thinking out loud: the first in a series of very public ruminations
by Mark Hunter Mulvey
Published: June 19, 2008
“What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer–as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.”
This was spoken by Barack Obama in 1995 in the midst of running for Illinois Senate, in what would be his first election to public office.
I like these words. They begin wistfully: “What if…” This is a phrase introducing a possible future, a hypothetical reality that the listener is asked to accept for the sake of the forthcoming argument. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this beginning (”I have a dream…”) but it’s a powerful device, and reels me in to find out what the speaker has in mind.
Barack then goes on to attempt a redefinition of what a politician is. Which gives me pause. What is a politician? I’m not altogether sure now that I think of it. Google has just directed me to Wikipedia: “an individual who is involved in influencing public decision making through the influence of politics or a person who influences the way a society is governed through an understanding of political power and group dynamics.” This snippet is hardly helpful, and using the word “politics” to explain a “politician” is a circuitous recipe for linguistic frustration. I’m not prepared to go down this rabbit hole of a search for nested definitions. But I think I get the gist.
Barack dreamed of a life as a politician who taught and organized communities, rather than one who merely influenced society based on policy. I like this idea. Another aspect of this quote that I happen to prefer: Barack’s dream extends beyond his own aspirations. His dream-reality is one in which the public makes decisions and the politician simply presents the choices. Great. I like this as well.
“We could come together…”; “bring church and community leaders together…”; “create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community…” It’s clear, based on these words, that Barack’s vision for his own future included the general public as well. This, in fact, is not an original thought but rather a founding American principle that seems to have been forgotten: of the people, by the people, and for the people. Abraham Lincoln said that. I like Lincoln.
I do like Obama’s message here. The whole source article in the Chicago Reader offers a piercing glimpse back in time for what I’m sure will be a mercurial romp of compare-and-contrast as Obama’s candidacy rumbles closer to the Autumnal Contest.
Here is the implied question under all of my ramblings: is this dream of Barack’s still alive and well, and does he seriously intend to see it through as president?
No one can know. It could have just been poetic rhetoric used to capture votes and make friends. It could also have been a dream of 1995 Barack and forgotten by 2008 Barack. People change, and so do dreams. But somehow this dream rings true. I like this dream. I like it because it’s about the people, and asks more of us than it does of our government. It implies that the government is our tool, and not the other way around. Of course, many voters prefer simply to be taken care of and have decisions made for them, and for those people a life of quiet complacency in a world of dynamic global change is the ticket to personal peace. I usually don’t want to know those people, though, as they are not interesting at all nor interested in very much of anything. Lousy conversationalists. This is a generalization I can defend if need be.
So, Barack is selling dreams in a time of sandy conflict and petroleum woes, it is true. Many cite a nebulous “lack of experience” as another setback to his campaign, despite the fact that our current president had 4 years of quality time in the executive branch when he was reelected to a dismal second term. He did give me $600 though. That was neat.
In the end, experience is overrated. A job can be learned quickly but a work ethic cannot. Part of the ethics of politics should involve the principles spoken in 1995 by a candidate for Illinois State Senate. I hope those principles are still alive and well.
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(6)
June 20th, 2008 at 3:55 am
If my $2,300 stimulus check hits my mailbox in July like it’s suppose too. Bush will go down in history as the greatest president to ever sit in the oval office. Barack, will have nothing on him.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Expect half of what it *could* be… that’s what happened to me.
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 am
I agree, experience could be overrated. It is very important, but history has shown that intelligence and courage can very often get the edge on experience.
However, I don’t know if I want Obama to be bringing my church officials together. I certainly don’t like his pastor. “God **** America.” For some reason, this phrase never particularly motivated me into believing in a better world, a better America, or a better social community, as you seem to be saying that Obama is calling for in the above speech. I know his pastor’s views are not necessarily Obama’s views, but he sure hasn’t rejected his ideas or denounced him as an extremist. He says his views are a little different. It’s sad, because twenty years ago if someone’s pastor said that, unless the politician denounced all connection with those outrageous, evil, beliefs very fast, all of America would have turned against such an un-Patriotic candidate.
And that adjective for Bush’s second term — “dismal.” I don’t agree with everything Bush has done but I think he’s done very well, on the whole. Many people hated Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagen, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too (mostly for being a supposed “warmonger”), and I think I could make a very good argument for any of them. If America, and in particular, the democrats, allow Bush to finish the job in Iraq with the help of the next president, I believe Bush will go down in history as the man who began the global war on terror and who called for an end to dealings with evil, volatile, dictators.
God Bless America!
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:20 am
Forgive me, Obama DID finally denounce his pastor. My apologies for my mistake in vilifying him and making him seem un-Patriotic. I am sincerely sorry to Obama and his supporters.
June 22nd, 2008 at 9:08 am
How has Bush’s time in office been anything short of abysmal? This “job in Iraq” you speak of was undertaken following the collapse of the Twin Towers, under the pretense that America would hunt down the people who were responsible. Instead, our military nabbed a foxhole-cowering dictator who, though admittedly awful in his own right, has yet to be connected to the terrorist attacks on America. All our government could conjure up was the notion of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a very frightening term for ‘weapons,’ none of which were found to even exist or to have been used against America during the September 11th attacks. Our “War on Terror” became a “War on Iraq,” and people like you are still gobbling up Bush’s misdirection so as not to appear unpatriotic. Well brother, I don’t share that fear.
Bush’s term was more than just this godawful debacle in the Middle East. I believe Bush will also be remembered for a few more items:
- His regrettable handling of Hurricane Katrina’s wake, a domestic disaster over which Iraq seemingly took precedence
- Suspending habeas corpus following September 11th
- Leaving behind a doldrum-waddling economy and record high oil prices for the American people
- The Patriot Act, which is about the least patriotic act imaginable
- His approval rating which, at the time of this writing, is hovering at around 31 percent. Clearly I am not the only person in America who disagrees with you, Winston.
This is not a republican/democrat argument here. I believe a democrat is equally as capable of being as egregiously selfish as Bush has been. My focus is not on denouncing Bush, but rather advocating a new heir to the White House. There needs to be a shift toward the positive, and defending Bush’s actions is not going to bring the country any closer to greatness.
I don’t fear evil, volatile dictators. I fear complacent, frightened citizens. Those are the people who are at the mercy of such dictators, and those are the people who say things like, “God Bless America” at the end of an opinionated political piece.
Your move, Winston.
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I think I’ve made it rather clear that I do not agree with everything Bush has done. In fact, I can’t think of one president that I believe has done everything right. I agree, for the most part, with his foreign policy in Iraq. I’m glad I have a president that, though mistaken, was frightened enough (Yes, frightened) to investigate a country that might have been harnessing WMD. I’m sure as heck glad to know that they don’t have them, just as happy as I would have been to have found out that they did have them. Either way, I know I’m safe. Can you imagine if we still didn’t know for sure that there wasn’t an evil, crazed dictator in control of those kinds of weapons?
If you aren’t in fear of evil, volatile dictators, then why are you so eager to pull out of Iraq and allow another psychos to take charge of a weak, insecure, infant democracy, abuse more innocent people, and eventually, harm us here in America? We can’t have peace with these men who kill millions of their own people. It’s like trusting someone who steals from the 7-11 to work at a bank and be an honest worker. My only assumption for someone wanting to pull out of Iraq is that they are too scared of the death toll (I am not trying to make light of this at all; it’s a sad sacrifice) or the effects on our economy. If national and international security is not worth blood and money, I don’t know what is.
It’s too bad you consider me a “complacent, frightened citizen.” I am very interested in the affairs of this country but yes, I am frightened. I am frightened about the way this country is going and for the lives of good, innocent people everywhere. I pray I am not too weak to act, now and in the future.
If “God Bless America” offends anyone, I do not apologize. I do apologize if it sounded “high and mighty.” It was meant only to be patriotic.
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
“God Bless America” offended me as a writer. It was a platitude that had nothing to do with the argument at hand, seemingly tossed in as generic conversational punctuation.
Regardless, it appears you are more than happy to give credit for a result despite the original intention. You would like me to thank George W. for ordering out troops to poke around Iraq to find nothing, even though the purpose was to reveal weapons–weapons that, discovered or not, had nothing to do with the original reason the American people were given to justify our place in Iraq.
I once took an algebra test in high school and reached a problem that I could not answer. In the space left for my response I drew an elephant. It took me about 20 minutes, and it was a very detailed and fearsome elephant. I wish you were my teacher back then, Winston, because you would have considered my elephant a correct answer to the problem. In fact, even if I had provided no answer at all it would still have been considered a worthwhile attempt, because then you would have gained the knowledge that I had no idea how to perform algebraic functions at all. I could have done no wrong in your eyes. It would have been a beautiful reality indeed.
But in actual reality, a person is only deemed successful in a given task if he accomplishes what he sets out to do in the first place. The correct answer in Iraq would have been the diffusion of al Qaeda, the terrorist contingent that attacked the United States in 2001 with our own airplanes. Instead, our nation was given the elephant of Saddam Hussein and fantastical weapons that never existed in the first place. It was dishonest misdirection by our Commander in Chief, at best.
George W. Bush has failed. He is a failure by several orders of magnitude higher than he is a success. And if it gives you warm-and-fuzzies simply to know that an Iraqi dictator is dead and that there are no nuclear warheads beneath the dunes of Basrah, then I am beginning to get a sense of who is actually responsible for the terrible state of American affairs these days. Fear has paralyzed the voting public and caused them to give absolute discretion to a man who said he would fix everything with a war.
We, as a nation, are smarter than that. We can deal with terrorists more effectively and intelligently than we have been. I want our next president to succeed in proving this fact, and to turn the definition of patriotism from “unconditional approval” to “passionate concern.”
In either case, being patriotic is not merely the result of asking a deity to bless your country.
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:28 pm
If you want to say that we were drug into an Iraq war and a more global war on terrorism even though we set out to do something different, though not unrelated, I agree with you. We set out to stop the terrorism that hit us on 9/11 and became concerned with other threats to our national security. At least, that’s what I believe. I believe any country that does not respect its own people with rights such as dissent and feeds hate propaganda to their people is a threat to our country. If we have found another group or country that our administration sees fit to make more secure before we ARE attacked by them, while on another mission, I am not going to be disapproving.
If you think the president should only fulfill missions to stop people who have already harmed us and not others who might harm us in the future, we’re going to have to see a lot more 9/11s before this country grips the reality of the dangers of the fear societies in the Middle East. I mean, I would liken us going after al Qaeda and THEN into Iraq, to going after a murderer and then finding another murderer and a potential murderer to US living next door. I’m sure not going to let him stay there until he proves my fear and harms me as he has harmed others.
It doesn’t really matter what I say; you seem determined to attack me as a person and not discuss politics in a friendly manner, genuinely trying to get me to see your point of view. I also offer my sincerest apologies if I’m wrong, but you also seem to hate everything Bush does just because Bush did it. I don’t think you have to agree or disagree with everything a president does just because you agree with some of his ideas.
And funnily enough, it DOES give me comfort to know that an Iraqi dictator is dead, that we are attempting to build a democracy in the Middle East, and that we know for certain there are not WMDs to fear. I would be sorely shocked and disappointed if you truly did not receive comfort from this. You seem much better than that.
Anyway, I wouldn’t have given you a higher score on your Algebra test, but I did enjoy the witty comparison. Nicely done.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 am
As a last note, and I don’t want to argue religious beliefs or anything of the sort, the spirit of contention never persuaded anyone, but..
Again, I only meant “God Bless America” as a patriotic and sincere request. For me, appealing to God to bless the welfare of our nation was the most sacred, patriotic expression of my care for this wonderful, free, nation. I agree saying that is not enough; we must become involved and do our part. But perhaps you’re right that I threw it in too generically, too carelessly. I will drop the matter now.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Oh come now Winston, this is all just verbal sparring. I wouldn’t be going through all this trouble if I didn’t think it was a worthwhile endeavor, or if I thought you weren’t a worthwhile combatant.
But it does me no good to embrace your vision of daisy-chaining one murderer hunt after another. Such a vision should not be America’s modus operandi. It’s an embarrassingly futile endeavor. Nor should America be recreating entire Middle Eastern governments in the name of national security. There are many countries out there living admirably whose governments don’t feel the need to cross borders daily on search-and-rescue missions and democracy makeover sessions. I think we both need to spend more time wondering why America feels the need to be so proactively defensive.
My true fear is apathy. As long as Americans can question, assess, and think critically about what our government is continually doing on our behalf, then patriotism and the overall health of the nation will be in good shape. Discussions, like the kind you and I are having, are part of that regimen. No need to take my comments personally, but you **** well better not take them lightly!
All the best, sir…
-Mark
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:31 pm
You’re right; there are some countries living pretty peacefully without being “proactively defensive.” But I think that that’s probably in part that America has been taking the lead on that. In fact, I think that is a solid fact. We are always verbally attacked for being the “world police.”
But I think we may just have to agree to disagree…I just feel that the best defense is a good offense. I don’t believe in “imposing governments”, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe that’s what we’re doing, based on evidence from other totalitarians-turned-democratic societies. I believe we’re just giving them the opportunity to have the government they want. The “passion of the few to rule the many” is certainly not what these people want; its the vast minority wishing to exercise unrighteous, oppressive rule on the majority.
I guess my ideas can be very hard to grasp. It makes one take a pill that’s hard for anyone to swallow - that we can’t ever be completely at peace. We can’t sit back and expect everyone to be nice back. At least, not until every country in the world is a democracy, where the peace-loving majority (like us in the US) don’t vote for war. I mean, look how hard it is for us to stay in a war with Iraq! We can’t stomach it. And that’s not bad, in a way. I believe we have to stomach the atrocities of war and sacrifice, but it’s nice to know that we Americans in general hate war and want peace so much that it IS very difficult to stay at war. In that regard, I’m glad for people like you who don’t want war. It also proves my point that democracies are infinitely safer for us than the non-democracies over there.
I guess I’d never thought about it, but the idea that we have to be on a constant watch and at war (and it can be a pressure war, like the Cold War, where no physical armies fought battles) with those who would harm us is pretty radical, quite difficult to accept. But that’s the reality of things sometimes, very unfortunately.
And yes, I quite agree with the right to dissent, as I hope I’ve proved. :) It is, in a way, THE difference between fear societies and free societies.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:25 am
I’m fairly certain that Bush would have gone down in history as one of the greatest U.S. presidents had we spent all of our efforts in Afghanistan. Moving on Iraq and all that has followed from it has turned almost the entire world against us. Hooray for Democracy in Iraq but at the price we’ve paid, I feel like we’ve been jipped. And on second thought it doesn’t make me feel like shouting hooray for democracy in Iraq.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
To be honest, I don’t CARE what the rest of the world thinks, if they aren’t ready to stand up for truth and right. If America is doing what is right and good and decent, trying to help other people win freedom and keep us safe, the other countries can pound sand until they catch on. Everyone outside the US and even almost everyone inside the US hated Reagan because he had the courage to let the world know we weren’t going to try and appease people like Gorbachev. We were going to confront it, go in an arms race with them. A communist nation where thought was suppressed would never be able to keep up with a democracy where everyone was free to publish new ideas. (And that thought was believed and published by one the Soviet Union’s most prestigious scientist, Sakharov.) Now most people think Reagan’s great for bringing down the Soviet Union and having the courage to call it an “evil empire.”
We need to try as a country to stop seeing everything as a Republican vs. Democrat issue, and begin seeing it more as a right vs. wrong issue. I hope America’s not ready to roll over and lie down for evil yet.
And to be honest, we lost WAY more men in the first week or so of wars like Vietnam than we’ve lost in the six years we’ve been in Operation Iraqi Freedom. (I’m not trying to downplay the value of American life, I’m just being realistic.) Yet the liberal-dominated media just wants to say how horrible we’re doing instead of focusing on all the good we’re doing, and ergo announce to the whole world, who, as you believe, Trace, is against us, that we cannot defend our own country by putting down terrorist-prone totalitarian governments. Even if one sincerely believed the wars in the Middle East were morally wrong and wouldn’t help our security (when someone can prove to me that countries run by dictators like Saddam are safer than a democracy, let me know), why announce to countries in the Middle East and countries like China that we can’t finish what we start? Do we want to let the world know that America can’t even stomach a war for its own defense and best interests and hopes for democracy and peace?