It's distressing, only in the sense of unfamiliarity, that Barack Obama is doing so many things right already. I have read that the most profoundly unsettling thing about international travel, for example, is that nothing is where it usually is in your life and you have to adapt every waking minute. That's probably why you can remember the details of trips so well: you had to focus, whereas one's usual somnambulant routine requires no such concentration.
I watched the interview of Barack's campaign team last night on "60 Minutes." They were calm and matter-of-fact. No Drama Obama apparently ran his campaign exactly as it looked: no frenzy, no extreme highs and lows, just relentless organization and hard work. In two years, a guy with very little name recognition (and with such a strange name for American politics) went from a kitchen table meeting with David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Briggs to a landslide victory last Tuesday. Their success was a classic example of the application of high intelligence to a complicated process. Axelrod, whom many regard as a kind of electoral genius, nevertheless said that Obama was the single brightest man he had ever been around.
So the President-elect is this highly gifted and intelligent man who happens to have come from definitely tough family circumstances, who therefore knows what it's like to try to struggle to make a living and survive in American society, and who furthermore has devoted his vocational life to the amelioration of poverty and social injustice. He demands competence from himself and from those around him. Can you imagine in your wildest dreams, for example, the image of Barack Obama playing air guitar in Southern California while black families sat in terror atop their houses in the rising waters of New Oreleans? It turns out, furthermore, that he has had about 50 lawyers working for months examining the more outrageous and insupportable Executive Orders and signing statements of the current incumbent, and he's going to spend the first day or so working up a powerful cramp in his left (3-point) hand reversing every last one of them. He's also going to close down America's concentration camps and bring the United States back into compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the Federal Anti-Torture Statutes and the War Crimes Act.
That's more than just a good start - that's phenomenal. It was more than I'd dared to hope. I mean, what next? Actual competent staffing of the Justice Department? A director of the Environmental Protection Agency who is not drawn from a K Street coal and oil lobby? Global warming reports written by scientists and not censored by an oil company attorney-hack with no scientific training? Unfettered stem cell research so our best genetic researcher (from UCSF) can return from England and do the world's best work again? Yep. An ability of Nongovernmental Agencies working with foreign countries on birth control to discuss the full range of family planning alternatives, including abortion, which are legal under such countries' laws? Yes again. Shutting down the Legal Black Hole of Guantanamo and outlawing the use of hearsay testimony extracted through torture? Uh-huh. Tax incentives, instead of tax obstacles, to the development of mass solar arrays, wind power and geothermal? Ditto. Hope? You got it.
I've just got one problem - what the hell am I going to write about?
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