Obama Unites the First and Third Worlds, Christianity and Islam, the Poor and the Rich

An American with African roots, a Christian with Muslim origins, a wealthy man from a poor background. Is there any citizen more universal than Barack Obama to govern the country that governs the world?

It’s good enough for Obama that his competitor is John McCain: a Republican, a fundamentalist, an American cowboy, an old man, an agent for the oil companies and the successor of Bush. The reasons to reject McCain are endless, but these are not the only reasons to support Obama, who looks to be a better presidential candidate than it can be believed.

Movies have always shown a black president in the White House, but no one imagined it would happen so fast as it’s happening now. When the famous TV star Oprah Winfrey said that she will support Barack Obama, a lot of people thought that this was just a kind of symbolic support given to Green or other third-party candidates, and it was thought that Obama was nothing more than a test candidate who wanted to open to black Americans a small window to the outside world, but Barack has astonished every one and has got only just a few more steps to reach the dream.

The astonishing consensus for supporting Obama’s by America’s friends in Europe and its enemies in the Middle East is not unusual or some kind accident, as the unusual mixture of races, religions and social classes that make up Obama makes everyone feel that they are attached to him in some way, as the African origin do not mean just Africa but also the Third World, especially when adding in his half-sister Maya, the product of his mother and her Indonesian father. Also, the links between his Muslim origins and his present Christian beliefs in the unfamiliar name (Barack Hussein Obama), symbolically bringing together followers of the two greatest religions in the world. Obama is not just linked to the Third World, as his mother was a white American from the state of Kansas, who raised him by herself since he was two years old. So it’s not difficult for anyone to find something attractive about the Democratic candidate.

But the most important thing about Obama’s nomination is the rare way he ascribes change in form and content. The motto “change” in his electoral campaign is not just a platform for economic and tax reformations, but it is a glimmer of hope for everyone, that anything can be possible: it is possible that America can have a president from the minority, even from the most unlucky minority, the African-Americans who came to the new world as slaves, later to become first-class citizens, with one even possibly becoming president. If Obama is elected, he represents a change as he will be a Democratic president, one of the few in the last 30 ears excepting Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, while there have been three Republican Presidents: Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. These Republican presidents have shown America’s aggressive face, while the Democrats – despite every thing – can be defined by their engagement among minority and civil rights organizations that back the Democratic Party, and one that even fights for the poor, the same organization that Obama once chaired himself in Chicago during the 1990s. He is also just 47, meaning he is still a young man and if we look at the ages of American presidents, change rarely comes too far from young men. And yes we can say that America is a country of organizations, but the prospect of the president and the idea of a leader are very effective in American culture, especially when that leader has a charismatic personality that flows out of the TV screen.

The most important item in Obama’s platform is the tax increase on incomes more than 250,000 dollars a year, which is about over ten percent of Americans, in order to aid social programs and pensions for the other ninety percent. This can be seen as social privilege in Obama’s capitalism, differing from the unhelpful Republican capitalism that has had a destructive impact on the world in modern times.

Now what about when they said Bush was for democracy in the Middle East? It has become clear that the Republicans have deceived the people here and they have renounced the change for democracy when their true intentions were revealed, and the Democrats will not be worst than them. At least the Democrats are promising to pull out of Iraq, while McCain says that they will stay there for a hundred of years.