ADVICE FOR OBAMA

Barack Obama swept the “Chesapeake Primaries” yesterday in a most impressive fashion. Any time a candidate collects votes at the 60 to 75% level, he is on a significant roll.

Tennis players are well aware of the vagaries of momentum that can cause a match to swing wildly from one player’s great advantage to the opponent’s jotting up one in the win column. I’m sure politicians learn the same lesson from their races and so avoid early celebration, but from here it looks as if Obama has definitely gained the upper hand.

One sign the savvy tennis player watches for is negative body language from his opponent. Just like a poker player knows to watch for his opponent to flinch, the tennis player watches for signs of disgust, anger, or discouragement on the part of the opponent.

Yesterday, Hillary flinched when she announced that she is now the underdog candidate. Not long ago she was riding the exultant wave of leadership in the race for the Democratic nomination. She had the most money. She had the most experience. She was the toughest. Now, suddenly, she declares herself the underdog. If nothing else has given Obama heart, that should.

John McCain, too, has shifted his rhetoric to recognize that his real opponent now is not the other Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee. Nor is it Hillary Clinton. McCain spoke yesterday to the Obama campaign of hope. He tried to belittle it by saying that a campaign of hope without solidly laid out policies is only a platitude, but if the idea of hope didn’t resonate, he wouldn’t have had to address it at all.

So here’s a little advice for Obama straight from the hinterlands. Maybe a bit more from the hip than the heart, but a straight shot nonetheless.

Keep hammering home your campaign of hope. Hope is what we need. Your platform is solid enough in the face of the McCain promise to keep us at war for another hundred years and to keep the common man impoverished by following the tax cut policies of the failed administration he seeks to emulate.

The hope you speak of is a hopeful America willing to put its shoulder to the wheel to make this country and this world a better place. That’s the hope JFK brought us, and it is most welcome as a returning beacon. But there is a greater hope embodied in our votes for you. That is the hope that you will bring our nation back to respectability; that you will stand move us from the false moral ground of blind, unfeeling patriotism to the true moral high ground of putting more of our energies into developing peace than into generating war; investing more of our future in the healing of our planet than in pillaging its resources during its final death throes; putting more of our taxes into caring for the people of America than into sheltering the economic position of its biggest corporations, and more of our patriotism into making a better niche for ourselves in the world community than that of the greediest consumer of its resources.

On the wings of that kind of hope, Obama, you just might lead this country back toward its finest hours as a morally upstanding super-power while still leading it forward into the potential the whole world shares as conservators of the planet.

That is our hope, and that is why you are garnering so many of our votes along with the fondest wishes in our hearts – that the country we love; the country we have served and fought for; the country that the whole world once imaginatively idealized as the shining beacon of freedom and the innate goodness of man might return again to the glow of international goodwill.

The war against terror will never be won with guns and bombs. If it is won, it will be won because the people of the world will not tolerate their neighbors’ attacks on a country they perceive to be a friend; a country that gives of itself rather than taking unto itself; a country that comes to the rescue instead of causing the destruction; and a country that demonstrates its strength not through bombing raids, but through diplomacy and through caring for its own citizens so that they might all thrive in the wealth their collective industry can provide.

So please keep us hoping. Please keep us believing that the future can be better. Don’t falter in the face of facetious criticism, but continue to lead us toward a better future. At this point, the nation believes in you. All you have to do is continue to believe in yourself. If you do that we will begin, once again, to believe in ourselves.


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle