polarizeme

Wow.

That one word above describes, in  full, my feelings for today. Here’s why:

I got home from a long night of work Tuesday evening/Wed morning around 3am. I had been in Janesville, WI at the GM plant setting up the staging, sound and lights for what was originally intended as a VIP-style meet and greet with Barack Obama. At some point Tuesday night I was pulled aside by Obama’s campaign reps and used as the Senator’s stand-in due to my height qualifications (apparently he’s only an inch shorter than I am). I have to state that it was extremely weird.
Plans changed sometime on Tuesday and Senator Obama decided that he’d very much love to meet a crowd of the workers at the GM plant after his guided tour, thus deciding to give a longer and more detailed speech than was previously planned for. The Press, who were once excluded from the event, were sent invites, as well as the scope of the production being toned up a notch.

I woke up Wednesday morning with a whopping 1.5 hours of sleep, ate a bagel, dressed accordingly and made my way back to Janesville. Getting into the event, being that I was staff of sorts, was much easier than the dog sniffing and wand dectection that everyone else had to go through in order to attend the speech later on in the morning. I spent a good hour or so getting to talk to and hang out with two of Senator Obama’s Secret Service agents - both incredibly well spoken, well trained and friendly individuals that successfully found a balance between taking the job seriously and not having a rod up their asses. 

Somewhere amidst his guided GM tour, endless meeting/greeting and giving an absolutely inspiring and well-delivered speech (that garnered at least half a dozen standing ovations), I had the chance to stand in a room with a handful of people including (but not limited to) some Secret Service men, Governor Jim Doyle (WI), and Senator Barack Obama.

I’m going to say it right here and now:
Barack Obama is, in my opinion, exactly what we should hope for in a President.

He’s incredibly intelligent, charismatic, funny, kind, well-spoken, witty and has a pretty good fucking idea of where this country went wrong (and what needs to be done to start fixing it). Is he perfect? Absolutely not - and no one ever will be. But, in getting to talk with him, I realized something about this man: He understands the over-emphasis that’s been put on the position of the Presidency in this country; he understands the smoke and mirrors that have been put in place to make it out to be something that it’s not and detract from everything that it can and should be.

I had a chance (along with the others in the room) to talk with him briefly about some things I had on my mind. I tried to find a middle ground in conversation - something that was political, but not too much of a formal inquisition. We all spoke of the concerns that weighed heavily on our hearts (the usual - economics, foreign relations, trade policies, health care, education, etc etc), but we also gave him a chance to speak from his own. No teleprompter, no speech prepared for our questions; just a conversation between a room of people… and some well-dressed body guards. haha. The words that left his mouth were saturated in the hope of a man who has dreams for this country and truthfully wants to do something good with it for a change. He understands that there will always be good and bad Presidents. He understands that no one can do this alone. He understands that the next Presidency will not change our world, but that the policies and actions put in place will certainly pave the road for whoever and whatever comes next… and he hopes to see them follow in the same inspiring footsteps of those great leaders of our past, so that they may become the next great leaders of our future.

One situation that was excitingly awkward was when someone raised the question on whether or not he was worried about possible assassination attempts due to being the first black President (and the percentage of the population that have him labelled as a Muslim infiltrator/terrorist thanks to clueless people like Bill O’Reilly, who have way too much power and constantly refer to him as “Osama Obama”).
Summed up, his answer was something along the lines of ”yes, i’ve thought about it. and i’d be a liar if i said it didn’t scare me or even my wife michelle… but i’m not about to let that stop me. i’ve worked too hard to fail out of fear. i think my secret service guys are just plain nervous about me being asked that question, so maybe we should change the subject before they try and throw someone to the floor.”

If nothing else, I had the opportunity to look into the face of someone I had previously labeled as genuine. and I can confirm, to the best of my abilities, that he’s the real deal.
I’ll clarify:
I don’t think he’s perfect. I don’t even claim to know enough about him from this small meeting to say, for certain, that he’ll be able to accomplish everything he says he wants to. I can, however, say that I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ll say that, in my opinion, if anyone can be given the opportunity to start fixing what’s wrong with this country; the opportunity to unite people and lead them into the new age of this country… it should be him. 

Should he become the Democratic Presidential nominee, and should he begin to gather a well-contructed cabinet of people underneath himself, you can bet your life that he’ll get my vote in the Presidential elections.

But, to be fair, I’m frightened.
The people of  this country have become far too stupid to ever elect someone this smart, sincere and hopeful as our own President. That’s only my opinion…

 …and I’d love nothing more than to be proven wrong.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 4:15 and is filed under politics, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.