<span style="font-weight: bold">Rod Watson: Our leaders should follow Obama’s cue</span>
Three days into his new job, the most important aspect of Barack Obama’s ascendancy remains intact: his status as a “new kind of politician” appealing to a new kind of electorate.
If we’re lucky, maybe it can have a trickle-down effect here.
Throughout the campaign, and again Tuesday, the new president talked of “unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”
More important, he proved that it wasn’t just talk. The divides Obama bridged amid two wars and an economic collapse are a testament to what leadership and vision can accomplish.
Consider: A black man who knows how to get white backing.
A Democrat who attracts Republican support.
A progressive who can meet in the home of radical William Ayers and a decade later dine with conservatives William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer in the home of George Will.
That “transformative” approach resonates with a country frightened to death to read the financial pages or war dispatches, and yearning for a government that solves problems instead of divides against itself.
Polls show that many more Americans approve of Obama than approved of either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton when they took over. As the new president put it Tuesday, “the ground has shifted. . . . The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
..
Three days into his new job, the most important aspect of Barack Obama’s ascendancy remains intact: his status as a “new kind of politician” appealing to a new kind of electorate.
If we’re lucky, maybe it can have a trickle-down effect here.
Throughout the campaign, and again Tuesday, the new president talked of “unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”
More important, he proved that it wasn’t just talk. The divides Obama bridged amid two wars and an economic collapse are a testament to what leadership and vision can accomplish.
Consider: A black man who knows how to get white backing.
A Democrat who attracts Republican support.
A progressive who can meet in the home of radical William Ayers and a decade later dine with conservatives William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer in the home of George Will.
That “transformative” approach resonates with a country frightened to death to read the financial pages or war dispatches, and yearning for a government that solves problems instead of divides against itself.
Polls show that many more Americans approve of Obama than approved of either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton when they took over. As the new president put it Tuesday, “the ground has shifted. . . . The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
..
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