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"Is there anywhere else you’d rather be right now?"
In Ron Howard’s movie "Cinderella Man," heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock’s manager asks him this key question. Howard, who has endorsed Barack Obama for President, captured the essence of not only the sport of boxing, but also of politics. It is a question that not only the candidates have to answer, but, as we will find out after Obama and Biden take office, a question that grass roots community organizers and activists will face, as well.
Years ago, at the Golden Gloves tournament in Troy, New York, the legendary trainer Cus D’Amato was in the dressing room where a number of teams, including my own, were preparing for the finals. I found it interesting that D’Amato didn’t leave the dressing room to watch the fights. Finally, someone asked him why he didn’t watch the fighters that he considered potential prospects for managing? He said that he didn’t need to, because he could tell everything he needed to know by watching the various fighters prepare to do battle.
Cus D’Amato knew that mental preparation was as important as the physical skills that are needed to compete in what is the loneliest of sports. All boxers have to examine their inner selves as they prepare to fight. Cus knew that the period of time when most fighters engage in this process was late at night, and so there are stories about how he would go and talk to his fighters in the middle of the night. His most important lesson had to do with fear: Cus said that both the coward and the hero experience the same degree of fear before a fight, but that the hero transformed that energy into the fuel for victory, while the coward was consumed by it.
Most fighters, of course, are neither cowards nor heroes. They are somewhere in between those two extremes. Yet Cus knew it was essential for them to reach their hero potential, rather than be consumed by the self-doubts that could destroy them before they entered the ring.
One of the things that the public finds reassuring about Brack Obama is his calm manner. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews often speaks of Obama as being the Zen candidate. This calm is the direct result of a person who is fully self-confident, and who transforms the nervous energy – both inside himself and from the outside – into the fuel that he needs to accomplish his mission.
Senator John Kerry is a true American hero. He became an important national figure when, upon returning home from his service in Vietnam, he spoke to the conscience of this nation, asking members of the US Senate, "How do you ask a man to be the last mn to die for a mistake?" He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest US Senators not only of our era, but in our nation’s history. His attempts to expose the truth behind the series of crimes that are collectively known as the "Iran-Contra scandal" stands out.
Yet during the 2004 election, on a flight from Phoenix to Washington, DC, there was a telling discussion between David Corn and Rand Beers, who had resigned from President Bush’s National Security staff, and become one of Kerry’s top advisers. Corn asked Beers about how Kerry would deal with the "mistake" of the US war of occupation in Iraq? He put that question into the context of Kerry’s question to the Senate.
"Beers recognized the dilemmas at hand. His voice became quiet. He described some of his talks with Kerry about Iraq – and what they might do were Kerry to win: ‘Sometimes, when it’s late at night, at the end of a long day, we look at each other and we say, ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ " (Hubris; Corn & Isikoff; page 376) I wish that Senator Kerry had had Cus D’Amato with him late at night, rather than Mr. Beers.
At a Washinton, DC dinner to honor his 44th birthday, on May 27, 1961, President John F. Kennedy told those gathered, "When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were." Yet JFK was up to the challenge. More, he knew that he alone could not solve every problem. He asked the citizens of this country to work with him, knowing that this was the only way to make real progress.
There is nowhere else that Barack Obama and Joseph Biden would rather be right now.Yet, when Obama and Biden take office, they will be confronted by problems that are even worse than those that faced John Kennedy. And they have already said that they alone cannot solve all of these problems. They have made clear that they will need our active involvement in the process.
And so tonight, on the eve of the most important election of our lifetimes, we should be asking ourselves, "Is there anywhere else you’d rather be right now?"
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