Posted on 01/16/2009 10:50:43 AM PST by mojito
A leader is a blank slate for the projection of all our hopes, Barack Obama perhaps more so than most. To some he symbolizes an end to racism, to some an end to partisan politics, to some a salve for economic wounds.
To me, he cuts a symbolic figure as our first cosmopolitan president. He is, that is, a citizen of the world. I project cosmopolitanism onto Obama because of his background: The Kansan mother and Kenyan father, the upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia. His political birth took place in Chicago. But to me Obama is a global citizen in the most reassuring way.
Before the election, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan lamented that both Obama and John McCain symbolized the "end of placeness." Neither could be strongly identified as "from" a specific location. McCain because, as a navy brat and then a service member, he moved around a lot before finally settling in Arizona.
Neither of them are rooted to their terroir in the way of America's old-time politicians from the Mississippi Delta or Irish Boston, or in the way Bill Clinton could be strongly identified with Arkansas and George W. Bush with Texas.
What Noonan laments, I celebrate. I was attracted to candidate Obama in part because of, not despite, his dislocated background. I identified with it. It meant sympathy for my own stints living abroad and my habit of roving around the world for work, education and pleasure.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
OK MSM, you can stop now, we’re past the puke stage.
Just STFU!
“A leader is a blank slate for the projection of all our hopes”
WTF?
A leader is someone who is given the reigns on the basis of prior accomplishments and expectations that he won’t screw up.
What is this “projection of all our hopes” and “blank slate”? He should already have a list on that slate of things he plans to accomplish. He should already have shared that list with us, debated how he would implement his ideas, and won in the arena of ideas.
Instead we have been sold a trendy ‘pet rock’. Nobody knows what it does. But everyone has the t-shirt.
This pathetic ego encrusted twit managed to hit nearly every hot button there is:
when the denouement comes, she won't even know what hit her.
“When I think about you, I touch myself”
Two Americas.
Hence the attraction for Obama. It is, to be sure, no deeper than the reflection on a mirror but it is infinitely malleable. And look! Right there! It's One Of Us! A mirror will do that to infants and pets. The rest of us know better.
isn’t that a just a new way of saying he’s a wimp who may or may not be queer as a football bat?
department store maniquin! i knew i had seen that guy somewhere before!! J.C. Penney had him modeling ski sweaters for years... how the heck did he get away? and who is pulling that “talk string” in his back?
...yada, yada, yada...to me he represents a phony, a fraud, someone who wants the big prize without ever having put in his dues other than to play the affirmative action card over and over and over again.
It is statistically improbable that a person can skate all the way through life, especially public life as President of the United States, without convictions, experience or grounding and not come up against a day of reckoning. Ceasar, Napolean, Hitler...they all had theirs though they seemed adored and untouchable for the longest time.
I’ve seen this play before...it always ends badly...just watch.
Oh my - projectile yuppie utopia barf alert.
I betja Betsey had multiple organisms while writing this.
Its rootless douches like you who are ruining once charming places like New York City (Mallhattan) and Santa Fe (now Santa Fake). For all your talk of being cosmopolitan, you yuppie excrement bring all the blandness of white bread suburban culture with a hypocritically latte leftist worldview, despite the fact that you would be the first folks to get shot in a real revolution.
Shouldn't she and Nooner have outgrown their schoolgirl crushes by now? Sheesh.
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