Why I am not having a Barack attack

Your Minor Heretic is not caught up in the giddiness that surrounds Barack Obama. I was discussing this with an astute friend, and she chided me for my lack of empathy. She said (quoting from memory here), “Imagine you've just had your head held underwater for eight years. You finally come up and take a great big breath and someone says, 'What's the big deal? It's just air.'” Well put.

Yes, I am going to vote for Barack Obama. No, I don't trust him any farther than I could shot-put an anvil. It's not really about him, personally. It's about the process that got him where he is and the web of influences that would surround him as president.

Democracy is like being on a tightrope. It is an unstable and unnerving condition maintained only by the constant attention of brave and practiced people, who are in that position against their own natural tendencies. It is a natural behavior for people to reproduce their families in their political structures, which often means looking to Daddy for solutions. We have an unfortunate tendency to replace one unsuccessful Daddy with another, in the hope that the new Daddy will finally kiss our booboo and make it better. Most people are less attentive to the means by which we select the new Daddy, which is the ultimate factor in determining the quality of the leader. That is how we ended up with the new George II. That is why am not leaping with joy over the prospect of Obama. Same process, same results.

Yes, I am sure that Barack Obama would be a far better president than either George W. Bush or the lobbyist-ridden militarist neocon John McCain. However, I think that Obama's mantra of change would be more accurate as “small change.”

I looked at Barack Obama's own website. I like a lot of what he says: changing labor laws to benefit aspiring union members, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, supporting renewable energy, emphasizing diplomacy over force.

In some areas, though, there is a kind of political anemia. I found that in terms of fighting for poor people who can't always make it from paycheck to paycheck he wants to cap the interest on payday loans to 36%. As the kids say, “Big whoop.” I know people who have been socked with rates far less than that and found them unsupportable. His health insurance plan leaves the gravy train to private health insurance behemoths intact. He wants to “reform” No Child Left Behind rather than scrapping an educational program that amounts to bayoneting the wounded. On his website there is a paragraph about prioritizing a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but I found his recent speech to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby) somewhere between pandering and groveling. In it he declared that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," an absolute show stopper for most Palestinians. Even some Israeli hawks have publicly backed off from this position. My general impression of his proposals is of a gardener trimming weeds without actually pulling them up.

As much as I consider him (as far as I can tell, from this distance) a decent and honorable man, I wonder what will happen when he dives into the sausage mill we call the Oval Office. He has as many political debts as any former occupant. He has raised a lot of money through small online donations, but about half of his $270 million has come in chunks of more than $200. Four out of five of his top sources were the employees of huge financial firms (Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc.).

In response to the accusation of being influenced by money, Barack Obama and other members of Congress can rightfully say, “I vote how I like.” To this I respond, “That's because they like how you vote.” If Obama or his colleagues had opinions that truly offended the small cadre of millionaire donors, most would never have succeeded in politics. Let's elect Barack Obama, but not allow ourselves to feel satisfied with that. We can't cut him any slack or lose sight of the larger effort.

For real change, we should concentrate on changing the process rather than just trading for a new personality. We all need to become single issue voters for a little while, that issue being electoral reform - 99% public campaign financing, paper ballots, instant runoff voting, uniform and fair electoral rules, independent bi or tri or quadra-partisan election committees, and so on. Then we can pay attention to candidates.