This morning, I watched the speech that Barack Obama gave yesterday. I was having a bit of a hard time putting my reaction into words. It wasn’t fervent, or foaming-at-the-mouth-omgee-he’s-awesome. I couldn’t quite nail how I felt about this, and I think it was from lack of recent example. nailed it, though, with his look at Obama’s speech:

I watched Barack Obama’s speech today and was literally dumbfounded.  If you have the forty or so minutes it takes to watch it in full I suggest finding it online.  It struck me as something I might have watched on an episode of The West Wing; it was too perfect, his response to the events unfolding around his campaign more what a fictitious politician might do than anything I have seen a real politician do since I learned to tell the difference between Ronald Reagan and the pupet from the “Land of Confusion” video.

In the words of Jon Stuart from the Daily Show “at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday a major political figure spoke to the American people about race as though they were adults.”

This election has been a weird one to watch.  I was terrified by half of the old white guys running for the Republican nomination, but I liked McCain.  I can still say that I liked McCain, but now he’s starting to worry me.  I suppose that’s a good thing.  He worries me because I disagree with him about what America’s role in the middle east should be.  I worry that his “fix” for the economy will have more to do with his choice of advisors and cabinet positions than it will his actual functioning knowledge of the economy.  The encouraging thing about this is that I feel like McCain is genuinely putting himself out there.  Should he be the next president I won’t be blindsided by how he conducts himself, and I doubt he would be the kind of president to blindly ignore anyone who didn’t believe his every spoken word was the Word.  Hell, he corrected himself today when Joe Lieberman informed him Iran was training insurgents, not al queda as McCain had said just a moment before.  Seriously.

But as I was finishing my first cup of coffee this morning and I wanted another one but didn’t want to tear my eyes away from the tv, a new kind of thing was blossoming in my brain.  I was honestly starting to hope that I was watching the next President of the United States.  His ability to succinctly, accurately and brilliantly lay out what he sees as the defining problems of race relations in the country just floored me.  When he took that from the inception of the nation (where our founding fathers left the issue of slavery for the next generation) through issues today (where legitimate fears of white people discussing black neighborhoods are “taboo”) he pointed out that there was a long way yet to go, but the first step was admitting that we had a problem and having a leader identify what it was and start us working toward a solution.  

Contrasting Obama’s boldness with the news from the White House allowed me to put to words my views on the differences between the candidates.  George Bush was congratulating the fed chair on “working over the weekend to solve the economic crisis.”  Okay, but shouldn’t they have been working before this?  I mean, the news has been pointing out the economic plunge since before Thanksgiving, and your guys just now started to grind the overtime?  On top of that, he’s confident the American economy will recover, seeing as they bailed out an enormous investment bank to the tune of $30 billion in taxpayer’s money (and saved the seven-figure-earning CEO’s bacon), but the administration isn’t into helping people with housing, health care, or jobs.  I know I’m comforted by that.

The difference I see is that Obama understands the American condition.  He can articulate it in a way that we all end up on the same page.  He noted that his white grandmother (he’s bi-racial for those who didn’t know; I consider him the Tiger Woods of politics) loved him very much, but was afraid of black men and sometimes said things about racial or ethnic groups that appalled him.  Well, I had a grandma like that too, and she isn’t the only person in my family I’ve witnessed saying things I wouldn’t want to have to comment on while running for office.  He pointed out that some of the things said by people we decry as intolerant are based on viable and understandable grievance.  Let’s work on that.  Obama gets what people are going through and wants to put the mechanism of government to helping people solve their own problems.  I can get down with that.  

So Hillary says she’s “ready to lead on day one” while doing everything humanly possible to win.  I can understand it, but there comes a time when it is no longer okay.  The film “Little Giants” has a moment when a dad from the monolithic invincible team is telling his kid to injure a player from the plucky underdogs, and the coach balks.  “Don’t you want to win?” asks the dad.  “Not that way” is the uncommonly human reply.  I just don’t think the Clintons have that kind of humanity in them anymore (if they ever did in the first place).

John McCain has his personal view rooted in making America safe by basically acting like we’re the new Rome.  The problems I see are A) we aren’t dealing with Barbarians, B) the Romans were way, WAY more accepting of other cultures than America has been in the lifetime of anyone I’ve ever met, and C) it didn’t work out so well for the first Rome.

Our current “leader” is content to tell everyone that things are fine and try and solidify his “legacy”.  There is an honest to god burgeoning economic catastrophy and the guy is content to fiddle and ignore it.  Or blame the democrats.  He has also forgotten that great leaders urge people to transcend their fear and instead has relied on nothing but fear and fear-mongering to do whatever the hell he likes to us and the world for seven years.  

And then there is Obama.  The greatest criticism people have heaped upon him is that he is a phenominal public speaker, so that means he must be incapable of anything else.  Well, today I saw the integrity to stand by a friend he disagreed with, the courage to confront an issue that is a part of life everyday in this country but we’re all too afraid to do or say anything about it directly, and in this moment of [manufactured and over-analised by cable tv] “crisis” in his campaign he took that as an opportunity to show us what kind of President he would be.

The best kind.