Friday, August 15, 2008

MCCAIN AND OBAMA—CAN THEY COLLAPSE THE WAVE?

Can John McCain or Barack Obama master their fate?  Can they collapse the wave?  Both presumptive presidential candidates are the product and the shaper of their times.  Each has a vision and a campaign to project that vision onto present-day socio-political-economic events.  How much are they chosen to play these forces and how much can they shape them?

 Thinking about this, a “man of action” like John McCain will actually be a man of reaction.  So many of the threats he perceives result from his having been raised to think of war as service, a positive force for change, and yet a reaction to threats—real or perceived—to the security of the nation and all its special interests.  McCain is reacting to what surrounds him.  He is not a leader but a politician.  He asks everyone for advice and changes tactics on the fly.  Because of this, a negativity pervades his campaign that seeks to suppress difference, dialog, the vote, and to promote special interests.  We know what he is against far more than what he is for.  He is focused and secure relative to challenges to US authority.  He is unfocused and insecure about managing change and diversity, deferring instead to a laissez-faire market economy.  This comes from an uncreative judgmental, opinionated, and reflexive mentality.  How does this differ from the approach of Barack Obama?

A broad world-view or weltanschauung projects itself onto the cosmology of interactive forces in a dynamic flux of variants and force in the personality of Barack Obama.  There is little emotion, divisive opinionating, or reflexive reaction in the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  A product of his time, Obama appears to enjoy being “plugged in.”  He is aware of and takes advantage of electronic media because it comprises his universe.  Obama reflects upon the energies of these interactive variables, attempts to order them in unique ways, then strips the abstraction from the conceptual fabric to reveal a clear structure, simply and clearly explicated.  The ideas are complex—their expression is not.

 By showing the public how quickly he and his campaign staff reflect, reshape, and recreate the attacks made upon him the style as well as the substance of the leadership potential Obama possesses are revealed.  The most refreshing thing to me as a political junky and a psychologist is the direct way Obama answers questions.  I can see the thought processes, the logic, the options considered, the stress on understanding, out of which emerges a nuanced and subtle approach to the multi-leveled attempts by the opposition to shape his responses.

It is more than reactivity because all of his responses come from a well thought out sub-structure alloyed with a penchant for clearly communicating what is on his mind.  This is the difficulty opponents have with him.  By understanding the pokes and jabs he feints and thrusts with authority.  Like the Jedi Knights of Lucas-lore, Obama intuitively grasps the largest situations and can move fluidly within this cosmic array in an intelligent manner.

 

In so doing, Barack belies his multi-cultural heritage and his life-experience in the Far East, Kansas, and Hawaii through his dual African-American eyes in the truest sense of the word. Obama is a first-generation African-American.  But, this sensibility is wedded to a Harvard Law education and a University of Chicago professorial focus on the American constitution.

 

If anyone can perform on the highest level with the greatest depth it is Barack Obama.  He thinks in the present with concepts birthed in the cauldron of the genesis of American democracy.  If anything, Obama is a clear counterpart to the wisdom expressed in McCain’s candidacy.  Both have merit.  Both Obama and McCain can perceive the future.  McCain represents a history of independence that has propelled the US into the 21st century with a focus on domination.  Obama reflects the diversity of his time and the control over electronic media that will be the future heritage of our maturing nation, making it again a leader by example.  Both men are collapsing the wave of probability proclaimed by the quantum theorists to be the mechanics of creation.  It is up to the forces to redistribute themselves—but through whose eyes?

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