Numbed with Obama vs McCain

Introduction:

I have been bombarded with McCain "positive" postings and anti-Obama postings in a particular Yahoo group email discussions. I guess the guy is so passionate with his choice of John McCain as his candidate for the US Presidency - to each his own. Hence this email reply:

Thanks Kuyang Willy for pointing this out (an article in Yahoo - click here). I did missed it since am numb with McCain vs Obama issues.

I guess we have our own in built biases as human beings. In the end, we tend to believe what we wanted to believe regardless of the facts at hand. All we can do is diligently do our research and vote for the ones we like. As long as we participate in the process, that is all what counts. If we don't participate at all, we better close our mouth and suffer whatever the consequences.

As a way of sharing, I've been reading a very good (to my own bias mind!) this article by a former Australian Premier, Bob Carr. Here are the excerpts:

Title: This race is far from over (The Sun-Herald, pp 14-15 issue 26 Oct 2008)

"We've been educated in the Bradley (the black Tom Bradley, who was defeated in 1982 for governor of California, he was 15 point ahead in the LA Times poll!) effect -- namely, that a percentage of white voters will tell pollsters they intend to vote for a black candidate but in the privacy of the voting booths do the opposite."

"The brutal truth is that Obama's was not the ideal biography for someone seeking to vault over three centuries of race prejudice. There's the Arabic name: Barack Hussein Obama. And the stubborn ignorance that has Americans insisting he is a Muslim. There are the 20 years spent in the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Above all, the absence of executive experience.

"None of the above needs count. Except that whites in the South stopped voting Democrats in 1968 in protest of Lyndon Johnson giving votes to blacks and the Democratic party desegregating. Race was the magic that turned the South Republican for 40 years. Remember too, only 18 per cent of American population have passports (compared with about half Australians) and are fed by a media that reports celebrities above news of the world. Their working class is crushed and demoralised, besotted with gun ownership and old time religion. Colin Powell, war hero and conservative, would have been a better bet to break the habits of prejudice.

"By the middle of the year, polls confirmed the election was becoming a referendum for Obama. Six years into an unpopular war and in the middle of what was then a modest recession, everything suggested the election should be about George Bush, not the Democratic candidate.

"A narrow McCain win was - for realist and pessimists -- more likely, especially as the incumbent party generally catches up in the last week of a campaign.

"Then came September 15. Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At 9 am John McCain said in Jacksonville: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." The ensuing full-blown, epoch-making economic crisis propelled Obama ahead. Economics dominates the election.

"To be fair, it was Obama's coolness under fire that seemed to clinch the deal, especially in the three debates in which he held his own and pressed every advantage.

"Michael Kelly, an Australian who teaches speech communication, describes the Obama voice as smooth, deep, lyrical, with the use of swinging cadence to "entertain the ear", stringing words and phrases together like a jazz musician.

"It was deliberate, Obama knew he had to prove to whites an African-American need not be angry, aggressive, emotional.

"The first Africans arrived in America in 1619. This was a full year before the Mayflower. Yet America has been coming to terms with their presence ever since.

"Its constitution contradicted the Declaration of Independence to accommodate slavery. The country then fought a civil war to end it. For a century the South fenced in black citizens behind Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation. In the 1950's blacks insisted on due process in the constitutional courts. The nation yielded to black pressure for equality.

"In 1968, Martin Luther King jnr was cut down by racists and the "nigger lover" Robert Kennedy followed King to a martyr's grave.

"If an African-American wins the November 4 election there will be no avoiding the symbolism.

"Abraham Lincoln once warned Americans: "We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves."

"Economic suffering may overtake the last redoubts of race prejudice. And some Americans - in spite of themselves - may do something to make their friends cheer."

Bob Carr, premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005, is a student of American political history.

Also please see and read this news: Aussies jump on Obama bandwagon: survey (click here).