Månadens valfläsk

Enligt mina beräkningar skrivs det i snitt tre miljarder artiklar om dagen om det stundande presidentvalet. Man behöver inte läsa alla, men man bör läsa de här två:

1. Andrew Sullivan om Barack Obama.
Just när mediemättnaden på Obama är som störst kommer Andrew Sullivan med en av de, tja, 340 bästa Obama-artiklar jag läst.
Han ser Obama som den enda kandidat som kan förena USA efter den polarisering som dominerat landet ända sedan 1968 och Vietnam.

Money quote:
”In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America-finally-past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly-and uncomfortably-at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war-not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade-but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war-and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama-and Obama alone-offers the possibility of a truce.”

Det ironiska med Obamas kampanj är motsägelsen mellan försöket att förena USA, genom att knyta band mellan demokrater och republikaner, samtidigt som hans slagord är att han är den enda som kan genomföra en ordentlig ”förändring i Washington”. Meet the press uppmärksammade det förra helgen, här.

2. Ian Buruma om Norman Podhoretz, den neokonservativa hök (och redaktör för Commentary) som Rudy Giuliani valt till utrikespolitisk rådgivare.

”Norman Podhoretz needs to be taken seriously for several reasons. Rudy Giuliani, in his campaign for the US presidency, has taken him on as a foreign policy adviser. Those who think the Iraqi disaster has killed the influence of neoconservativism should follow Giuliani’s campaign with interest.”