So far, a good healthy crush

We watched Barack's acceptance speech last night (Tivoed from Thursday), and I was quite impressed. I've seen him speak before, and he's indubitably an excellent orator. More than anything, I'm grateful for the fact that he actually writes his own speeches, that we finally have a candidate who's actually capable of writing his own material. There's something incredibly disingenuous to me about politicians who deliver speeches written by someone else and get the credit for those words. Like so many other things about Bush's sad excuse for a presidency, it's intellectually lazy.

I can't say I'm quite in love with Barack yet, but I definitely have a serious man-crush on him. I haven't felt this way about a candidate since I saw Bill on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992. I'm excited to know that someone I respect, someone I would want to hang out and talk to, someone who shares my values, could actually be our leader again. It's not the "I want to have a beer with this guy" thing, which fucked us all for the last 8 years, but rather the simple feeling of identification.

In the few times I've seen or read Barack in interviews, he does seem like what I consider to be a regular guy--intelligent, curious, compassionate, witty, self-deprecating. Not some schmuck who drives a pickup and clears brush so he looks like a regular dude--someone who is comfortable knowing he's fortunate enough to be smarter than a lot of people and wants to do something with that ability. This concept that the president should be "one of us, just like the average Joe" is such an idiotic crock of shit it makes me throw up a little in my mouth. The President SHOULD be smarter than all of us. Jon Stewart had a great bit earlier this year where he said that our President should be like this guy. With everything going on in the country and the world, we need as smart a person as we can get, somebody who actually thinks and learns and adapts to new situations, not someone who blindly insists they have a chosen path and will stick to it no matter what.

It makes me sad to think that so many Americans value stubbornness over adaptibility, folksiness over intelligence. I'm fighting my normally cynical outlook on national politics with the knowledge that IF all the young people who CAN vote DO vote, Barack will be our President. We came close in 2004 with that pasty android Kerry, but some of those kids didn't show up and we got fucked sideways into four more years of idiocy. I think this batch of young 'uns doesn't want to be responsible for having Grampa Munster as our leader, and is smart enough (for the most part) to get over the ridiculous notion that maybe they're just not ready for a black man to be President. If they still get hung up on that a little, somebody should remind them he's only half-black. It's pandering, but I'll take whatever works this time around.

Just as I intend to actually watch football every Sunday this year, I intend to really immerse myself in the election now that we're in the homestretch. I hope that by the time I've seen all the debates and interviews, I will be fully in love with Barack, and come November 4th, will be joyously celebrating the fact that we finally pulled ourselves out of this retarded backwater ditch we've been idling in for the last 8 years and have Barack driving us into a new era for this country. If not, you can all kiss my ass as I drive by on our way to Canada.