Barack Obama: All Things To All People

NY Times front page November 5, 2008: Obama elected President

Some discussion now, post election, concerns how  Barack Obama is perceived as “all things” to all people.

There is speculation that we voters have deluded ourselves, that we are seeing what we want to see, not what is.

I disagree. I think that, in Barack Obama, we see clearly that he represents a vision of our own possibilities and that his strength is his ability to help us unite in an effort to achieve that vision.

Many of us in the U.S. despaired over the direction our nation had taken over the last eight years. We could not see a solution. We did not envision a leader who could speak to our hearts and dare us to hope, not fear.

The politicians who stepped up all seemed the same as those we have elected in the past. It seemed as though their campaigns had little to do with us, and more to do with how high they could rise in their own lives on the world stage.

Yet we did not want just another politician hungry for the office, the power and the importance of the presidential spotlight. We knew in our guts that this was not what we needed.

We longed, instead, for someone who did not want or need power to feed his or her own ambitions and ego.

We dared to want someone for whom the election would be less about him or his party, and more about us and how we would define ourselves.

We  prayed for someone who would answer our deepest need for a leader we could believe in and follow out of the darkness of our fears.

Yet even as we hoped and prayed for renewal, the cynical and fearful self raged against our political system and our fellow voters and denied that renewal was possible.

We had, after all, elected an administration that reflected our lower selves not once, but twice.

As a nation we had voted for intolerance, war, torture, culture wars, selfishness, greed, swift-boating, and scapegoating. We had elected an administration that embraced George Orwell’s “newspeak” in which peace, to them, meant perpetual war. And we had seen a vice-president continue to repeat the lie that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction six years after the entire world knew it had not.

Perhaps like me, you prayed that this one ideological faction could not possibly reflect who we are, in our hearts, as people and Americans.

Perhaps, like me, you affirmed that we would align with our higher selves and, somehow, elect a person who might represent the best of ourselves.

Perhaps, like me, you were tired of fear, and you thought we might yet rise above it.

Perhaps, like me, you were sick to death of racism limiting our possibilities as a nation.

Yet, perhaps like me, you held your breath a week ago today, suspended and waiting, to see the true nature of yourself, your fellow Americans and the future of your country reflected in the final tally.

Like so many Americans, I wept when Barack Obama was elected president of our nation.

And, for the first time in all my decades of voting, I feel that I have a president who represents my ideals, my dreams for America, and my hopes for a better, more compassionate world.

He is my leader, the one who I will listen to when he appeals to my better nature, my belief in possibility and my willingness to sacrifice. He is the one I will trust when he asks me to find another way and asks me to cheerfully work for the common good.

At last I have a president who shares my vision that we are one people and one family and that we can no longer afford the luxury of negative, punishing or fearful thinking.

At last there is a leader about to enter the White House who knows that we rise together or fall together; that we have immense talent and even greater determination; that in promoting the common good and looking out for each other, we only strengthen ourselves; and that compassion is a quality we are wise to embrace not mock.

In short, to me, Barack Obama represents spiritual renewal.

Barack Obama may be all things to all people. He may be something else to you. This is what he is to me.

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