(An Iowa Caucus Day item) Soon after the 2d inauguration of
George W. Bush, whose Presidency already had been marked by abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, by the folly of the Iraq invasion, and by the failure to incapacitate Osama bin Laden, I began to prepare for the next election cycle.
My road to 2008 began on the freeway, listening to politicians read aloud the books in which they endeavored to tell their own stories in their own words.
My Life, the memoir by Bush's immediate predecessor,
Bill Clinton, filled in some details about a man who in the 1990s had dominated current events. In
Living History his wife,
Hillary Clinton, read her precise account of those same times. The works left me appreciative yet disengaged.
Then, on a colleague's recommendation, I listened to
Barack Obama read
Dreams from My Father, the "story of race and inheritance" he'd written a decade earlier. The last thing I expected to discover were things in common. And yet here was someone who'd also moved about as a child, been raised at times by grandparents. Who'd also witnessed Harold Washington's milestone mayoral election while working in Chicago -- who'd worked a few years before moving on to law school, then to law teaching. Whose family ties put him in close contact with newcomers to America and with relatives overseas. (Yesterday, in the Voice of America interview
here, Obama urged political rivals in Kenya, his father's homeland, to "address peacefully the controversies that divide them.") A progressive Illinoisan who preferred consensus to conflict.
His campaign's followed lines sketched in
Dreams and detailed in his 2d book,
The Audacity of Hope. The operative word remains "hope" -- discussed by means not of doe-eyed promises of the impossible, but of substantive policy prescriptions. There's a focus on building a movement, one that underscores the significance of a fact seldom studied despite the reams of copy written about Obama: This is
someone whose sensibilities were shaped by years of organizing poor people in job-starved communities, a real world experience that all politicians could use but few have. The campaign's unabashed reaching across the aisle, moreover, comes as a relief to all exhausted by the pitched political battles of the recent past.
And then there's Obama's foreign policy.This is a candidate who
fears not to speak with favor of the United Nations and other international bodies. Who speaks of the essential need for the United States not simply to demand from its allies, but rather to earn from them, respect and assistance. Who understands "
security" to mean more than military might. A candidate who persists in a plan to meet personally with world leaders of all political persuasion, to cut in on diplomatic dances of avoidance that sometimes extend distance between cultures.
Not least is Obama's
denunciation of Guantánamo and all it stands for: indefinite
detention for purposes of interrogation, abandonment of habeas corpus, cruelty and
torture. It's unequivocal and delivered to all audiences.
Aiding Obama are
scores of foreign policy experts and international lawyers. They include many noted and respected women, among them: Pulitzer Prizewinning Harvard Professor
Samantha Power;
Patricia Wald, former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; and Dr.
Susan E. Rice, formerly assistant U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs.
It may seem odd that someone who's spent nearly a year blogging the achievements of the world's women leaders is working for this candidate. Would I welcome as President a woman who's made her own way, who stands on her own feet, who promises to bring the best to the job? Certainly. I'll embrace that candidate, when she emerges.
Now, though, this IntLawGrrl's honored to be doing her wee bit for Barack Obama, the human who pushes people to "
Change the World."
We at University College Cork, Ireland, are delighted to announce the launch of a new LLM in International Human Rights Law and Public Policy, to commence in September 2011.
