…self-possession. It’s a word I’ve been searching for ever since I was struck by the way he connected with audiences, and predicted his nomination win last November on this blog.
He really is his own person. Which is something I don’t think can be said about many other politicians on the scene. Not swayed by the petty carping of the “I’m not a racist, but…” opponents on the right. Nor co-opted by the juvenile hysteria of some on the left. (Vide his line in the speech about being able to disagree with people without attacking their character).
For those who dwell on his youth and inexperience, there are a lot of politicans who are older but not wiser. Incapable of learning anything, they haven’t reached maturity whatever their age.
This guy is both wiser than his critics (look at how simple minded the anti-Obama commenters look by comparison, driven crazy by the fact that he’s smarter than they are)–and savvy enough to be able to learn from experience.
And he’s no pushover. He didn’t wrest the Democratic nomination from the death grip of the Clinton crime family by being Ghandian. He did it by outwitting them and out-toughing them. His favorite movie, remember, is The Godfather.
That’s it really: I’ve alway said the people who caricature him as an effete Adlai Stevenson elitist are way off. He’s got the self-possession and the strategic wisdom of Michael Corleone.
Obama is like Malcolm X, in cool, appearance, cadence and detachment
Michael Corleone? Seriously? The best since FDR?
He may be the better of this election, but even that is unsure. He is certainly nothing like the fictional Corleone child who would kill a cop for his father. Obama would likely want to talk the cop to death or, perhaps, give the cop some grants to study the Mafia. Obama is a man who commands the attention of crowds like a fine tent show orator. What else he can do is a mystery, but decisive, terminating action (except to call off a fight) is not his strong suit.
As to the line after FDR, you fail to give the great credit due LBJ for getting the Civil Rights Act through Congress. That was a miracle. JFK was never going to do it.
Greetings:
I think that he has the self-possession of a child who was abandoned by his father and later sent away by his mother. I haven’t heard anything about how he either addressed or resolved those traumas. He always seems to speak positively about his birth parents.
I think that there is a whole lot of psychological distress bubbling away in that tea kettle and I don’t want to be there when that lid begins to rattle.
If Obama is the best the Democratic Party can do since FDR and JFK, then I suppose you are content to remain in sovereign, blissful obliviousness about his Chicago machine start (think Rezko, think Richie Daley, think Cook Cty. Board Chairmen, the Strogers, father and son); his extended involvement with “former” Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge foundation and other Hyde Park sherry shindigs; and his twenty-year friendship with a rabid left-wing anti-American black liberationist in Dashiki minister’s robes.
I just wish the Obama supporters would have the courage of their convictions–like Ayers, who is remorseful only about not having bombed enough targets–and profess their support of him with eyes wide open about who he says he is, and also who his friends and associates over the years say he is by virtue not of their slippery words but their actions and their ideas…in other words, taking him seriously, instead of, shall we say, whitewashing him.
Your fealty gives new meaning to the well-worn trope that the Democrats are not what they used to be…