansan grandparents) but in the newest and most remote state, the son of a teenaged mother and of an immigrant, growing up in a single parent household for years, and with his “Greatest Generation” grandparents, and being exposed to multiculturalism at a very young age, having lived in an island “paradise” (not really, but by perception) and a second-world nation and in the inner cities of L.A. and Chicago and attended two Ivy League institutions and worked as a community organizer and alongside multimillionaires and career politicians, he has one of the widest spectrums of exposure and experience imaginable- far more than many people acquire in 80 year lives. As a half-black American who has lived in a white middle-class family and as a half-white American who has lived among impoverished black and Latino families, he knows first hand the lessons of inclusion, exclusion, prejudice, belonging, being in the minority and in the majority and neither, and the true nature of “e pluribus unum” the nation is based on and I believe, based largely upon his extremely perceptive speech on race relations, he will take these lessons with him.
His experiences make him culturally and socioeconomically something like the people in Ethiopia believed to be perhaps closest in appearance to “the first people”: just as you can look at some Ethiopian"]Ethiopians and see “ah, there’s the Asian features”- “that’s Caucasian”- “that’s Bantu”, etc., no matter who you are, you can find yourself in him somewhere. This will unite far more than others are capable of doing.
He does not have a background of privilege. In a land that’s googling plans for guillotines and, rightly or wrongly, feels on the receiving end of “let them eat cake” rhetoric, I think this is important.
His refusal to denounce Jeremiah Wright initially was something I found extremely- uniquely- admirable for a man running for office; it could easily have cost him the nomination, let alone the election. His decision to denounce Wright came only when Wright essentially spit upon the olive branch proffered, showing that Obama is also a realist.
Obama is from a working class background. His mother was on food-stamps for a time and spent her final days fretting about medical bills. While JFK, FDR and several other trust-fund babies were presidents who cared about the interests of the poor, Obama truly does know about them, and very recently. This is, imo, needed.
This is going to sound strange as hell: the fact his father was Muslim, however nominally, and that he has lived in a Muslim country are things I can see being a major plus in international negotiations. He seems to know the difference in Sunni and Shia and understands the mindset a whole lot better than some I could name.
He is intellectually curious. Mandatory for an office like the presidency, as demonstrated by those who have occupied it who were not.
A major contributor to the failures of many societies, at least as much so as such civilization killers as natural disaster/poverty/famine/Germans/class struggle, is the feeling of a society’s citizens that they are unimportant/do not matter/are in fact not even a part of the greater society. (This is one I think the electoral college plays a major role in, incidentally, but I’ll leave that for another thread.) Obama’s push for community involvement is, I believe, an attempt to amend and correct this. He sees the problem, which is more than others seem to.
He has the backing of Warren Buffett and others who put the good of the many above their own deep pockets, and I believe (as with his choice for VP) he will surround himself with great advisors and choose people for posts based on their qualifications rather than on their politics.
And of course he shares my socially liberal views while at the same time seeming to be a realist. He sees the need to end the war in Iraq along with the problems of setting a definite timeline and the need to withdraw responsibly.
He’s the first presidential candidate in years to have written books that he seems to have actually written and his wife doesn’t look like a post-embalming Eva Peron, which is not to say other people’s do, just an observation.
I’ll leave it there for now.
