Why Obama Matters
It has become a grand American tradition for pundits of all sorts to consider the next federal election as “the most important election in U.S. history.”
Normally this sort of statement can be attributed to an abundant ego and good old American inflated bravado. It’s simply a bloated declaration from a bloated nation.
This time, however, it may be right.
The U.S. faces unprecedented challenges on virtually every political front. They have an economy wounded by years of deficit-spending and long-term ineptitude.
They are seeing a world economy, shifting from the ageless dependence on the U.S. dollar, to a much more democratic - yet volatile – system and a balance of power yet to be determined.
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Why Obama Matters
It has become a grand American tradition for pundits of all sorts to consider the next federal election as “the most important election in U.S. history.”
Normally this sort of statement can be attributed to an abundant ego and good old American inflated bravado. It’s simply a bloated declaration from a bloated nation.
This time, however, it may be right.
The U.S. faces unprecedented challenges on virtually every political front. They have an economy wounded by years of deficit-spending and long-term ineptitude.
They are seeing a world economy, shifting from the ageless dependence on the U.S. dollar, to a much more democratic - yet volatile – system and a balance of power yet to be determined.
The war in Iraq has not only cost countless American lives but has polarized a nation from its allies and has further demonized the country’s stature amongst those who need little motivation to dislike – or even hate – America.
It faces an imposing financial, cultural and, possibly even military threat from the swelling juggernaut of China. They are the 21st century’s new reality of an opposing superpower and they are growing much faster than the capacity to deal with them is.
America also feels mounting pressure from a world hell-bent on creating and correcting a planet ravaged by industrial pollution – the vast majority of it emanating from U.S. soil.
And domestically, America continues to be a country trying to turn the principles of equality and happiness for all into something beyond empty words. It has a people and an internal economy being shifted and re-invented by means beyond its control. People need jobs. People need healthcare.
People need a government that works.
So, in the lead-up to each candidate’s nomination, there is clearly one dominant theme: the need for change. It’s become the unshakeable premise. Contenders now have to think beyond traditional lines. They have to show something the people, and the voters, have not seen before.
Two hundred and thirty two years of nation building has created an ugly, inhuman shell of a government. One that has somewhere - within its growth – lost track of the very democratic principles it has been founded upon and, by continuing to feed this behemoth with more of the same dirty fuel, the engine would continue to sputter and falter.
Simply put, those candidates having a deep lineage of political governance would become less attractive the deeper that actual lineage runs. It is the ultimate irony of this 2008 election: the greater your resume, the less likely you are to get the job.
It is a most telling fact that John McCain, essentially the incumbent, has to distance himself from an eight-year stretch of his own party’s rule, in an attempt to appeal to voters across the political spectrum.
U.S. voters face the choice of a soft-shelled Republican or a Democrat who completely embodies the term “political neophyte”.
Consider the absolute magnitude of the mandate facing the next president. In perhaps the most tumultuous time in U.S. history, voters are entrusting this daunting task to a largely-inexperienced person. And it’s not because they have to, it’s because they want to.
This theme of change has run deep and garnered popular support beyond normal party lines and the traditional pool of voters. People are becoming involved as much out of self-preservation as they are out of apparent “excitement” with the political process. To not take part, at this juncture, is democratic suicide.
Whether driven by fear or passion, the desire to be included in the process once again is inspiring voters on a massive scale. They want a nation that works. They want to believe in America as more than just a rosy, antiquated concept.
And in Barack Obama they have possibly the biggest hypothesis ever presented to them in a candidate. A relative newcomer to the political spectrum, a man with few ties to the political old guard and a man whose greatest weapon - or weakness - appears to be an undying, and unpolluted, belief in the theory of America.
Barack Obama, in effect, is the theory of America. A country with a long-established underbelly of racial inequality may be about grant its most important position to an African-American of mixed parenting and of a faith, not calmingly-orthodox Christian.
He is a principle. He is the belief in a tenet. He is the litmus test to the simple premise of all men being created equal.
Either way he will show America what it has now become.
