Barack Obama’s campaign has had a hard month, and that is not surprise. As a nation we seem to delight in blowing up our public figures to superhero proportions only to deflate them. With Obama this dynamic was accentuated because we are a) so desperate for a leader to bring us back from the morass the Bush administration has sunk us into and b) Obama is unusually well spoken and charismatic and c) he fit well as one of the three character actors chosen for this election by the media (the war hero, the woman, and the black man).
My husband thinks that public figures, especially those that aspire to as high an office as the president, should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us folks. He has a point. But there is not a human being alive who could stand up to the modern era media witch hunt. In the case of Obama there isn’t a single thing the media detectives could come up with to smear this squeaky clean overachiever, so they relied on guilt by association. And they’ve done what they wanted to, cause damage. While Obama’s first response to the Jeremiah Wright flap was statesmanlike and eloquent, after the media, the opposing party, and his fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton (as well as Rev Wright himself) refused to let the matter die, Obama became angrier, more diffident, more bumbling. His confidence was shaken; he felt pressured to apologize though he’d done nothing wrong.
Please. Barack Obama is not the return of the Messiah. He is not the return of JFK. Even JFK wouldn’t be the return of JFK in this day and age. He is an intelligent, articulate, highly ambitious human being who is the best of the three candidates still running and a hell of a lot better than the moron currently in office.
He’s evidently not as unflappable as the impervious Clinton, whose makeup never smears, voice never hesitates, and has a smile as glued on as Pat NIxon’s used to be. So what? Are we electing chief robot? Let the poor guy eat his waffle.
