Three Looks at Obama
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Mark J. Pelavin is the Associate Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He is one of the Jewish community's leading legislative strategists, and one of its senior lobbyists. |
Lots of people writing lots of interesting things about Barack Obama this week.
In the New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar offers a wide-raging profile entitled “The Conciliator.” MacFarquhar reviews Sen. Obama’s unusual personal background, and puts his political character in some personal context. One key paragraph:
Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” [law school classmate and friend] Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes.
Jodi Kantor of the
His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”
Finally, Perry Bacon, Jr. has a front page story (“Obama
Reaches Out With Tough Love”) in today’s
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is delivering pointed critiques of the African American community as he campaigns for its votes, lamenting that many of his generation are "disenfranchising" themselves because they don't vote, taking rappers to task for their language, and decrying "anti-intellectualism" in the black community, including black children telling peers who get good grades that they are "acting white."