Michael Eric Dyson: Barack Obama

[illinoisprogressive]

Barack Obama

Michael Eric Dyson



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Time to Choose: As the primary season approaches, eight Nation contributors make their case for the candidates.
If the Democratic presidential primary were held today in your state, whom would you support? Cast your vote in the Nation Poll.

Ever since he thundered into our collective consciousness with an electrifying speech before the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has breathed new life into American politics. He has revived the hope of millions that their elected leaders would dare to dream outside the rigid categories and earthbound aspirations that hold too many politicians captive. Though his written word sings and his spoken word soars on the wings of renewed faith in the democratic process--and how we need such renewal in an ugly age of despotic indifference to freedom's true creed--Obama's eyes are fixed on what we can make together of our national future.

For a clue to what makes Obama stick and tick, one need look no further than his training in the trenches of community organizing. As Ronald Reagan practiced what Vice President George Bush would call "voodoo economics"--supply-side theories wrapped in tax cuts for the wealthy--Obama exited the Ivy League corridors of Columbia University in 1983 and, after a brief and unsatisfying stint on Wall Street, headed straight for the 'hood. On the South Side of Chicago, he worked with a church-based group that sought to speak to poverty by understanding the language of its painful expression in crime and high unemployment. Obama rolled up his sleeves--something he was used to in satisfying his basketball jones on the courts of many a concrete jungle--and applied elbow grease and hard thinking to the persistent ills and unjust plight of the poor. Such practical training in relieving the burdens of the beleaguered will stand him in good stead as leader of the free world--as the poignant memory of the most afflicted replays in his mind.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/dyson

[Clintonista2]

1. Funny thing happened after I read the first eight empty slogans...

:boring: