Tuesday, January 29, 2008

A President Like My Father by Caroline Kennedy

We need a change in the leadership of this country; just as we did in 1960. We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Barack Obama. OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

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The Kennedy/Obama Mystique by David Brooks



Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party, now that a throng of Kennedys has endorsed Barack Obama. Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling, and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. All the suppressed suspicions of Clintonian narcissism came back to the fore. Are these people really serving the larger cause of the Democratic Party, or are they using the party as a vehicle for themselves? And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened.

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Making a Turn


Anyone following my political entreaties here will know that I supported Hillary Clinton. Hillary and Bill, always a safe bet in my book. Well...I am making a turn. I finally picked up Obama's The Audacity of Hope. The more I read, the more I heard my own voice. He did not just speak to me, he spoke for me, more eloquently and with more knowledge than I could have ever imparted. As I write this, I try to extrapolate, in my mind, the most powerful, most influential section of the book. I can't. It would be like separating my mind from my soul. Actually, that's it. In reading this powerful collection of thoughts and experiences of Obama, he emerged as a man that encapsulates both in his approach to politics and life. Granted Hillary trumps him big time in experience and ability to withstand a Republican onslaught, but for anyone that believes in God we know that leading with soul and conviction and applying those to your actions will win out. Why? Because then you are living as, I believe, God intended.

When I use the phrase "win out" here, I am alluding not just to the Presidential primaries or even the general election. I have no predictions or certainties about that. We are all much too fickle and the winds of circumstances are much too lubricious for anyone to predict the outcome of this election. But Obama will win. He will win because he is who he is and actually strives to remain so. I believe this to be true because no one can lose, in the long run of life, if he remains true to himself and that self is good, true, and cares for his fellow man. Obama will win in life, whether or not he wins the Presidency.

"To thine own self be true, for it must follow as dost the night the day, that canst not then be false to any man." ...William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"