Posted by Davy Bui on April 15th, 2008 in Politics
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Michael Shedlock posts a back-handed endorsement of Barack Obama, pronouncing him the best of a bad lot. Anyone following Mish’s blog knows he is a libertarian who strongly supports Ron Paul. What is really interesting is the comments section of this post as his audience mostly denounce and reject his endorsement.

I have mentioned before that I avoid discussing politics to an extent on this blog because it would be counterproductive. Most people, some of them very intelligent, are simply unable to separate ideology from politics and to a degree, reality. To this day, some hard-core neocons refuse to give up the ghost in Iraq, as an example.

Of course, everyone has a personal perspective and opinion. Every person, including myself, has an ideology which guides their preferences. But it is crucial not to let this ideology override other, perhaps more important, factors when making decisions. This weakness is not limited to politics. Developing a “blind spot” when it comes to your portfolio can be detrimental to your wealth — for example, an unwavering belief in American supremacy may lead a person to overweight domestic stocks or discount the possibility that our pathological reliance on imported energy may weaken the economy long-term.

As it relates to Barack Obama, my top 3 personal candidates in no particular order were Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. Obviously, the fringe element strongly appeals to me. But if you approach the presidential election as an interview for the CEO job and ignore the ideological-based factors– that is, which person is most able to lead based on personal skills, traits, experience, etc. and forget about whether one person is a liberal, conservative, DINO (democrat in name only) — it strikes me that Obama would be the overwhelming winner in that horse race. Most likely, your ideological proposals probably won’t get implemented anyway.

The great community organizer, Saul Alinsky, wrote in his seminal book, Rules For Radicals,

“As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be…”

Ideology is fool’s gold: even if your philosophically perfect candidate wins office, your wishes and views go unimplemented. The fiscal and religious conservatives saw their candidates Reagan and Bush(es) elected and yet government is bigger than ever while gays and abortions still abound.

I harbor no illusions that Obama will implement any earth-shattering reforms or policies — the system is too big for any one person to fix and will require an epic crisis before real changes are made. But that epic crisis, that shitstorm, is coming and when it hits, Obama strikes me as the best candidate to handle it.

His inspirational traits are indisputable, his managerial skills convincingly displayed by winning a campaign against an entrenched institutionalized brand like the Clintons (people who have never ran a campaign just don’t understand how monumental a feat this was — imagine if Google overtook Microsoft as the largest software company in the world by sales) and obviously, the man can make rain like no one before him, raising obscene buckets of money despite being a “socialistic, Islamic, America-hating, race-baiting” and yes, black liberal.

Now I have serious doubts about Obama getting votes in the fall. I think his “failed to close the deal” losses (NH, TX, OH) are symptomatic of the people not being able to vote for the black candidate when they get in the booth. The demographic make-up of the “fly-over” zone combined with the electoral college map means that the American people are going to have be more enlightened than I give them credit for.

Does this mean the Dems should pick Hilary? Her electability is a myth made possible only by the fact that Obama refuses to attack her too harshly and the right has remained strangely silent on her. So Dems should pick Clinton only if they want to lose this election and a generation of future supporters, which knowing that party is a distinct possibility. Which means they pick the best person for the job and see if America is ready to move to the next evolutionary step of our society.