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Inside Obama’s Dream Machine

 

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Sitting on the campaign bus the night before the caucuses, Michelle explained her desire to shake up American politics. "We complain that politicians are mean and cynical and angry, but we've been doing the same thing over and over again," she told NEWSWEEK. "We have been making the same irrational decisions. When faced with the most rational choice, we hesitate—and … we have to break out of this." Stretched out beside her, Obama was clearly enjoying watching his wife getting all worked up even as he was ready to sack out. He leaned forward and stage-whispered, "She's scary." His wife wasn't entirely amused. She poked him and forced herself to smile.

Obama shares his wife's sense of impatience and a certain disbelief that the world might think he's not ready for the presidency. In one of his rare evocations of the civil-rights movement, he said he shares Martin Luther King's belief in "the fierce urgency of now"—suggesting that his own accelerated run for the White House is the result of a burning need to right the nation's wrongs. At times, Michelle's enthusiasm for her husband's talents can come off as a bit regal. She recently told an audience that "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics," and she has also suggested that if he loses, neither she nor her kids would want to go through the punishment of a national campaign again. That prompted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to take a swipe at the Obamas. She wrote that they "radiate a sense that they are owed … for offering themselves up to save and uplift the nation, even though it disrupted their comfortable lives." Obama later recast his wife's remarks in more-flattering terms. Michelle, he explained, meant that it was important for him to run now, while he was still rooted in the real world, before life in Washington had "boiled all the hope out" of him. Michelle shrugs off the criticism. "It's ridiculous. People jump on little jokes. But you can't let that stop you."

Michelle has worried for years that politics has the potential to ruin her husband's idealism. In 2000, he lost his first campaign, for a House seat. "It really humbled him. It chastened him," recalls Joe Moore, a Chicago alderman who has known Obama for years. Up until then, Moore says, Obama "felt like he had been God's gift to politics." Three years later, when he toyed with running for Senate, Michelle told him no. With two young daughters, she dreaded losing him to another campaign. "We were uniformly against the idea," says Jarrett. "Our sense was it was just too soon for him to run." At a brunch with a small group of friends, they told him all the reasons he shouldn't do it. Then it was his turn to speak. "I can't quite explain how it happened," says Jarrett, who describes Obama as presenting his side like "he was making a closing argument in a case before the U.S. attorney." He said he wouldn't do it without her support. By the end of the brunch, Michelle had given her blessing.

Michelle didn't need that kind of convincing when he decided to run for president. Though the inexperience question came up in early conversations with friends and advisers, an old political mentor told him the bigger risk was not running. Obama's 2004 convention speech had generated buzz, and Dick Durbin, Illinois's other senator, urged him to take advantage of it while it lasted. "Don't believe you can time this thing," Durbin told his protégé at lunch one afternoon. "I have colleagues who waited for years and the opportunity never came." Forget about the whole "experience" question, he said. "A thousand more votes in the Senate isn't going to make you a better president."

There may be a more personal edge to Obama's impatience—a steadfast belief in his own qualities that he seems to think others should be able to see as clearly as he does. "At some point people have to stop asserting that because I haven't been in the league long enough I can't play," Obama told NEWSWEEK. "It's sort of like Magic Johnson or LeBron James, [who] keep on scoring 30 [points] and their team gets wins, but people say they can't lead their team because they're too young." Faced with stubbornly undecided voters in Iowa in the closing days of the race, Obama would sometimes wonder out loud what it would take to win them over. One church pastor stood up in Boone, Iowa, to praise Obama's 2006 op-ed in USA Today on the relationship between church and state. "I appreciate that, thank you very much," Obama told the man. "So what's the problem? Why don't I have your vote?" Obama demanded. The pastor froze, uncertain if Obama was serious. "I'm teasing you," he said with a smile.

Flying from Iowa to New Hampshire after midnight on Friday, Obama explained his impact on politics a little more modestly. "What I was so pleased with was not just the fact that we won, or the raw numbers, but what it showed about the country."

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  • Posted By: paulte @ 12/23/2008 10:53:02 AM

    As anyone who watched the debates knows, there ain't a whole lot of grey matter in either Obama or McCain. Obama is slightly ahead of McCain on that score and whatever grey matter he has most probably comes form his white mother. Would America have elected a man who was 100% black or mostly black? The answer is clearly no but America has elected a man who is half black, a mulatto in traditional parlance. In reality America has elected it's first mulatto, not a true black man except by American standards which considers a person who is 1/8 black to be black. If Obama had been born in South Africa back in Apartheid days, he would have been classified as a Colored, not as a Black or an African. So much for Obama's blackness!

    If we examine him closely, we can see what is usually called an Oreo cookie, black on the outside, white inside. He may come from the Hood and tried some drugs but he really belongs to the Harvard crowd, fairly bright, arrogant & liberal, not very decent or moral, greedy white people. I don't think I ever heard him say a word about urban renewal in the entire campaign. His wife is described by a phrase my mother used to use, "an uppity one." Everyone in the clan knew what that meant!

    How did this congenial black fellow get to be President? Well, things just seemed to play out for him. He tossed his hat into the ring, having two whole years in the Senate at the same time that the wicked witch of the West , Miss Hillary (Daisy) tossed her broomstick into the ring. 95% white Iowa decided to vote for a black man for some reason in the caucuses. Was this the death knell of white racism? No, this was a way to quash Hillary. And there you have the tale, Obama was a vehicle to quash Hillary. The rest is history. The wicked witch of the west was actually vanquished by this guy.

    I had a lot of respect for him back then. The thought of even voting for him in November and sending him money entered my mind like some wild illicit temptation. Coolness of mind quickly returned but I still retained a soft spot for this guy who ultimately vanquised the wicked witch of the west. He didn't even put her on the ticket. But then he makes her Secretary of State and now I see in the news that she wants more power for the state. Power is her vice just like sex is her husband's vice.

    You made a big mistake Barry! I always felt you would self-destruct. I admit I thought and hoped that it would happen before you got elected but it is inevitable. You've sown the seeds of your own destruction by tarrying with the witch Hillary. She will destroy you! Remember, Macbeth, King Lear & Hamlet. You're about to join them! "Double, double, toil and trouble.....

  • Posted By: Nins @ 09/19/2008 12:47:51 PM

    Trazer, you don't seem to know that Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama for President, despite the fact that Powell is a Repblican. Perhaps you are not aware that Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State, saying that he could not do an effective job as a diplomat under a President (Bush) who refused all forms of negotiation and undercut the country's diplomatic efforts. You also may not know that Obama holds a degree (with highest honors) in International Relations from Columbia University, the most prestigious foreign affairs school in America. Futhermore, Obama has been on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for four years, and his running mate, Senator Joe Biden, has been Chairman of that committee for a couple of decades, and is widely seen as the Senate's best and most experienced foreign relations hand.

    Maybe you should research a little more before you write your blogs.

  • Posted By: Nins @ 09/19/2008 12:41:13 PM

    Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest of the failed institutions have failed primarily because of former Senator Phil Gramm. The Gramm-Leach-Biley Act stripped away the regulations separating banking from investment companies, insurance companies and mortgage guaranty companies. Those regulations were added after the Great Depression when it became obvious that allowing banks to be in bed with the stock market was a sure way to rig the system to collapse, as it did in 1929.

    Lo an behold, a few years after the regulations were removed, the sh!t has hit the fan, and the inter-related investment, insurance, mortgage and banking industries are now starting to collapse, and guess what, you, the taxpayer will have to pay to clean it up.

    Phil Gramm is the Senator who brought you the "Enron Loophole" that de-regulated futures trading, causing the prices of oil, gas and food to spiral out of control.

    Senator Phil Gramm was McCain's top economic advisor until recently, when he was forced to step down after he said that there is no problem with our economy other than a "mental recession" on the part of a "nation of whiners." Phil Gramm is the man who McCain said he wants to name Secretary of the Treasury if he becomes President. You have to believe John McCain when he says that he knows little about the economy -- so little that he doesn't even know who to choose as an advisor.

    Barack Obama addressed the Enron Loophole, futures trading, short-selling and Wall Street de-regulation months ago in his economic position papers, which are available on his website. Obama has been saying all along that he is going to put in strict regulations and clean up Wall Street.

    McCain just started saying that he favors regulation in the past couple of weeks. How is it that McCain is going to put in new regulations, when he plans to appoint Phil Gramm, the man who authored the de-regulation, as Secretary of the Treasury? McCain says he would fire Christopher Cox, the SEC Chairman, to solve the problem. However, the problem is caused by lack of regulations on the legislative level, regulations that were removed before Cox was appointed. The SEC can only enforce regulations that actually exist, so making a scapegoat of Cox solves nothing. I would suggest that McCain is guilty of saying what's politically expedient, that he does not actually intend to regulate the banking industry. McCain knows that most Americans are unaware of the details.

    I am a middle-aged white conservative Republican who loves America. I am voting for Barack Obama.

    http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/15050.html
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/145011/page/1
    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6007788.html
    http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D81038F934A25752C0A9649C8B63
    http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gG5Rzb

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