In a column in the NY Post, Mr. Leon Weiseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, wrote about Senator Obama's run for the presidency (summary: yes, he's charming, but charming isn't good enough and he hasn't really said anything yet) had some rather thoughtful things to say that I wish I'd hear more of from the Left, such as:
I AM in the fourth or fifth stage of working through my feelings about Barack Obama. In the beginning, I was exhilarated by the appearance of somebody to challenge, and torment, Her Royal Highness - whose dazzling intergalactic celebrity blinds many people to the fact that she may be the most plodding and expedient politician in America....
But skepticism is sedulously arriving. For a start, I hold Obama's suavity against him. Since I am myself not unsuave, I know how much it accomplishes with how little. Charm is not a political virtue. ...
Obama dislikes polarization. I like it. I think it is one of the marks of an engaged citizenry. Obviously it can also become a kind of democratic decadence; but often polarization is simply your name for my refusal to assent to your opinion. ...
"Cynicism" is not an argument, it is an aspersion. Its subject is not ideas but motives. Yet it is entirely possible to have the right ideas and the wrong motives, and the wrong ideas and the right motives. The conservative antipathy to government, which is one of Obama's illustrations of contemporary cynicism, is not at all cynical, even if it is false and dangerous. ...
UNTIL the fall of the Soviet Union, I voted in general elections on foreign- policy grounds. There was an enemy to fear and to fight. Then, for a bizarrely lucky decade, I permitted myself a fuller calculation at the polls. Now I am a bit of a security simpleton again.
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