I was not in the least surprised that Jann Wenner, the driving force behind Rolling Stone magazine, endorsed Obama. After all, I first “met” Wenner politically while working on Jerry Brown’s original “We the People” campaign. Joe Trippi was a part of that campaign, and Jodie Evans of Code Pink was the fantastic campaign manager.
But reading Wenner’s words, he’s deeper than I even suspected. Here’s what he has to say, in his article, titled brilliantly, “A New Hope”:
first learned of Barack Obama from a man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush’s political organization through two presidential campaigns. He described the first-term senator from Illinois as “a walking hope machine” and told me that he would not work for any Republican candidate in 2008 if Obama was nominated. He challenged me to read Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
The book was a revelation. Here was a man whose honesty about himself and understanding of the human condition are both deep and compassionate. Born to a white mother and an African father, he was raised in multiracial Hawaii and for several years in Indonesia. He drifted through some druggy teenage years — no apologies! — before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School. He chose to work as a community organizer in the projects of Chicago rather than join the wealthy insider world of corporate law. And as a young adult, he searched, in the distant villages of Kenya, for the father and family he never knew.
…
Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him “frankly, naive” for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America’s most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton.
Wenner really lets Clinton have it, and rightfully so:
All this was made clearer by the contrast with Hillary Clinton, a capable and personable senator who has run the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so discouraged about our politics. Her campaign certainly proved her experience didn’t count for much: She was a bad manager and a bad strategist who naturally and easily engaged in the politics of distraction, trivialization and personal attack. She never convinced us that her vote for the war in Iraq was anything other than a strategic political calculation that placed her presidential ambitions above the horrifying consequences of a war.
His closing few paragraphs made me catch my breath a bit. I wonder if you’ll feel the same.
Read the whole thing. I promise, you’ll feel so much better.
Thank you!!!!
Here it is:
The Parable of the Walking Hope Machine, the Ants and the Ant Killers.
I hope that you will understand.
Later…
AG
Arthur,
If you knew more about Obama, you wouldn’t be so cynical.
He is not what some believe him to be. But he’s a lot more than YOU believe him to be.
As I say in my piece:
But short of being able to walk on water and multiply bread and fishes, I think that the odds of him being able to change what is going down here…and Lisa, I do mean “down”…in any substantive way are about 1 in 100.
Too much power lined up against him.
He may win the nomination.
He may win the Presidency.
He may bring in a dominant Dem Congress.
But then what?
The Empire lives on no matter WHAT is done on that level, and it has financial and life-or-death power beyond anything ever seen on this earth.
I want it to be defeated. But I do not see that defeat…on the evidence of all of human history…coming from political change of this sort. First it must collapse of its own internal contradictions, but even if THAT were to happen it would still live on for decades on sheer power alone. The only thing positive in that direction that I see happening today is coming from South/Central/Caribbean America and from within this country among the lower classes including the young.
Dassit, Lisa.
The Islamic movement? It is a BACKWARDS movement, towards feudalism and fundamentalist religion. It may even win (although I doubt it) but if it does it will turn an overall negative profit for humanity.
Obama?
One man, running a feel-good spin game?
Ain’t enough words in the UNIVERSE to deal with the corporate power that exists today.
Gonna take a whirlwind to blow things clean.
A whirlwind.
Sorry.
That’s what I am seeing.
AG
Spare me defeatist crap.
We fight the right fights whether we’re going to win or not.
“We” do not.
Read The Art of War.
Also
Yes.
AG
So are you saying, “Yes, we can”?
We can only when the time is ripe.
I do not believe that it is ripe now.
AG
The time is ripe whenever the torches are lit and the pitchforks are raised…
Amen, Oscar!
The time is right when we decide to act, period.
Who “we”, Lisa?
Really.
Which “we”?
How many “we”?
And in what position of power relative to the PermaGov?
Not today, Lisa.
Not today.
Sorry.
Wish it were so. But it’s not.
AG
And they are not.
Not today theyt aren’t.
AG