Texans for Obama!

I went downtown in the cold rain today to get trained to be a precinct captain for the Obama campaign for the Texas primary, which seems likely to be a defining event for the nomination for president. That means knocking on doors, handing out pamphlets, and calling strangers on the phone. Ordinarily that appeals to me about as much as a colonoscopy, but I find myself pretty fired up about it.

It seems many are. There were many more people at Obama headquarters to volunteer than the campaign had expected. They were frantically setting up extra rooms but had big smiles on while they did it.

A lot of people seem to feel pretty strongly about Obama. They were encouraging people to talk about their reasons, to practice for talking to people in their neighborhoods.

There are many reasons people seemed to like him. One of my main ones turns out to be common: a desire to get beyond the extreme partisan polarization that we have been increasing for the last 28 years. Part of that seems to be getting the partisans of my generation, the Boomers, like the Clintons and Bushes, out of power and letting someone try a new approach. Obama seems to focus on and promise just that. (And I don't buy the Clinton argument that he is weak on the details -- his are just as well organized, indeed really pretty similar to hers, but he has a vision and a largeness of spirit that she just does not have. Or the Clinton argument about her preparation to lead--an interesting column recently noted that if you take the organization of their campaigns as an indicator of management skill, Obama is better prepared than either Clinton or McCain.)

Another one of my main reasons was less commonly expressed. I worked for four years (1979-83) researching what people in other countries think of the U.S. I still follow it pretty closely and other people, like the Pew Charitable Trust are doing good research on it now. If you look at world opinion from the early 2000s compared to now, George Bush has so completely destroyed the image of the U.S. in the rest of the world that we need someone very different to show us internally and the rest of the world externally a very different face for the USA.

A number of people have observed that abroad, even more than at home, Obama, simply by being who he is, a part black, part white guy who grew up in several cultures, is the perfect example of what is still pretty good about America, our strength in letting immigrants from lots of places achieve better lives.

There is a very articulate essay on exactly that point by Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly last year, Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama/4.

I recommend it.