Spring Break
Barack Obama for President
Mark Jia (mjia@)
Issue date: 1/8/08 Section: Opinion
On February 10th, 2006, Senator Obama announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for President of the United States of America. What followed was a series of record-breaking achievements that have become emblematic of his message for change, from a donor base of unprecedented magnitude to the creation of the largest student mobilization effort for a presidential candidate in United States history.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Senator Obama mused between bites of salmon that "if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country. And they'd be right."
Indeed, Senator Obama's diverse background and experience lends itself to a degree of empathy and understanding that is lacking in American domestic and foreign policy today. Who better to build alliances, repair the broken foreign relationships of the past eight years, and herald America into a new era of multilateral cooperation than Senator Obama, who spent years of his childhood in Indonesia, and who still has family in Kenya? "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," describes one such expert who is unaffiliated with the campaign. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama" - and with good reason.
Senator Obama stands alone among the top democratic contenders in his initial impassioned opposition to the Iraq War. As early as 2002 he warned against the dangers of ethnic factionalization and a political climate hostile to compromise. He exhibited remarkable judgment and courage at a time when it seemed like political suicide to oppose a war that had been linked (spuriously, as it turned out) to the attacks of September 11th.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Senator Obama mused between bites of salmon that "if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country. And they'd be right."
Indeed, Senator Obama's diverse background and experience lends itself to a degree of empathy and understanding that is lacking in American domestic and foreign policy today. Who better to build alliances, repair the broken foreign relationships of the past eight years, and herald America into a new era of multilateral cooperation than Senator Obama, who spent years of his childhood in Indonesia, and who still has family in Kenya? "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," describes one such expert who is unaffiliated with the campaign. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama" - and with good reason.
Senator Obama stands alone among the top democratic contenders in his initial impassioned opposition to the Iraq War. As early as 2002 he warned against the dangers of ethnic factionalization and a political climate hostile to compromise. He exhibited remarkable judgment and courage at a time when it seemed like political suicide to oppose a war that had been linked (spuriously, as it turned out) to the attacks of September 11th.
Be the first to comment on this story