The Challenge Ahead

What can it be that convinces people that they’re imbued with the requisite sobriety, confidence, self-assurance and intelligent direction that can not only persuade themselves they can succeed in whatever direction their mind turns, but that they can also extend their belief in self to enliven others’ imaginations in their exceptionality?

These are individualistic, idealistic people so confident in their insightful capabilities that nothing can serve to dissuade them from their belief in themselves. That individual believes implicitly in his personal endowments of grace, intelligence and maturity of action, giving him entitlement to reach for the stars. Imbuing him with a quiet confidence and a burning determination.

They are capable, these rare individuals, of such charismatic confidence and empathetic sensitivities toward others that they become wildly successful in drawing other people to their personal aspirations. Infusing them with a new vision that they articulate for the end purpose of ascending to a seat of deterministic power.
With it, a sense of personal obligation to succeed at representing the public interest.

They have an overwhelming desire to lead people. In a direction that they have identified, that corresponds to their singular ethical and moral code. Reflecting social mores as they should be. Can this singularity of self-identification be anything other than the reflections of a Messiah complex? The compelling need to administer to the needs of others...

There's a reason that Barack Obama flashed onto the American political scene, so swiftly rising from an unknown of suspicious origins, to a dignified, confident figure offering hope for the future to his confused, beleaguered and despondently disillusioned fellow Americans. He has become, to them, a kind of superior being.

Although the race for the presidency does have racial overtones, Barack Obama, while identifying his black ancestry over that of his white, places himself, as a candidate for the highest office of the land, as a representative of all America. Most particularly the middle-class, the working class, the immigrants, those stuck in blighted poverty and lack of education.

And at what a time in his country's history. When it has become heavily embroiled on two war fronts the current administration initiated. When its national financial institutions have collapsed through neglect of oversight and greedy mismanagement. When American citizens have lost employment in huge numbers. When the future has been obscured by a demoralizing fear of personal economic disaster.

If Barack Obama succeeds in further making history beyond his obvious success in reaching the Democratic presidency candidacy - to take the White House - his will not be an easy journey to deliver his promises of hope. It's one thing to enthuse an electorate with his message "we can do it", but can they, at this time, turn the nation on a course more acceptable to a future of confidence and stability?

Although Barack Obama, as the first black American to reach such a level of success has the international community sitting on tenterhooks with their belief that his administration will become a balm to international tensions and disasters, how can he deliver? He will retain the obligation of an American head of state to place the country's interests first and foremost.

He hasn't the freedom to enact his agenda of raising taxes and to embark on redistribution of wealth. Doing that at this critical time; setting up a universal health care system, balancing the financial support that the current administration has promised its failed financial and banking system.

Then there is the additional matter of trade; responding to the country's international obligations, re-structuring its Free Trade agreements with various countries, will surely result in added uncertainty as international investors in the money markets withdraw even further from investing confidence.

And while the country's vital infrastructures remain in disarray, as the new administration tries to find a balanced footing, deliver a nuanced message that must inevitably inform the voting public that not everything they wished for can be expected just yet - and in fact, they'll be expected to launch themselves on a voluntary diet of restraint - investment from abroad may be further constrained.

And then there is the unspoken but very real threat to the stability of the new administration if it disappoints that vast demographic that placed its trust in its new leader, unable now to deliver them from their immediate uncertainties. Allied with the resentment and hostility of that other demographic that would not vote Democratic, and would never, ever, vote for a black man to lead them.

The country, polarized far more seriously than it was back in 2000 when George W. Bush first took the presidency through superior electoral seats - while the popular vote gave his opponent a 500,000-popular-vote majority - stands in danger of becoming even more bitter about the vote outcome. Two distinct and opposite viewpoints, and values unrealized.

Out of which can grow the misfortune of the kind of radical response that has seen too many prior assassinations of other worthy and beloved candidates for high office in the land.