I've Been Watching

Since Barack Obama was declared the presumptive Democratic nominee on the final night of the primary season, I’ve been sitting back and observing. The truth is that I have devoted a tremendous amount of my personal time to the campaign, and it was time for me over the past few weeks to throw myself into my work. Truth be told, I still have a paying job, and since it finally picked up over the past few weeks, I had to make hay while the sun shined.

Distancing myself from campaign work has allowed me to regain a perspective that is a bit different from being directly in the trenches. I have allowed myself to watch and listen to various media outlets , stations and channels on the left and far right, and I now feel that I have developed a sense of where this presidential contest is headed. I must say that I am not really surprised, but at the same time, I am still somewhat disturbed by what I see.

As luck would have it…well, it’s really more than luck. It’s fate and great timing. We have a terrific candidate in Barack. I adore him, and he has really become a symbol for my entire family to rally around. My wife and I have not felt like this for most of our adult lives, and it’s been very empowering to be a Democrat in 2008. I have also been very pleased to watch my daughter, who will be 20 in August, blossom into an involved and engaged member of our American democracy.

I have watched with curiosity John McCain and how his campaign has evolved. He is an enigma in the sense that he has completely reinvented himself from the McCain of eight years ago. We cannot take him seriously, and yet he is all the Republicans have got, and even though he fails in almost every category of representation as a qualified and quality candidate for the Republican Party, the powers that be have bounced into action as if they have another Ronald Reagan running for president.

Barack must plow ahead and continue on his historic journey toward the presidency. He is a superior person and candidate to John McCain, but we must not spend one moment becoming complacent. By the time we reach the election in November, Barack will be slandered, lied about, had his record completely misrepresented and outright shredded, and he is relatively untested when it comes to the attack machine that is the Republican Party. They are just getting started, and one look at what they’ve done to Democratic candidates from Dukakis to Gore to Kerry will remind us how potent their venom is.

McCain looked into the camera about two months ago and said that he will run a positive campaign, completely free of negative attacks on his opponent. Although no one with one working brain cell believed that, he has actually made an art of his daily attacks on Obama. He and his surrogate team seem to have almost abandoned an actual agenda in lieu of seeing what Barack is talking about or doing and then either reacting to that or countering his words and attacking him politically and personally, technically substituting a traditional game plan with an attack strategy, kind of a scorched earth on Obama policy.

Well, in the long run it won’t work, but it’s painful to watch sometimes. I visited a very close friend yesterday who is wealthy, Republican and quite self-righteous when it comes to support of what has protected his vast assets the last eight years. I have deliberately stayed away from politics during our many visits, but yesterday he was a bit feisty, and since I was coming directly from a meeting at the San Mateo County Central Democratic office where I will put in quite a bit of time the next several months, he was ready to pounce.
He first asked me what I plan to do for Barack Obama and this country. He is very well aware that I am headed to Denver as an Obama delegate, although he’s never brought it up or congratulated me for it. I told him that I will spend a good amount of time registering voters and that since voting is clearly our most important right, one that is ignored by over half of our population every election, this is my highest calling.

He started asking me about Obama’s tax policy, and reminded me that the word Democrat is synonymous with raising taxes. Before I could even answer, he also told me that he essentially knows nothing about Barack Obama because he’s so secretive and doesn’t really want to come out and let the world see who he really is. Sounds like a Fox News headline to me. He asked me what I thought of Obama’s plan to raise everyone’s taxes.

I informed him that Obama’s plan is to actually lower the taxes on a vast majority of this country, certainly those making under what we would all consider the higher end of the spectrum, and that people who are high-end wage earners have been protected long enough over the past eight years of the Bush Administration and it’s time that they should pay their fair share. He of course didn’t agree with me and felt that no one should have one dime of extra taxes to pay.

He also pointed out that Democrats have the philosophy that government should pay for everything, and that it’s his presumption that Obama is in the same mold of Democrats of years past, and I let him know that the unique gift that Barack has is in considering all modes of paying for things in this country, and that he would strive to determine the best ways to have necessary government programs get funded and be paid for.

My friend then pointed out that he doesn’t believe that we should just abandon Iraq and allow our “enemies” to see us a quitters and that we should complete the mission as the victors. I once again pointed out that Obama completely comprehends the necessity to get us out of Iraq as carefully as he can while getting the rest of the world and Iraqis themselves to shoulder the burden that the US is now completely taking on themselves, and that we need the vast amount of money that we are wasting in Iraq to spend on the infrastructure of our own country.

Lastly, he has totally bought into the McCain/Bush proposition that we should begin exploration for oil on the continental shelf and oceans in our country, because that is the best way to wean ourselves off of foreign oil, and I was happy to point out to him that this proposal is a red herring, that the oil companies already own vast oil leases in many parts of our country already that are capped and that they are simply sitting on them to control the price and supply of oil that is available to consumers.

My friend represents a portion of our country that I see and hear every day, and it is all of our responsibilities to enlighten everyone around us as to what the truth is about Barack Obama. I have enjoyed a few weeks off from the grind of the primary season, and now I’m renewed, fired up and ready to go on with the rest of the election. I will try to stay positive and recognize that I have a job to do, as we all do, and I will not rest until I’m on the plane heading to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of President Obama.