Obama the symbol

POST: Goodbye To All That, By Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 10/26/08

Nice post by Andrew Sullivan. We're looking at the most potently symbolic president since Reagan.

Comments

[Jeff Thomas]

Obama the symbol? Even the NYT acknowledges it’s more like a question mark:

“Even some of Mr. Obama’s friends call him unusually opaque. After hashing out a question with him, “you may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia and a former adviser to Palestinian diplomatic delegations. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

Reagan had a well-defined ideological core, galvanized over time and there for all to examine. Obama is a carefully crafted enigma, as much the product of consummate political skills as a woefully derelict press. If he is what this country wants, fine. I’m just not so sure they know what they’re getting.

[TEJ]

Linked to the year-ago article he referenced and saw what's been my personal deal-maker:

"To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities."

My kids and many of their playmates are 'hapa', as we used to say in Hawaii. Half-and-half. We celebrate Christmas and Tet. Sometimes we're a haole family where grandma gets to spoil her grandkids and then they go home. Other times we're an asian family where Ong Ba Ngoai expect to do 49% of the child-rearing. Sometimes our kids are just like their over-programmed individualized hyper-protected playmates. Other times they are learning their place in a web of relations defined by birth order and the primacy of intergenerational obligations.

My Indonesian friend has an Indonesian wife and two kids who have never left the country. Yet they have the same mixing going on because of the American and Old Core culture seeping into their nation. Eventually this even happens in Kazakhstan and Cameroon.

In this way Obama feels like my current and future life, McCain reminds me of my childhood and my parents' lives.