Barack Obama answers Democrats’ longing for a candidate who is above politics, but he would probably lead them to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2885 in November.
by Scott McConnell
The nation’s Obama swoon has eased, arrested by Hillary’s http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3304 of tears. But the force behind it gathers for resurgence. Its intensity is driven by yearnings as old as society itself, for a politics of the transcendent. Some intellectuals who fled Europe in the 1930s described a continent-wide “wholeness hunger”—a longing for release from corrupt, narrow, divisive parliamentary factions, a search for a more poetic, more binding politics.
There is some of that in the Obama fervor. In the wake of his http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2893.Obamaism responds to a specifically American need. In his lucid study of the candidate, A Bound Man, Shelby Steele notes that America has “has undergone a moral evolution away from racism so transformative that there is now something like a desire in the body politic to see a truly qualified black person in the White House.” But no previous black candidate has been plausible. Obama is, passing without ambiguity the ability threshold for holding the highest office.
In the age of affirmative action, attending Harvard as a black would not suffice.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_28/article.html