History is full of men and women who didn't always live up to the grand messages they put forth. You could call this hypocrisy, and many do. But unfortunately those with the most beautiful dreams are not always those with the purest life. The failings of a man to meet his ideal should not reflect upon the worthiness of that ideal or the gift he has given others by sharing it - it reflects on the man alone.
Which is an abstract way of voicing my prediction that Obama will disappoint us, probably many times. He will fail, he may become corrupted, he may not, we don't know. But that doesn't make the ideal he espouses any less admirable, any less sound, any less necessary. Few people are fully enlightened in this life - I'm certainly not and I don't think Obama is either. But a lot of people don't care, they don't give a crap, they've given up. A lot of politicians have given up. A lot of Americans have given up. I think there are some Kossacks that are tempted to give up. I'm sure there are days when Obama considers giving up, days on which he gets called a terrorist for the zillionth time or accidentally stabs himself with his shiny new lapel pin.
We have to keep each other going, pushing the nation further down the path to enlightenment, pushing ourselves slowly toward emotional adulthood. We have to keep Obama going, if only for the simple reason that he's trying and he cares and he inspires us to do good things, and that's better than 99% of the politicians out there.
Please don't get me wrong - I think "mistake" isn't strong enough for what happens when someone in power messes up- we need a new word, something that evokes untold numbers of people suffering great injustice, rather than someone accidentally putting their pants on backwards. If Obama is like all other great leaders, he will make "mistakes" of great magnitude, ranging from inconveniencing many many people to gross disruption for (hopefully) a smaller number of people. Political mistakes are inevitable, but that doesn't mean they're acceptable. It makes sense to express our disappointment, and to demand that any errors (again, a word that minimizes the scale of the ramifications) be rectified.
But we have to keep on going, keep each other going, keep Obama going. Cynicism is born, I think, out of great disappointments...and moral recklessness is often born from cynicism. The risks of staying hopeful are mostly personal - we may be disappointed again, we may feel stupid, we may feel like we wasted our time, our money, our trust. The risks inherent to cynicism or apathy are much greater, I expect, and the potential victims far more widespread - think of all the people suffering under the Bush regime because enough people in the right places didn't vote against him.