Michael Chabon on Obama:
To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.
And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world’s nature and of our own to break, ruin and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world’s to find ways to mend what has been broken. We can do that. Come on. Don’t be afraid.
John Podhoretz on Chabon on Obama:
Chabon may hate Israel, but he loves tikkun olam. And he has a taste for Messianism. In Yiddish Policeman’s Union, he posits a Messiah who is the gay junkie son of an obese Hasidic rabbi-gangster. Now, with his new-found passion for the half-Kenyan, half-WASP Hawaiian-born Senator from Illinois, you figure Chabon is slapping himself on the side of the head–”Why didn’t I think of that?” He might as well have. His Obama is at least as much a fictional character as Kavalier or Clay.
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