Young people across the country are responding to Sen. Obama's uplifting message. This op-ed comes from a senior from the George Bush's alma mater.
From Yale Daily News:
When it comes to political leadership, Americans are starving, and they have been for a long time. The United States has gradually seen its population waste away, malnourished on an insubstantial diet of focus-group-tested platitudes. Above all, candidates are afraid of saying the wrong thing, and so they manage to say nothing at all. They are on perpetual verbal autopilot; they stick to the party line and their talking points, using all their mental energy to strike out at the other side of the aisle, rather than propose innovative solutions to the problems ordinary America faces.
Obama’s appeal comes, more than anything else, from his recognition that the American people are exhausted with this brand of politics. His charisma and his eloquence are magnified by his tendency to assume that he isn’t speaking to a bunch of idiotic preschoolers whenever he opens his mouth in public. On issue after issue, Obama is given to speaking with nuance, respect and a quiet appeal to reason. It is marvelously refreshing, and so far it has worked.
One core of Obama’s message for the country is spectacularly simple: Few things are really all black or all white. The candidate, who has described his Kansas mother as “white as milk” and his Kenyan father as “black as pitch,” is a walking, talking almost-too-perfect metaphor for this principle.
He has consistently infused his rhetoric with this conviction, and he has gotten an overwhelming response.
