dengre's outstanding diary I choose change and I choose Obama! inspired some thoughts and observations about Obama, which I wanted to share with you.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has a lesson to teach us.
In that movie, Gore made a trans-partisan appeal to people, asking all of us to rise above the usual bickering and the mundane in order to recognize the grave threat that the living beings of the planet are faced with.
That by itself didn't stop the denialists from their campaign to derail the message. They even ramped up their efforts to a new fever pitch and hence they needed to be, and to some degree still need to be, fought off.
However, in the process, the denialists became the fringe, as a sea shift took place across the board in terms of acknowledging the problem at hand. By the nature of his appeal, Gore transcended over the denialism on acknowledging and acting to reverse rapid climate change.
That's the nature of the message Obama is bringing to the table. Unless we persuade those that disagree with us into opening their ears, we can't get them to hear the message of change. Can we? If they don't even hear the message, why would they support that message?
Obama isn't saying let's sit down and cut deals with the exceedingly selfish interests, which is what the Obama bashers would have us believe.
Instead, Obama's making an appeal to the population at large that we're all in this together. While we all have self-interests, we also share collective interests, overlapping paths and a certain common destiny.
In other words, Obama's message is not that we should live and die by compromise, but instead to work to build and reach a consensus towards commond good and common purpose and implement the same to forge change.