Procrastinet

President Obama, Part II

filed under: Idle Chatter

Slammed this week, so posting will be sparse. But I just stumbled onto a post by Barack Obama, on Daily Kos, addressing the more radical members of the Progressive movement who are demanding orthodoxy in the Left, which also serves as the most eloquent primer for principled politics I've ever read.

An excerpt:

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Oh my gosh do I like this guy. If you've ever wanted to see truth and insight spoken with strength, go read the whole thing.

Boy is this a campaign I would work on.

Posted by rjt at October 3, 2005 02:38 PM