Trusting Barack Obama

Barring some catastrophe, next Tuesday we will elect Barak Obama President of the United States. Amazingly, we came to trust him and there is a good chance that his will be the presidency that we need.

We are in the midst of one of the most serious crises in 100 years and it isn't just financial or domestic. It is military, political, economic and social and it endangers our way of life.

It's a mess. The world's most powerful army is being wasted in Iraq. Our entrepreneurial economy, the world's engine, is grinding to a halt. Our innovative financial system is collapsing. And the nature of the most basic social unit, the family, has become a ballot referendum.

Globalization was supposed to spread democratic capitalism. Instead it has lurched into an unsustainable empire of far-flung military bases, greedy international banks and predatory corporations.

The deregulation and free-market ideology that has been in place over the past 30 years tied the country up in knots and constricted our freedom. The world that we know is self-destructing into what has been called the Great Unraveling.

A President Obama will face a set of problems that were only alluded to in the campaign and for which there are no acceptable answers. Why would anyone, Obama or McCain, want to take on the chaos which now seems beyond control?

The old models are at best curiosities. Henry Paulson is Secretary of the Treasury in a Republican administration and he was the high priest of Wall Street as president of Goldman Sachs. Yet he seems to be channeling Karl Marx as he wipes out all of the storied Wall Street firms, socializes the largest banks and turns the Federal Reserve System into a printing press!

At the same time the McCain campaign is accusing Obama of being a socialist. Some things are so disconnected that they are beyond irony. More fatefully, this means that the market idolatry, the so-called limited government program of the past 30 years, is dead and all the options are on the table for a President Obama.

The campaign never really addressed these core problems and options. Instead the campaign became focused on personalities and character traits. And that was not a bad way to go.

Chaos breeds insecurity; insecurity breeds distrust; and we can do nothing without trust. How do you get Joe six-pac, soccer moms and the business community to trust the presidency and our country to a Chicago-based 47 year-old black man with an African name?

That was the problem Obama faced and solved.

He did it by gaining our trust. The internal watchword or motto of the campaign was: "Barack - no shock, Obama - no drama." It was a quiet, constant steadiness in the candidate and his campaign that made him trusted and acceptable as our president in these troubled times.

As Senator Hillary Clinton and then Senator McCain shifted from one line of attack to another, they got pushed around by events. Obama stayed with his original plan. He resisted entreaties from his supporters to answer in kind and go on the attack. Demonstrating control was the only way he could gain the people's trust and deserve to win.

It was the firm and persevering ability to stay with the message at hand and not be drawn out into personal or extraneous matters that made people trust that he would treat the problems of his presidency with the same constancy.

I could list the programs I want to see in the first hundred days: investment in green infrastructure and a green economy, a regulated financial system, a universal single-payer healthcare system and, of course, an end to the Iraq idiocy. I don't know how much of this I will see but I trust that Obama will provide a consistent and carefully thought out approach to our problems.

So I will welcome a President Barak Hussein Obama, a man we can trust to be steady in these most uncertain of times.