Choosing our Future President

The future is what this election is about. Here are a few thoughts about that.

If John McCain becomes president, he will take office at the age of 72. The oldest man to be elected president. His father and grandfather were distinguished US Navy admirals in WWII. John McCain himself served and did hard time in a POW camp in Viet Nam. That was a very long time ago. The America that greeted John McCain when he returned from Viet Nam must have seemed quite different from the country he left to serve. The Viet Nam war ended in 1975. Just think how different our world has become since then.

Now consider this:

If elected, Barack Obama will become our first post Cold War president.
He will be the first American President to mature in the the modern
post WWII/post Cold War era. That post war era may not have ended on Sept 11, 2001,
but a new era certainly began on that day and the fact that Barack Obama is not bound to the previous era but embarks in the new era is a decided plus. We can no more go back to calling on our post war success in this day and age than we can re-unite the Beatles.

I watched Senator Obama's speech, "A More Perfect Union" or, the "Race Speech" again last night online. If you have time, review John Kennedy's First Inaugural Address and see where Senator Obama's political roots are. Watch John Kennedy be the first President to address the people of the world live on television. His understanding and mastery of TV gave him command of the election and his message reached to the far corners of the world. (My first online search for a link to this speech hit on a Chinese server.) Senator Obama has internet skills John McCain doesn't even comprehend and Barack Obama already speaks to the world.

If he is elected, Barack Obama will be the first president who understands the internet the way Kennedy understood TV. He has built a solid campaign on the internet and has become the first candidate to figure out how to fully integrate his message across all new media.

If he is elected, Barack Obama will be the first African American president. He will be in the unique position of Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson. Americans who responded to "no you can't" with "yes we can". And as such, he will be the first American president with the moral authority to face down the racist past of white America and the opportunistic bullying of soon to be irrelevant black nationalists.

If he is elected, Barack Obama will be the first modern liberal in America. He will be free from the cynical calculations of Democrats from the last generation. In a day when the word liberal no longer holds enough venom, and socialist or communist or anti American or terrorist must be used in it's stead, this will be no small victory for middle America.

If he is elected, he will be the first global citizen to be elected president.
James Garfield (1831 - Orange, Cayuhoga County, Ohio) was the last president to claim birth in a log cabin. Bu we've held fast to the myth of humble frontier beginnings ever since. Barack Obama has humble roots and humble beginnings that span America's modern frontier to the West - in the Pacific. Born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia before coming to Kansas, Cambridge Massachusetts and finally Chicago Illinois. He has already seen the world Americans inhabit.

He will be the first visionary president since Reagan.

He will be the first "philosopher king" since Kennedy.

He will be the first president who sees the future in our time.