Why I Support Obama

One of the most important roles of a president is "Storyteller in Chief".

After 9/11, our current Storyteller in Chief told us a very bad story: He told us that the world had become a scary place and the only sane way to respond to that was to be afraid -- be very afraid -- then go out and kill some people. He doesn't seem to think it's very important who we kill, just so long as we can tell ourselves we've struck back.

Now stop and think about that: All terrorists have one thing in common: They want us to be afraid. So the true net effect of the War on Terror is to complete the work of the terrorists, by ensuring that we continue to feel afraid. This was not the story that the President should have told. Rather, he should have told us that the way to defeat terrorists is to refuse to be terrorized. If their actions cannot make us afraid, their efforts will be unrewarded.

In the days after 9/11, America stopped flying. It was too dangerous. But a better reaction would have been for every American to go directly to the airport and buy a ticket to anywhere, board the airplane, and show the terrorists that they had failed. We didn't do that. Instead, we told them that they had succeeded. We thus "emboldened the enemy", something that President Bush keeps saying we shouldn't be doing. This does not seem consistent.

By contrast, I believe that Barack Obama has a much better story, and he is telling it consistently. It is a story of hope. He has hope that mere human beings like you and me can do things that will help to make this a better world. He has hope that enemies can talk to each other, find out why they hate each other, and work toward becoming friends, so they don't have to keep hating and killing. He has hope that environmental problems can be solved by working to solve them. He has hope that our increasingly polarized political system can be overcome, so that Republicans and Democrats can actually work to solve national problems instead of spending all of their effort telling everybody that the other party is wrong.

It's possible that Obama is wrong. Maybe we can't succeed. But we dare not admit that, or we risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. On the other hand, if we keep insisting that he's right, it just may turn out that we'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy of success. We all have it in our power to decide which prophecy we will choose to fulfill.

I choose success. So I choose to hope.