Very Interesting Obama Story in the Atlantic Monthly

I can't believe nobody has diaried this one yet. There is a very interesting story by Andrew Sullivan in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

[Full Article]

Sullivan makes an interesting case, specifically about how Obama is guilty of the many things his primary opponents and their supporters charge him with: he is inexperienced, he is not a spectacular campaigner, and he hasn't spent that much time in Washington.

Sullivan goes on to make a compelling hypothesis:

But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters.

It is so easy to say, "Sure, I like Obama, but he is eight years early." I think this sentiment has been losing steam lately, but it is still pervasive.

Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.

True, or bullshit? I have no idea, I am only 28. But that is exactly how I see it.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

I don't agree with everything that Sullivan says, but in a way that I think Obama could relate to, that might be a very good thing. Inciting the other side to hysterics is a bullshit tactic. It's been tried, it has failed. It brought us to where we are today, and no one can give that a positive spin.

And now, for the money quote, the one that I have been dreaming about, the one that motivates me, a broke ass student, to donate another $25 to Obama, the first presidential candidate I have ever given money to:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

There is so much more in this article. Health care, abortion, the Iraq war, faith, evangelism, race, war, and peace. But you'll have to read the whole thing.

I am on my way to donate a few more bucks.