The 22nd year of being Ryan Hartley, documented.

It must have reached the point now where we the majority of us have heard more about America’s first non-white (amazing thing that – describing something in the negative) president, so I’ll keep this as short as possible. I am shamelessly Pro-bama. Have been since before Oprah. It wasn’t any sort of prescient political vision, I was just amused at the possibility of America being led by someone whose middle-name was Hussein. That’s how it started at any rate. In spending time following the election, watching the debates and reading the articles I was completely won over by the Harvard lawyer and the aura of destiny he seemed to project. Not that I think the kid is perfect. Before he was President-elect, he and hope for a nation and the world, he was only a first term senator with limited experience and only a really good Democratic Convention key-note address behind his name. There are plenty of things wrong with him which the media seemed in no hurry to point out. Unfortunately, those who did draw attention to his missteps where often less than capable of eloquently bringing a point across. So, instead of the cogent argument: “Why did Obama renege his commitment to only use public funding in his campaign?” we got the rather less astute: “Did Obama bought the election(sic)?”[1] Come on guys! If you can’t cobble together a sentence in English then get someone else to write your political commentary. Many of those who did have enough of brain to formulate a decent argument managed to colour their opinions with patently ridiculous prejudices.”Obama is a Muslim”, ”Obama is a terrorist” and one of my favourite lines of all time:”I’m not racist but I’ll never trust a black”. These two groups conspired to force any half-intelligent, non-racist individual to consider supporting Obama purely out of embarrassment at what the other side was saying.

But even without all the blatant idiocy from Republican supporters, I think I still would have had to be firmly in Obama’s camp. I found the clearest expression of why in an article in the Sunday Times. “Obama doesn’t have a dream,” it said, “Obama is the dream.” Obama is what every progressive thinking individual holds up as the standard we should all be striving to achieve. He is a child of the global village, a child of a multi-racial family, growing up in foreign countries, a tolerant and eloquent intellectual, focussed on youth and technology and the future. He is everything that liberals say is good and right. It seems the youth of an entire planet have vicariously claimed his victory as their own. I place myself in that group, seeing in him something of what I aspire to be. In truth though, Obama is a human being and not an exemplar of Post-post-modern values. This simple, self-evident fact, may be a bitter pill for those young idealists to swallow.