Audaciously Hopeful

Just got done reading two separate items. The first, from my property textbook, was long and boring and related to the economics of rent control.

The second, from the Atlantic, was a compelling argument and epic endorsement for Barack Obama written by Andrew Sullivan.

If you've got about 20 minutes, feel free to read the full piece here.

Otherwise, here's the summary:

America is deathly ill. It has been so for quite some time and it's mostly on account of the violently hostile political divide that those oft-bickering baby boomers have left as their most unwelcome legacy. According to Andrew Sullivan, there's really only one possible treatment, and at this stage it's only experimental: Barack Obama. Here's a paragraph that I found particularly illustrative of his point--

"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. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common."

Sullivan goes on to make the other key arguments for Obama: his credibility (both domestically and internationally) on the Iraq war issue, his electability, his cross-over appeal with Republicans, his ease with religion, his charisma, and yes, even his face. In this little excerpt, Sullivan explains just how a face and a name might radically alter a young man's conception of what America stands for:

"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

Goodbye domestic rancor and suspicion, hello hand-holding and goodwill.

Optimistic? Nope, just audaciously hopeful.