THE WAY I SEE IT...

I am compelled to write about my hope for America, my hope that people who read the BLOG will understand why I feel strongly that Barack Obama is the best choice to be the next president of the United States. I believe Obama sees the world, not just the United States, the way a president of our great country should see it.

George Bush’s biggest liability as president, the personal failing that led to his failure as president, is his lack of curiosity about what the world looks like. (Pardon the preposition at the end of that last sentence, but another more correctly written one didn’t have the force of “looks like” and doesn’t fit as well into an essay titled “The Way I See It.” My guess is that as George Bush was growing up, he opened his eyes and crawled out of bed every morning into a world he did not care to know about or to explore. Until he was well into middle age and was the governor of the state of Texas, he showed no interest in visiting, in seeing for himself, in knowing about the towns and cities along the Danube, the Main, and Rhine Rivers that I have recently visited and will be writing about in subsequent postings on this BLOG. In fact, his world was Texas and the insular, secure place he enjoyed in one of America’s wealthiest, most aristocratic families. He was wealthy enough to afford to do anything he wanted to do, but he wasn’t interested enough in the world to go out and see it. In many ways he was like Sarah Palen, who has so little curiosity about the world outside America that she got her first passport in 2007 at the age of forty-four.

I like the idea that throughout his life Barack Obama has been seeing the world from many different points of view. That vision, coupled with raw intelligence, reassures me that he knows something about the world from actual personal experience. His information about the world has come not just from geography lessons in school and National Geographic specials on television. He knows, for instance, how a little boy sees the world when he is growing up in a home with a single parent struggling to make ends meet. He knows what the world looks like to a child who doesn’t even know his own father. He had a good reason to want to know something about Africa because the father he didn’t know was African. He knows what it’s like to see a world changed for him by his mother’s marriage to an Indonesian man who took him away from the familiar, comfortable classrooms of the United States and enrolled him in an elementary school in Asia where language and religion were different from his own. I could make a long list of experiences that Barack Obama has had that will make him a good president of our wounded country. Governor Palen and Senator McCain continue to say that Amerians don’t know enough about him to trust him. Americans who read and think know know much more of his experience than the few things I have mentioned. We know his experience and interest in the world and his academic record, including his brilliance as a Harvard Law scholar and his work as a “community organizer,” which Governor Palen and Senator McCain continue to deride. His life experiences have given him the background that will make him a great president. We know his experience in his state’s legislature and in our Senate. In his desperation to be elected to a job for which is not suited by age, temperament, or experience, Senator McCain sadly has resorted to blatant distortions of the truth about Barack Obama’s accomplishments.

I like Barack Obama’s vision. I like the fact that he understands that Americans are citizens of the world as well as citizens of our own special country, and that he sees problems of the world more clearly than his political opponents see them. I respect Senator McCain for what he experienced as a prisoner of war, and I owe him thanks for what he suffered in the service of my country. I do not owe him my vote. For him to be president of the United States would be a mistake. Most Americans know his life experiences, and they can be sure the way he has seen the world from his childhood to old age is very, very different from the way Barack Obama has seen it. A child whose father and grandfather were admirals in the powerful, United States Navy and who himself, following family tradition, went through the United States Naval Academy (near the bottom of his class) sees the world in a certain way. Of course, his horrific experiences of deprivation as a prisoner of war locked away from the world have shaped his way of seeing the world. I appreciate and honor him as a war hero, but his being confined and isolated during the terrible years of his imprisonment didn’t provide education and insight he would need to be president. His personal experiences as father and husband in a failed marriage are tragic. I am sad for him, but I do not think his experiences in that failure have prepared him to see the world the way I want my president to see it.

And Governor Palen as President Palen: Unthinkable!