The New Republic
23.07.2008
Obama’s Jump Shot for the Ages
Now we know why Barack Obama spent so much time in the gym those last days in Chicago before taking off for Afghanistan. He was practicing jump shots, preparing for the sensational 25 footer he sank in the Kabul gym in front of cheering US troops.
All practitioners prepare. Professionals are defined as much by preparation as practice. Great professionals practice as Obama does, their focus on key moments, striking, often unexpected occasions and opportunities. (”Photo ops” is the vulgar phrase.) The great practitioner takes a longer view than the people around him. The fine, diligent New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about Obama making his slow, challenged way to political office in and through Chicago shows him learning the ropes and continually abandoning them for other ropes, other learning, other modes of advancement. The same goes for his negotiating with University of Chicago law deans and professors who wanted to recruit this brilliant, attentive young man, one going so far as to tell him after a political defeat that he had no future in politics but might well have a great career in the academy and then perhaps as a public intellectual, a la Judge Richard Posner. Obama accepted an office, a stipend, and some lecturing on constitutional law, but nurtured his political career, his long view, as he wanted.
(snip)
Richard Williams and the even more eloquent Barack Obama may never express their knowledge of what surrounds or nurtures them as richly or poetically as Lampedusa’s Gattopardo, but I think each understands the obstacles before them with some of the same profundity and originality. This is some of what underlay both this year’s Wimbledon women’s final and the wonderful three-point shot which Barack Obama made before the troops, the American voting public, and history this week in Kabul.
—Richard Stern
(excerpt)
“He is an Obama/Ayres mouthpeice. “
Good call. Obama has the Hybe park left-liberals going to bat for him. Obamedia’s inner circle.