Scott McConnell, editor of the American Conserative, saw Obama at a Pennsylvania rally, and was charmed:
“Wall Street is teetering on the
brink of nobody knows what,” [Obama] told the crowd, a more felicitous line
than the standard political pose of make-believe mastery.
The latest American Conservative has a piece I did on Zbigniew Brzezinski. Not on-line yet, go buy it. My favorite part is when I emailed Brzezinski to ask why he was for Obama, which I’d stupidly failed to ask him in the rush of a short interview, and his secretary called and read me the following:
“In my judgment the United States confronts, and the
world, a fundamental historical discontinuity. The world of the cold war or
earlier, the world of the struggle against the totalitarianism of the
Nazi/Stalinist variety, is finished. We live in a complicated, much more
dynamic, much more politically awakened world, in which the population of the
world for the first time is politically active, stirring, restless,
increasingly anti-western, increasingly anti-American. And to manage that world
well one has to understand how history has changed, how the global context has
changed. Hillary Clinton would be a perfectly competent president, but her view
of the world in my judgment is quite conventional and traditional. That
criticism is even more applicable to John McCain, who is in my view is a great
patriot and a great hero but represents essentially the past. I have been
impressed talking with Barack Obama and also from reading what he has been
saying by the fact that he understands that this great historical discontinuity
has taken place and that America has to redefine its place in the world. In fact, that America has to
redefine itself. And I think that he symbolizes that needed change, and if he
becomes president he can help America effectively make that change.”
I’ve often wondered on this blog why people are for Obama. I know why I’m for him, but why are all these kids for him, his army? Zbig Brzezinski is 80 years old, but he has articulated a sense of history, and of history’s hinge, and of the misunderstanding that labels this new era "a clash of civilizations," that I believe Obama’s army understands in their young bones. As they say in New York: Genius.
