horse of george

"... everyone has demons, everyone vulnerable to delusions and darker matters that lie in wait behind the stars... how Obama will be set upon by his is a question that will not go unanswered, that's the nature of the job... where we will stand as a nation consequent to such is a state that may resist divination... or may become all too familiar... but if you press me to hazard a guess I'll say my main concerns... once you get past the economy, which pretty much overshadows everything right now... my main concerns breakdown thusly: he can't escape or worse resist the siren calls of the wrought left wing... regardless of him so far seeming to position himself as a pragmatic centrist the left still views him as the saviour of everything they hold dear... how he deals with the pressure that will come from them and possibly himself regarding this salvation will be key... not to mention that it's not at all clear yet that the man isn't a sheep temporarily gone wolfish as part of a political calculation...; that his election, because of the race component, but more importantly I think because Bush has been so thoroughly and irrationally demonized, is being invested, larded with a dangerous amount of naive idealism that is by its very nature doomed to be disappointed... how certain constituencies respond to that disappointment, at home and abroad, could complicate things to the point where his administration becomes confused...; and then I worry that his 'academicness' will prove debilitating... professorial types like him tend to put too much emphasis on what they're good at, subtle argumentation, and therefore, out of a sense of inferiority or fear of losing what passes as control for them, tend to demean or shy away from its antithesis - cold, hard action... a leader of an empire stands his people in good stead if he's adept at both, is comfortable with both... right now we have absolutely no idea how Obama will measure up when it comes to the burden of having to act with harsh and sometimes cruel precision... we have no idea because he's never been in a position of true leadership, a want that has and should still cause any reasonable person to view with skepticism his high minded rhetoric... rhetoric that too often seems inclined to fancy that words and deeds are the same thing and that an ideal, once expressed, is magically transformed into an actuality..."