About Barack Obama
Here's my question:
Have any of the people, including and especially Obama's supporters, who are shocked by his vote on the FISA bill or his stance on Iraq, actually READ HIS BOOK?
If not, maybe you should stop shouting, unplug the computer, and read The Audacity of Hope. It's a moving read, and he addresses the nuanced thought processes behind so many decisions that get splashed in the headlines as the ultimate indicators of a person's motives and character.
He writes about the need to sometimes vote for a bad bill or against a good one, in language very similar to his recent discussion of his FISA vote. He reaches into the history books to help readers understand the compromises that are inherent to lawmaking. Like you, and like Obama, I dislike the provisions of the bill that provide immunity to corporations who have violated the law. You can argue til you're blue in the face about whether or not it his vote was a good political decision. The point is whether or not as a legislator, in the circumstances of that particular vote, he made the right decision.
The positions he espouses on the Iraq debacle are no different now than when he wrote the book in 2006. And in my opinion, they are the most reasonable position a person can hold amidst this madness. I attended the Chicago rally in 2002, rode a bus to Washington to protest the invasion, pleaded with Rahm Emmanuel while he campaigned at my Lincoln Square train station. I was invigorated by the hundreds of thousands who marched alongside me. But like many, I grew disappointed with the anti-war movement's inability to come up with a better slogan than "Bring the Troops Home Now" once the war was underway. It is an overly simplistic slogan that ignores the actual situation, and we deserve a more sophisticated approach from a president who truly intends to end the war.
I am a progressive through and through, and if I'd voted for the candidate who agreed with me on every issue, I'd have voted for Dennis Kucinich. But good governance is not about who agress with me on every issue. What Obama represents, what have given him such strength, is his insistence on discussing the nuances of his positions. Of not boiling his votes and his words down to whatever our spoon-fed culture can digest. Before you start whining that your candidate has abandoned his values, ask yourself if you'd taken the time to understand those values in the first place.
As progressives, what we need most is a leader who challenges us, as a nation, to think. It is our collective inability to think that's gotten us in this mess. It's only through a lack of critical thinking that the working and middle classes vote time and again against their own interests. We need a leader who can't be summed up in sound bites. We need this far more than we need an ideologue. This is what we have in Barack Obama. Get behind that, and the rest will follow.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
