Maggie's Farm

Obama's first coming

Washington correspondent Geoff Elliott | February 09, 2008

IT was early 1994 when Nelson Mandela gave a speech in a slum outside Cape Town and spoke in grand terms of a new beginning and how when he was elected president every household would have a washing machine.
People took him literally. A few months later he became South Africa's first black president. That's when clerks in department stores in Cape Town had to turn people away demanding their free washer and dryer.

Having spent some time as a reporter in South Africa watching the Mandela presidency I was reminded of that story this week when I travelled with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail.

How does a cult figure, in the eyes of some something akin to a messiah, make the transition to a political frontrunner - president even - where disappointment will soon crush what seemed to be a journey to a promised land ?

http://tinyurl.com/3ysykm

In the above article Geoff Elliott posits the question in the last paragraph offered.

The answer of course is that Obama can't.

Large, no huge, parts of the American electorate have no political bearings by which to guide their vote, but a vote they have and it may well aid in scuttling America.

Obama is in for a hard time. If he begins to give away America, to become another apologizer in chief and a anti- military-world-in-harmonic-balance president then by 2010 the backlash will be huge and the racial divide will become more prominent with the majority demographic reasserting itself...'cause there ain't no free lunch or washing machines.