WHAT MAKES BARACK TICK

Last week former US Attorney General John Ashcroft confused Osama and
Obama and was mocked by the left for his mistakes. Last week, after
writing a lot about the Middle East I did exactly the same in a hurried
article on the way to the doctor which unfortunately escaped the subs
notice. The fact is it is a mistake that any can make. I am a great
admirer of Barack, as I will now call him but I think in terms of
defining the man Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist has, at the weekend
done perhaps the best job I have seen in analyzing the wonder that is
fast becoming a black messiah.
I have selected some key paragraphs from this article as I think they go
closer to explaining what is happening than anything I have read.
The best thing about Barack Obama has almost nothing to do with him as a
person or as a leader .... It's not even the wondrous oratory power or
the charisma or the sweet sense of deeper change overlaid with all kinds
of sparkly utopian futuriffic goodness.
There is, I think, something more. Something richer. And it's rather
startling.
See, I've read the profiles and the liberal fawnings and the intelligent
analysis, the attempted takedowns and the right-wing smears, all the
valiant attempts to dig up something dirty or problematic or frightening
about Obama and his family... attempts that, rather amusingly, have all
failed.
I've read, too, the glut of wonderment, how Obama is this generation's
MLK, how he makes Hillary Clinton's brand of retro cronyist politics
feel like the equivalent of rubbing salt on a paper cut. He is, they
say, that once-in-a-lifetime candidate, a fantastically rare mix of
intelligence, consistency, inspiration, hope, charisma, humanity,
articulation, and an almost shocking lack of manipulation and sheen
(well, relatively speaking), all packaged in a strikingly handsome unit
in whose closet apparently live almost no skeletons at all.
I also nodded in agreement when snark-master Jon Stewart appeared
slightly stunned and taken aback and very nearly jokeless as he pointed
out, following Obama's remarkable speech on race in America, that at
long last, here was a top-tier politician who dared to speak to us like
we were adults. It wasn't just refreshing; after seven-plus years of
humiliating, monosyllabic dumb-guy Bushisms, it was downright jarring.
Initially I thought the most impressive aspect of Obama's run was, well,
how the guy made it this far at all. That someone of his caliber and
obvious intelligence could survive what has become a truly caustic,
brutal political system and still emerge into the international
spotlight as, well, not deeply f-ed-up and insane, not possessing that
creepy demonic gleam shared by so many politicos (hi, Sen. McCain!) that
suggests they've had souls eaten whole by the same scabrous trolls of
greed and war and corruption that birthed two Bushes and gave Bill
Clinton that nearly intolerable aura of ego and slickness.
See, I've long believed that, if nearly eight years of the World's Worst
President has taught us anything, it's that the American political
system has moved well beyond merely deeply flawed and broken and sad,
and is now wholly rotted, ruined from the inside out, a true moral
wasteland barely suitable even for cockroaches and leeches and Rick
Santorum. I thought George W. Bush had actually managed to do the
impossible: make an already defective system truly unbearable, turning
something already gray and murky to turgid and pathetic, toxic to all
decent human life.
And I'm happy to report that the fact that Obama exists at this stage of
the game is proving me very wrong indeed.
But I'll even take it a step further. Because the greatest thing about
Obama isn't really about Obama at all, per se. It's actually about,
well, us.
This is the great revelation: We still got it. The collective
unconscious, the deep sense of inner wisdom, that intuitive knowing that
borders on a kind of mystical proficiency, where millions of people can
actually look beyond rhetoric and media spin and merely feel the
presence of something great in the room? Yep, still there. Who knew?
There's a lot more in this view at the Gate but you get the idea. There
is something very different, different to JFK, different to RFK.
Different to anything we have seen. Perhaps the time produces the man.