Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe he is a good man, but I’m
not going to vote for him. I cannot tell you where he lost me, because
he never had me in the first place. It is not my intention to catalogue
my objections, such as they are, to Senator Obama’s political and
philosophical positions. It suffices to say that for now, he’s over there,
and I’m over here. I can’t see my way clear to him, and something
makes me doubt that he could be converted to my way of thinking -
and even if he was open to evangelization, I wouldn’t be the man for
the job.

Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe that he is a good man. I
was never going to vote for him, but up until now, I was rooting for him.
Not even his unsavory associations could dampen my genuine good
wishes for him ? especially since, as his star rose, Hillary Clinton’s set.
I have identified myself, in this very space, as being in favor of anyone
who was not Hillary Clinton for our next president. I likened her to
Jacob Marley, and I said that the chain she dragged across the
national stage was, essentially, the worst tendencies of the Democratic
Party. I expressed my hope that, once Hillary had to leave the island,
Barack Obama would not take up the chain.

Perhaps my worst fears for Barack Obama have been realized.

Barack Obama is a great guy: is he a great man? He belongs to a
political party that counts on the support of those who believe ?
correctly or incorrectly ? that they have been cheated by the system,
and placed in harm’s way. Year after year, the party reminds these
people that they are underpaid and overtaxed, and often, this is surely
the case. Year after year, the party reminds them that their progress in
this world has been confounded by bigotry, and often enough, this is
the bitter truth.

Indignant as the party is about pervasive and intractable inequity,
there can always be found within their ranks a number of brave
idealists. They concoct elaborate plans of action ? plans to get
everybody health care; plans to get the idle rich to shoulder their share
of taxes; plans to save the ozone layer – but these plans turn out to be
doomed marriages between spotty logic and wishful thinking.

Invariably, the idealists degenerate into cynics, and they join the slew
of cynical politicos, many of whom were born cynical, riding the sullen
tide to re-election. The perennially discontented rarely have any place
to go, and they will keep the cynics in office as long as the cynics
continue to give lip service to discontentment, and as long as the
cynics give them someone else to blame when, year after year, decade
after decade, nothing changes.

Barack Obama is a great guy: is he a great man? He is the prophet of
change. He says he despises the ideological gridlock that long ago
ground discourse in our political life to a halt. He is an intelligent and
resourceful fellow, and it must have occurred to him that change
begins and gridlock ends with the reformation of his own party. In
2007, he might have decided that time and history were on his side.
Rather than seeking the presidency, he might have dug in, and
resolved to improve his party from the ground up. He might even have
given up the party entirely, and forged, with like-minded souls, a party
more willing, if not more able, to foster authentic and positive change.

Instead, and more power to him, he fought for the nomination against
the element of his party that is most offended by logic and most hostile
to challenge: he took on the surly embodiment of the Democratic Party’
s sanctimony. He outlasted everyone, but he vanquished no one. He
was also bloodied in the process. Now come the Republicans ? with
salt for his too-fresh wounds.

Obama now seems convinced that he can eke out a narrow victory
over Senator McCain only if he embraces the very stagnation he
promised to eradicate: teaming up with Senator Joseph Biden; making
nice with the Clintons; shakily emerging from a nasty primary season,
and, for the sake of victory, cultivating the support of the same people
who savaged him. Such is the nature of politics. Such is the
treacherous paradox that obtains when democracy boils down to
consensus among people unable or unwilling to move past half-truths
and repudiated policies. It is well argued that the paradox can only be
countenanced by subtlety. It is more to the point that the paradox can
only be transcended by greatness.

Barack Obama is a great guy: does he have any greatness in him? I
hope for his sake that he does.

Supporters of Barack Obama can claim, correctly, that much of what
he says has been subjected to mean-spirited scrupulousness, or
taken out of context. They claim that such dissection is the work of
character assassins. They remind us, correctly, that choosing a
President ought to be a matter of character definition. What can I use,
in order to determine what I must about the character of Barack
Obama, other than his words?

Can I use his stellar and comprehensive career as a public servant?
Can I accept the character witness of such unimpeachable bastions as
Ted Kennedy, or John Edwards, or ? it must be said ? Bill Ayers? Can
I trust that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg would not drape the mantle
of her parents’ aura over shoulders unworthy and untried?

Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe he is a good man, but
Candidate Obama has gone as far as he can go on rhetoric alone.
This is why it is so sad to me that he has identified himself, and tied the
fate of his campaign, to the same old Democratic Party.

Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe that he is a good man, but
is President Obama going to waste his chance to lead by entrusting an
ambitious social agenda to the incompetent bureaucracy that has
dashed the same hopes so very many times? Will President Obama
set out to right the real and imagined wrongs of the past, only to
demonstrate that he terribly misunderstands the times in which we live?
Will he advocate planetary citizenship, only to wind up duped by thugs
and opportunists ? and vilified by marginalized people at home and
abroad?

Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe that Barack Obama is a
good man. If he becomes our next President, will he join the ranks of
great guys and good men among our former presidents who were
waylaid by history? If he becomes our next President, will he end up a
tragic figure, who failed, notwithstanding his idealism and his political
acumen, to navigate either the power or the limits of the office to which
he was elected? Will he squander the revolutionary implications of his
own ascent by perpetuating the empty promise of lumbering
government? Will he entrench the very impediments to the change he
now pledges to bring to the world, and plunge the generation of young
Americans he has inspired into apathy?

Barack Obama is a great guy, and I believe he is a good man, but
what I saw in Denver last week was appeasement of the same old
Democratic Party, and not anything resembling change I can believe
in. I was rooting for him, but I fear that he met has the enemy, and he
is them.

J.R. McCarthy

Article Source: Barack Obama Is a Great Guy by JR McCarthy