Dowd: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obamas indispensable capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides. Its November 2008, he imagines. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man Barack Hussein Obama is the new face of America. In one simple image, Americas soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.
A man who wouldn't know a logarithm from a spherical harmonic.
Im in this race because Im tired of reading about Jena, he said. Im tired of reading about nooses. Im tired of hearing about a Justice Department that doesnt don't understand justice. ... I dont doesn't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college.
Or twice as many black women in college as black men. But if you want to be a 'brother' you gotta get the lingo right.
Grrrr. I lived in Obama's state district for a while. The man is earnest enough but he's clueless on world affairs. I can forgive a president who has a clunky sense of domestic policy; we have a Congress to handle (or mis-handle) that. But a president who doesn't understand how the world works is dangerous. I don't want someone who is into NGOs, and flower power, and how the world 'should' be. I want someone who understands how it is, and how to make it move in a direction that's beneficial to all of us.
Obama isn't that man. |
Posted by: KBK 2007-12-02 |