Ready or Not, Here I Come!

‘Is America ready for a black president?’, the question is all over the place, infact I Googled it and got 632,000 results.  632,000 results?  Insane.    Have we as a country asked ourselves if we’re ready for yet another white president?  Do we reply to that question with “Well, George Washington was white and did pretty well.  Abraham Lincoln was also white and he did pretty well too.  And Zachary Taylor, well I’m pretty sure he was white and thats all I know about him.  So, sure let’s elect John McCain, he’s white and thats good enough for me.”  Thats plain idiocy.  The color of one’s skin does not dictate the strength of their character, the level of their intellect, or their capacity for being a great leader. We must take our leaders as they are, by their actions and their words and determine their qualifications from those terms. 

What if we raised out awareness just a small amount and instead, asked ourselves, “Is America ready for a good president?  A decent president?  A president that is a true leader?”

What’s Good for the Governor, Isn’t always Good for the Rest of the Flock

This afternoon, The New York Times reported that Governor Spitzer of New York was linked to a prostitution ring.  Not simply linked, but seemingly a paying client.  This is a politician who has come down hard on wrong doing, that surprisingly involved at one point…2 prostitution rings.  This sort of ‘I can do whatever I please, but you the little people better get with the program’ attitude shouldn’t be surprising at this point.  Senator John McCain has never waivered from his conviction that abortion is wrong, voting consistently to erode and possibly over turn Roe v. Wade and yet when asked about what would happen if his daughter became pregnant with an unwanted child, he replied that he would support her decision whatever that may be.  How come she gets to choose, but the rest of us are told what to do?  Dick Cheney has come out against same sex marriages, supporting a Constitutional Amendment to make marriage only between a man and woman…and yet his daughter is a lesbian, “married” and having children, creating a family.  How come she gets to have an ‘alternative’ family and the rest of us are told its an abomination?

I’m leaning towards the belief that as far as we in America feel we have left behind monarchies, that we are all created equal…we’re not as far away as we think.  Our leaders and those who speak for us seem to see the world seperated into 2 camps, the people (aka mindless riffraff) and the anointed ones.

John ‘Chicken Little’ McCain

In my recent research into the ways and means of Senator John McCain, one name repeatedly appears…President Theodore Roosevelt.  He is hero, father figure, and a persona to emmulate all at once for the Senator from Arizona.  Which at first didn’t seem to be negative or questionable, as it seems Theodore Roosevelt is regarded as a great leader, great man, and the personification of all that is best in Americans.  A spirit as wild as the western lands he loved and as tender as the man teddy bears were named for.        

Time, the great eqalizer, plays both sides of the political equation.  On the one hand it offers distance to  leaders from the very peole they represent and in the generations to come, we the people have the luxury of viewing those self same leaders through a different form of distance.  Time allows us to see leaders in a larger fashion, a progressing time line that leads to today, and it is for the most part rather forgiving.  We can never truly understand what it felt like to live in America during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, just as we can only guess at what it would be like to live during a McCain administration.  But, considering that Roosevelt wasn’t re-elected, there must have been people who didn’t see in him the greatness we attribute to him today.  For better or worse though, he was man of his times.  He represented the age in which he lived in, the better part of that age…the part we like to recall.  He was a member of the highest tier of society, which allowed him the luxury of pursuing any and all things that interested him.  This was by no means the ordinary, for the ordinary.

John McCain on the other hand, regardless of any traits he may share with President Theodore Roosevelt, is most assuredly not a man of his times.  He represents neither the best or the worst of the world we live in.  He is a man capable of revealing his greatest crimes and cruelties, but dare not learn from them.   His opinions and “maverick” ways are as changing as the weather.  He was opposed to military intervention during the Clinton presidency and yet now embraces it the way a child clings to a security blanket in the darkness.  He declares he is a rebel on Capital Hill and yet his most rebellious actions more often than not, are flipping the bird to a naysayer. 

In the end, Theodore Roosevelt spoke up and out for courage and John McCain… a preacher in fear.  So, for all his worship of Roosevelt, he is a very pale version of the Bull Moose…more Chicken Little than anything.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!