Maybe we are not content just to have our music. And our NBA. Maybe for the United States of Black America having the world’s 16th largest economy (with GDP of $728 billion) is not good enough, although that is quite impressive, notwithstanding all the horror stories. Maybe the United States of Black America is not content to be just ahead of Portugal and just behind South Korea. (data courtesy of Booker Rising, a website for “black moderates and black conservatives.”) And with a name like Booker Rising—Booker as in Booker T Washington and Rising as in MojoRising—you can’t be wrong. Mr. MojoRising, you just keep on rising, rising, rising, promised Jim Morrison (The Doors.)
We have owned the music, and danced to it. But not the inauguration music, and that is what Obama promises. Maybe that is one of the appeals—a pay back for a long-overdue claim. Maybe there is a special compounding formula which says 20 acres and a mule equals a presidency, at some point.
Maybe Barack will make millions of people feel like they are hosts, not visitors.
Our Own Roger Bannister
Or maybe it is something completely different. Maybe it is like the myth of the 4-minute mile that Thomas Sowell, a fine philosopher and economist who would feel right at home at Booker Rising, used to narrate. Of course, Sowell, an economist, is too rational to support Obama: he is missing the joys of irrationality.
Years ago, the idea that a person could run a mile in under 4 minutes was unthinkable. It couldn’t be done: gravity, lungpower, heartbeat all conspired to slow you down. Then came Roger Bannister, a British runner, who broke the record in 1954. That is impressive, but not as impressive as this: within 3 years, after Banister demonstrated that it could be done, 17 others athletes did it too, continuously chipping at his record. The current record holder is Morocco’s Kikkam Al Garouj, who ran a mile in 3 minutes and 43.13 seconds.
I run a lame 2.5 miles (usually, in 30 minutes, you do the math) before running out of breath. But when Eritrea's Zeresenay Tadesse shattered some long distance records, I felt that I could do better and I made it all the way to 7 miles. My running mate, also an Eritrean, hit 10 miles, and he started saying insane things about preparing for a marathon. Irrational, yes, but it works. So, maybe Obama is our Bannister. Even if he doesn't go the distance, we want him to travel as far as he can, for he is a harbinger of better days to come.
Best Fit
Or maybe it is just a recognition of the obvious: Barack Obama is, of those running for President of the United States, better than the rest. He is not the most qualified (not by a long shot). But better: he is the best fit.
You have heard of that word “fit” as applied in human resources, haven’t you? Generally, they use it in the following context: you are qualified but you are just not a good fit for our company…or you just don’t fit what we are looking for. They will tell you this when they are denying you the job or the promotion you seek.
You look at your resume, and your long list of recommendation letters and you say, the hell I am not! Who better than me to answer the call when the company’s alarm goes off at 3:00 AM? I have a PhD, an MD, a six-Sigma, a Microsoft, a Cisco and an ISO-9000 certification.
But you, (and by "you" I mean Hillary and John), don’t know the company and you don’t know what the HR folks are saying. They are saying the job is more than the summary of Skills, Abilities, Aptitude, and Experience. They are saying, “By hiring you or promoting you, we risk disrupting the good thing we got going at our company: you will be toxic to our mix.” Or, "you are not the right person for this time." Or, “you are good enough, but you are not a blowout, that rare find who is in the lobby waiting, whom we can't afford to lose.”
Maybe it is the temperament. See, John, how you blew your lid off when you were losing to George in 2000? You were on the verge of a nervous breakdown and you scared us a little. You are set in your ways: you already look like an ex-president, for God’s sake. And, you, Hillary: remember how you got shrill with all your rehearsed lines about “change you can Xerox,” and “slumlord friend” when you thought things were slipping away from your hand? Besides, you have already been in the White House for eight years—not baking cookies, but, according to you, as a co-president. You, too, sound like an ex-president. Now you want eight more years?
Now compare the temper tantrums and the sour grapes of the others with the unflappability of Barack. Even when there was a nuclear meltdown next door—in the form of a pastor on a youtube loop--the man kept his cool.
There is more: Barack is a learning organization, and displays all the signs of a man possessing inherent intelligence. He gets better with time—he hasn’t peaked yet. He just keeps on rising, rising, rising.
Well, of course, he has no clue about what to do with the economy; how to bring peace to the world; how to solve the Middle East crisis; what to do about Iraq; how to manage the price of gasoline; how to fight inflation and recession, or how to bring an end to the Eritrea-Ethiopia stalemate, for that matter. But none of them do. But, with him, there is a sense that he has enough curiosity, enough intelligence, enough drive and enough humility to attempt to figure it out. And enough positive energy, and enough felicity with words to motivate the problem-solvers to get to work.
And that is what makes him the best fit. And he should be the next President of the United States even if, for some of us, it will be jarring to know that the next president of the greatest nation on earth is a man who was born the same year we were.
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