I've recently started a conversation with a former student whom I taught when he was a freshman and sophomore in high school. I noticed on his facebook page that he considered himself a conservative so I asked him why he thought of himself as a conservative. I am more happy than words can really express that this 23 year old young man took my question seriously enough to not only answer me, but to also want a conversation between the two of us regarding our political differences.
In his letter to me, he asked why I support Obama. I wanted to share with you part of my response to him.
Like I said at the beginning of my letter, I've been voting for 20 years, and 95% of my voting record has been for the Democratic Party. One of the really big reasons I consider myself a progressive Democrat has to do with the issues of tolerance and acceptance. I personally believe that no matter your race, religion, gender, sexual preference, hair color, eye color, whatever, when it really comes down to it, we are all equal on the human level - the genetic level - and as such, not only do we all have the unalienable right to be treated equally regardless of our differences, but we also have the right to representation that reflects those differences.
Tolerance is a tough idea for many people to deal with. If you look to your religious training and stories in the New Testament, tolerance was a tough issue in biblical times also. Jesus was ridiculed because he was in the company of tax collectors and whores (and Mary Magdalene is described as a whore before she came to Jesus, so I'm not trying to be disrespectful.), but by his actions, he was trying to teach tolerance. When I was teaching and I'll nail a student for saying "this is gay" I was trying to teach tolerance. Any society is weakened when energy is spent tearing each other down, pointing out what is different rather than looking to see what is the same.
For the first time since Jimmy Carter (who was elected when I was 8 years old), there is a Democratic candidate who really represents that whole idea of "we" that I so strongly believe in. When Obama first came on my personal political radar in 2004, he was such a strong contrast to any previous African-American candidate I've ever seen run for national office. Jesse Jackson, who ran for President in the 80's, and Alan Keys, who was running against Obama in 2004, were what I would call "fire and brimstone" candidates. Arms would be waiving and voices raised, and you would get the feeling you were being preached to, and if you didn't do exactly what the candidate said, the country was going to hell in a hand-basket. Obama was different. He spoke from a platform of tolerance right from the beginning. But the "zing" that really told me that he was special as an elected representative was his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
That year, the networks decided to only air three of the four convention evenings for each party, and for the Democratic Convention, it was decided that Tuesday, the second evening, would be the night that the networks skipped. The network heads probably saw Obama's name down as one of the evening's speakers, didn't recognize the name, and thought that was the best night to not air coverage. All I can say to that is thank goodness I live in the Chicago land viewing area, because local coverage on ABC broke into network programming, and I got to see Obama's speech live.
The man has a way with words, but it is more that just words. The power of his speech is not in the words but in the ideas behind them. 2004 was a bitter political year. The Republican Party was really preying on fears and differences, and we were being fragmented as a country. Obama's speech told us America didn't have to be that way. His speech brought into focus that those differences that were being used to scare us need to be embraced instead, because it is the culmination of those differences that make us Americans.
In all of my adult voting life, I had never heard a politician talk that way, and that gave me hope. I grew up watching elections where the candidates tore each other apart, looking for the smallest weakness to exploit, so that when you finally get to the voting booth, you have been so worn down by the constant battering of negativity that your choice becomes not for the best candidate, but for the lesser of two evils, or the candidate who seemed less negative than the other one.
I'm too young to remember Bobby Kennedy, but I've read books and watched documentaries about the kind of campaign he was attempting to run back in 1968. I feel Obama is trying to run that same type of campaign - not exploiting differences and fears but rather trying to get us to recognize individually what we have in common as a society, and then to build on that to really become a government by the people that is really for the people, instead of the corporations that can give big to your next election campaign.
I also believe that Obama is honest and straight-forward, but most importantly, when he makes a mistake, not only does he admit it, but he learns from it. Take this whole "gas-tax holiday" that is the latest buzz. At different stump speeches, Obama has spoken out against such a holiday, mainly for two reasons - 1) there is no real guarantee that such a tax break would in fact actually lower gas prices because there was nothing keeping the oil companies from raising costs anyway, and 2) that tax break would prevent money going into fund responsible for interstate road and bridge repair, which would also mean a loss of jobs because the funding wasn't there to do the repairs. Those reasons sounded pretty acceptable to me, but that wasn't enough for some people. So Obama went on Meet the Press this past Sunday and gave another reason why he was against a gas-tax holiday - he had voted for it before when it was a proposal for the State of Illinois, and it didn't work. He acknowledged that he made a mistake voting for the proposal then, and because of that experience, he was against such a proposal now.
I think part of being a true leader is being able to recognize when you have made a mistake. When you can accept that something went wrong, you grow and learn from that experience and it can only make you better. Why is it okay for "regular" people to make mistakes, but our political leaders have to be "infallible supermen?" Aren't they just as human as the rest of us? I have more respect for a politician who can admit they made a mistake, because I know they could have "played it safe" and not admitted to any weakness that an opponent might use against them, but they took a chance on the idea that mistakes can be corrected. And if mistakes are acknowledged and corrected, maybe, just maybe we won't have to repeat them further down the road.
I like Obama as a candidate because he calls on each of us to look past the differences and accept the better nature of ourselves. If we could all go back to that child we once were who didn't care if Sha'wanna's skin was darker than mine because what was really important was that we both liked the latest Jackson 5 song, or it didn't matter if Gabe's family didn't celebrate Christmas like my family did because he got a really cool set of Tonka trucks and he said I could play with them. As kids, we didn’t see the differences in people until we were "taught" to see them, and things become so fractured that pretty soon all we can see are the differences. The new challenge is to try to discover what is the same about us again.
(Steps off the soapbox and takes a breather)