A Respectable Politician????? or Obama's Grandmama, but That Title Seems Disrepectful

I usually avoid politics in this blog, not because I am uninterested, but because politics ticks me off generally. The way I cope is getting my news from the Daily Show and Colbert Report, and recently my brother introduced me to NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. These shows are just as honest and credible if not more than Fox News and CNN. And they are less sensational and much smarter. I mean that with no sarcasm. The problem with politics and politicians, besides that 99% of them ruin it for the good ones, is that so many of our national problems are so difficult and multi-faceted, and both parties are giving simple, ridiculous, and unworkable solutions to them without even acknowledging the shortcomings of the suggestions. Plus I have very frustrated with the religious right (which is neither) that tries to play church with politics expecting a nation of unbelievers to act as if they know the Lord. What is sad about it is that it seems many have given up on using the church to influence the community and taken up with trying to do it through politics. That’s not what the church is about.

That all brings me to what was a very impressive speech by Barack Obama a couple weeks ago. I have always thought that he was very charismatic, but charisma is only as good as what you do with it. I have no idea who I will vote for, and it may very well not be him, but regardless he definitely gained some respect from me. For the first time in my life (now 29 years today, woohoo!) I heard a presidential candidate be honest, straight-forward, and real and REASONABLE! He acknowledged that people are complicated and cannot be reduced to a few sound bites, and he did not sell out his friend for the sake of getting into an office. He also was very honest about issues of race from all sides.



One thing I appreciated in particular was what he said about his own white grandmother. I have no racist bone in my body. Racism makes no sense to me at all. But I like his grandmother I have looked at groups of black people and had that uneasiness:

I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.--Barack Obama

I have had to ask myself where it comes from and I do not like it about myself at all. But it is there, and I was thankful that he acknowledged it instead of swept it under the rug. I heard one political commentator said it was a faux pas. Bullcrap! It is the difficult truth we all must face about ourselves.

He made no personal attacks and only politicized the speech a few times here are there (much less than I expected). If this is the way that Obama will approach issues, he will have my vote, even if I do disagree with several of his stances. Many politicians that I have agreed with on a lot of things have made no difference, or worsened things by their hypocrisy or apathy. It matters much more what you stand for by how you live than by how you speak. I would love it if more politicians could be this honest about the realities of life, but then many of them would not have the charisma or articulation to pull it off. To me it matters less what you believe and much more how you believe it and what you do about it.

People on the extreme left and right are just like each other, they only change in the actual stances they hold, but Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are just like each other, and both extremely irritating.

And that ends my political discussion for quite awhile.