On Tap

After reading Kyle-Ann Shriver’s excellent piece on the hard-core left pinning their hopes on Obama, after hearing my neighbor talk about the “brilliance” of Barack Obama, after watching the YouTube videos and seeing a large number of people who are awfully zealous in their support of Obama, I’ve begun asking a question that I haven’t been able to answer.

What does Barack Obama expect of us? After all, we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. Yes we can! We we we, all the way home. But surely our obligation to change and hope doesn’t end the moment we cast our ballot for the junior senator from Illinois. So what will the Obamaites do after their man wins in November (assuming that happens)?

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for Barack Obama!

So I’m asking. What does Obama expect of me, and frankly, what does he expect to do with the millions of glassy-eyed followers? Am I alone in thinking this is a fairly important question I haven’t heard asked?

Of course, you shouldn’t ask the question without looking for the answer. And the first thing I thought of was this post by Jim. In it, he quotes Michelle Obama:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged.

Assuming that Michelle Obama wasn’t simply pulling that thought out of thin air, what exactly does that mean? How will Obama try to accomplish this? Isn’t this worth asking?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at May 27, 2008 - 10:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.