Monday, October 27, 2008

A Big Question
By Monica Crowley (bio)

Barack Obama has made a not unreasonable strategic decision to sit on his lead and hightail it to Hawaii to visit his ill grandma (this would be the same white grandma he implied was a racist in his Philadelphia speech on Reverend Jeremiah Wright.)

One thing he’s conveniently doing: avoiding one very critical Big Question. It’s an obvious question, yet I haven’t heard anyone else raise it. It’s a question made evident by the brutally honest comments of his running mate, Joe Biden.

At a campaign rally on Sunday in Seattle, Biden said this:

“Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator President of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here, if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

(Then he descended in some weirdness, which included the phrase, “Gird your loins.” Not exactly Jeffersonian prose. But I digress.)

Here is the Big Question Obama is avoiding:

He says he’ll “change the world.”

He says he’ll “fix” our reputation in the “world.”

He says he’ll get the “world” to respect and love us again.

So if he’s elected and can deliver all of this “change” and “respect” and “love”: why would the “world” want to test him?

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