Change, and leadership

October 19, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

I regularly read David Brooks but usually disagree with his conservative views.  So this column grabbed my attention and I think its beautifully written as well as a portend of the future of U.S., and even world, politics…someday. What bothers, and maybe its my own blind spot, is how he contrast Obama’s view to those of the current "baby boom" politicians.  I’m sorry.  I don’t consider Rumsfield, Cheney or any of the current old guard Republicans who have had a grip on power for decades "baby boomers".

[TS] Op-Ed Columnist: Run, Barack, Run: "Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you should hope Senator Barack Obama runs for president."

He should run first for the good of his party.

The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.

Second, he should run because of his age.

He notes that it’s time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday, that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.

Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world.“Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality,” he writes in his book. He distrusts righteous anger and zeal.

During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power, not conversation. He pointed out that he’d risen from nothing to national prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation.

 

The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview.

In the book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social mobility. The contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.

He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Filed under: Consciousness, career, going solo
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