Obama, the contextualist intellectual
Posted on | October 26, 2008 |
The more I read about Barak Obama, the more I forgive his sins.
I stop criticizing him for being more moderate than me and moving toward the center. I stop ranting about his ties to ethanol in the Midwest (if you take a closer look, the price of US corn has gone down because it is all genetically modified and so using some of that for fuel is not worsening the food crisis). I stop getting bitter about him giving an inch on wiretapping.
From those who have studied and watched political campaigns, Barak Obama’s is the best run campaign in history. Campaigns are more complex than ever before. He must do it on the ground, in various states. He must campaign in the newspapers, radios, and television. But, he has to do it online, in the blogs, on youtube, and facebook. He is doing it as with grace. He took a few days off to visit his grandmother in Hawaii while his lead grew to around ten percent.
His campaign is drawing in the voters who were registered to vote but never did. Registered Democrats in many states considered Republican strongholds outnumber registered Republicans. Obama is now competitive in those states, including Pennsylvannia.
All over the country, his campaign has brought in new voters. In Nevada, the number of new voters that registered democrats was several magnitudes higher than those new voters who registered Republican. He is now competitive there. In Atlanta, where I lived this summer, the new voters are in Fulton and Dekalb counties. These are metro Atlanta and heavily black areas. The registration in rich, white Northern parts of the city is small.
Mr. Obama’s campaign not just successful, but well-managed. He runs it with tight discipline. His message is always the same - not shifting positions easily, or reacting impulsively. He absorbs all the positions and arguments before making a decision, and then he holds to that. He devises a plan and then sees it through. His careful study and deliberative decision-making will be a welcome change from the current administration.
Read more about this on the New York Times. Obama is suspicious of generalizations, the reporter writes. He is an contextualist, she argues.
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