Where Would Obama Take the Nation?By Robert Parry
February 4, 2008
Among the recent flood of celebrity endorsements, one that has received little attention came in a Washington Post op-ed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, explaining why she’s backing Barack Obama. Her principal argument was that she believed Obama could help this generation of Americans pull together to address worsening problems and “leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found,” like her grandfather’s generation did. But Susan Eisenhower also recalled her grandfather’s great insight, the warning in his farewell address about the danger looming from the “military-industrial complex” and the potential that democracy might become the “insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
When combined with the endorsements of President John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline and his surviving brother Edward Kennedy, this Eisenhower support suggests that heirs to leaders from that earlier era see something in Obama that gives them hope that he can get the United States back on track with an earlier vision of America.
In Obama’s rhetoric, there are echoes of both Eisenhower’s cautionary advice and Kennedy’s famous speech at American University on June 10, 1963, when the President spoke about “the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
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Ending a War Mindset
Of the five remaining major candidates for President, only Obama seems to offer that kind of direction for resolving disputes through negotiations, not ultimatums. In the Jan. 31 debate in Los Angeles, he not only criticized Hillary Clinton’s vote authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq but he disputed the critique now prevalent in opinion circles of Washington, that the war was a good idea, just poorly executed. “I don’t want to just end the war (in Iraq), but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place,” Obama said.
Constitutional Vision
Obama also may have the most sophisticated understanding of the U.S. Constitution and how the Founders structured this complex system of checks and balances to protect individual liberties and to compel reasoned debate. A Harvard-educated lawyer who has lectured on the Constitution, Obama devoted a chapter in his memoir The Audacity of Hope to a discussion of how constitutional principles apply to today’s political challenges. In the chapter, Obama doesn’t do what many politicians do, cite the Constitution to support some favored position. He views the Constitution instead as an ingenious device that compels debate and compromise, while protecting individual liberties. “The answer I settle on – which is by no means original to me – requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had,” Obama writes.
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Obama continues: “The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. …
Where Would Obama Take the Nation?
On edit: PLEASE do not use this thread to criticize Obama or Hillary or their supporters. Thank you for being the peace that we all want to see.
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