2008 Year in Review

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama

Prayers have been answered and the US has finally, maybe even begrudgingly, joined the community of nations.

If you live in Morrison, IL and you don’t have any Republican friends, you probably don’t have any friends at all. With this in mind and with Senator John McCain’s wonderful concession speech to spring from, I think it is safe to say that Mr. Obama was the obvious choice and a positive step forward both in the history of our nation, and for the future of our nation. This is not to say that Mr. McCain was a poor choice, but had he won, the message sent to the rest of the world, our youth and to all marginalized people would have been, “better luck next time – you are not ready to fully participate in or lead the world’s oldest democracy.”

A friend told me that a few years ago he received a political message in the mail supporting Obama for US Senate and he threw it in the trash. Why would I vote for a Muslim, he thought. Why would we vote for someone who isn’t exactly like us or share our values or speak our language even if he was, for example, a Middle Eastern Jew, drew large crowds with radical speeches and spoke Aramaic? I told my friend that Obama is a Christian, just like him and that probably his theology more closely resembled his than it did mine. He was quick to point out the anti-American rhetoric of Obama’s former pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. All I could think of was that rebel Martin Luther telling the Roman Catholic church that they had been not treating people correctly or fairly and that things had to change.

I read an article that questioned whether we would have elected a black man if he had graduated at a prestigious university near the bottom of his class, was a war hero and had an extra-marital affair and divorced his wife who had been disfigured in a car accident? Or would a black man or woman with 5 children including an unwed pregnant teen have been considered suitable for US vice-president? My friend felt that McCain would have done better if he was just allowed to be himself and hadn’t attacked Obama so much and so often. President Obama will raise raise your taxes. President Obama went to a Muslim madrassa and is the anti-christ and a former drug user. In my opinion, if it weren’t for lies, which is an acceptable and apparently necessary way to run a political campaign in the US, McCain would not have done as well as he did. McCain actually did pretty well considering the state of our economy and the approval rating of our current president. I guess we’ll never know how it would have turned out without attack ads.

We’ve had a regular old white guy with good old Christian values lead our nation for the last 8 years. It has been painful for educators who are trying to get our kids to study hard and speak English correctly. We will now have a well educated and eloquent leader. This does not guarantee success, but at least we can take some pride in a majority white nation electing a minority candidate for the highest office in the land – of the most powerful nation on earth.

US presidential elections are big news around the world. They provide lots of theater, lots of entertainment, go on and on for a long time and everyone can have an opinion. You can go into an Irish pub or a market in Kenya or a hut in Afghanistan and hear informed discussion of US politicians. Unfortunately, even with massive turnout we still only managed to get a little over 60% of the American electorate involved.

If you are an American you can look at President-elect Obama and see that he looks like us. If you are a citizen of the world you can say the same. Many of us don’t care what the rest of the world thinks about us or our president. Maybe that’s been the problem.

by Marc Adami, Guest Columnist
December 5, 2008