Did you see that hoop he shot too ! Nature is speaking clearly to the
world now. Old school warmongering republicans and democrats are
history.
OffWorld
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com , feste37 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Good column from today's Washington Post. Obama has oodles of what we
used to call in the movement nature support. Things just go his way.
He's a lot more than a former community organizer, Shemp. A lot more.
Making His Own Luck
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, July 25, 2008; A21
It was as if the fates had conspired to give Barack Obama the kind of
foreign affairs photo op that a campaign manager would see only in his
wildest dreams. Damp, gray Berlin was alive with bright sunshine. A
crowd that police estimated at more than 200,000 filled the heart of
the city. They cheered not only when Obama talked about global warming
or called for a world without nuclear weapons but also when he spoke
of the fight against terrorism and the need for Europe to remain
engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in
our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all
too common, Obama chided -- and Berlin took the admonishment in
stride. What were the odds on that?
There has been much comment about the extraordinary luck that has
followed Obama's new Boeing 757 around the globe like an escort plane.
Indeed, from the Obama campaign's perspective, it would be hard to
script a better series of set pieces. He lands in Afghanistan just as
allied commanders and even Bush administration officials endorse his
view that more U.S. forces are needed there urgently. He moves on to
Baghdad, and Iraqi officials promptly echo his call to set a timetable
for U.S. withdrawal. He tiptoes through the minefield of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and somehow comes out unscathed.
After all this good fortune, the Berlin stop became more like a state
visit than a political foray. The huge media contingent traveling with
Obama, lacking gaffes or controversy to grill him about, was reduced
to asking how it felt to be welcomed by cheering multitudes whose
hosannas would embarrass a conquering hero.
A line commonly attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca says it
best: Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Legendary movie mogul Sam Goldwyn was even pithier: The harder I
work, the luckier I get.
Obama has been talking about the need to pay more attention to
Afghanistan -- and to schedule a pullout from Iraq -- for more than a
year. His enthusiastic welcome in Berlin owed much to the way he has
made restoring America's image in the world a major theme of his
campaign. Obama helped make the good luck that he's now enjoying.
Bad luck is a different thing, however. As Franklin Roosevelt said, I
think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not
enough the bad luck of the early worm.
John McCain is having an early worm kind of week. It's not just that
he goaded Obama into taking his trip. And it's not just that the
world's attention has been focused on Obama's trip, while McCain's
plane was met in New Hampshire the other day by only one reporter.
It's also that McCain's attempt to capitalize on one of his most
promising issues -- energy prices -- while Obama was preoccupied with
foreign affairs has seemed jinxed. The McCain campaign had the idea of
helicoptering the candidate to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico
to highlight his support for eliminating the ban on new offshore
drilling. But Hurricane Dolly made the trip dicey -- and a barge
accident in New Orleans that spilled 420,000 gallons of fuel oil into
the Mississippi River made it even dicier. A big, noxious oil spill
was not the backdrop McCain wanted. He ended up making a hastily
scheduled campaign appearance at a grocery store -- not quite the same
thing as commanding the world stage from the Victory Column in Berlin.
But a run of bad luck doesn't justify McCain's increasingly angry
rhetoric. His new attack line is that Obama would rather lose a war
in order to win a political campaign -- a stunning charge to level
against a fellow U.S. senator and perhaps a reflection of McCain's
frustration at having failed so far to paint Obama as some kind of
geopolitical naif.
If the grouching and grumbling continue, a campaign that once promised
to be a referendum on Barack Obama's experience threatens to become a
referendum on John McCain's temperament. At the moment, one of the
candidates is acting presidentially and one isn't.
McCain's crankiness toward Obama reminds me of something the French
writer Jean Cocteau once said: Of course I believe in luck. How
otherwise to explain the success of those you dislike?
