Kelly Clark links to this apologia for why this voter is supporting Obama in the election, and it’s scary.
Normally i’m all over experience, policy opinions, legislation, tax policy, etc. etc. But I’ll be damned if leadership, respectability, intelligence, and good old fashioned charisma….aren’t driving my decisions this time around.
I think Obama might just be the right person at the right time. If this were 2000, or even 2004, I don’t think he has a chance. In 2012, he probably wouldn’t have a chance…..but in 2008, I think a weary public just wants….just wants to BELIEVE in America again.
He’s got the right message and the right deliver. I mean, everytime I hear him speak, i have this guilty suspicion that i’m getting suckered…but I just don’t care. [emphasis added]
Imagine you’re the owner of a company with many employees. The company’s performance and profitability and reputation have suffered in recent years and you’ve decided to replace the chief executive. You bring in a potential president and he has no experience in your industry and offers no concrete ideas for how to turn around your company, but he’s charming, witty, and makes you feel good when you talk to him. Are you going to entrust your company to him? Will you stake your family’s financial security on him? Will you stake all your employee’s jobs and their families’ well-being on him?
So why would you give the biggest job in the entire United States of America and the world to him?
It just doesn’t make sense.
And the irony is that this guy’s instincts are telling him that he’s making a bad decision, but he just doesn’t care. What a country.
You know, one of the current ways of describing the cause of Europe’s cultural slide is that it is a “tired” continent – tired after two cataclysmic wars and sitting in the middle of the two behemoths during the Cold War. One does wonder if this is the tipping point where the US decides whether it too is too tired to care any more or renews its commitment to the world. It will be, if nothing else, interesting to see.
Perhaps the Pope was timely with his encyclical, Spe Salvi. Without hope and without God, the human thirst for the One who can save remains.