Why I'm Betting On Barack Obama's Victory by Bernard-Henri Lévy

[babylonsister]

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=dfe7a745-e6d0-4fed-9509-f73b4277f7b1

Why I'm Betting On Barack Obama's Victory by Bernard-Henri Lévy
There are unknowns, of course, but there are also three big reasons he'll win in November.
Post Date Thursday, July 10, 2008

snip//

With these caveats in place, here are three good reasons to believe the senator from Illinois will prevail:

1. America has changed. It was the conservative Samuel Huntington who said it in his latest book, "Who Are We?": America is no longer a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon country, European by tradition and white by vocation, that cannot seriously imagine a black man running for the presidency. George W. Bush's two terms? The swing to the far right the country took after 9/11? The campaigns by those opposing abortion, or the partisans of anti-Darwin creationism? Sure, one could see a marked tendency, a fundamental movement. Or one could also, as in my case, see the shock and desperate mobilization of an America that knows it is dying but is trying nonetheless to delay the moment when it realizes it must surrender.

2. Obama is not a typical African-American. Unlike, say, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Condoleezza Rice, he does not carry with him the heritage of slavery or the memory of segregation because he was born of a Kenyan father. The difference is enormous, because the mirror he holds up to America is no longer one that reflects those dark times, no longer one of unbearable ancestral culpability. Barack Obama can win because he is the first African-American to take, by the grace of his birth, a step away from the two sides of a deep divide--and the first who may now play the card--not of condemnation or damnation--but of seduction, and--as he says over and over--of reconciliation.

3. He is good. What I mean is that he is not only the most charismatic but also the most gifted politician produced by the Democratic machine in a long time.

Look to Denver, in a swing state par excellence, where Obama will probably oversell the fact that his party chose Colorado as the venue for his official nomination. In Florida, another swing state, he is already campaigning against the prospect of offshore oil drilling, which has been imprudently supported by his rival. Listen to him in Nevada, finding the words to touch the core of Hispanics who are first- and second-generation Americans. Not to mention the setting up of a special committee (partly presided over, if you please, by Caroline Kennedy!) to help choose Obama's future vice president. Will it be the former governor of New Mexico? Governor Strickland, in a nod to blue-collar voters? Bill Ritter, for the Catholics? There is, in the very idea of this awkward political dance, the cleverest, most cunning and, in the end, most profitable of tributes being paid to the inescapable weirdness of America's electoral system.

Four years ago I was one of the first to acknowledge, after having heard, then met, Obama, the emergence of a meteor. I hope that today I will not be wrong in announcing that he will very soon be the face of the United States. In any case, I am marking my calendar.



French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy is the author, most recently, of "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville" and "Ce Grand Cadavre à la Renverse." Translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.

[jaysunb]

1. Good article

also, very interesting comments.

[babylonsister]

2. They are a tough crowd at TNR, and not shy about their views.

I'm glad they're not being censored, but some people are over the top.