Older and wiser

If I were the naive, idealistic 22-year-old I was 40 years ago, I almost certainly would be out campaigning for Barack Obama.
I would see Obama the way I saw Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, fighting for change against the old guard of the Democratic Party, represented then by Hubert Humphrey and now by Hillary Clinton. And the thought that John McCain, however more palatable than Richard Nixon, in the Oval Office would be horrifying.
But I'm not that 22-year-old, thank God. Forty years of life experience have given me the equivalent of a 62 gigabyte hard drive, versus a 22 gigabyte hard drive with which to inform my decisions.
Kids in their teens and early 20s tend to think they're bulletproof. They take more risks in their personal lives and they are willing to expose the country to more risks through their political views. That's because they haven't lived long enough to appreciate what a dangerous place the world is.
Even today, there's a whole generation of Americans who want to treat the events of Sept. 11, 2001 like a scary movie - something that was frightening at the time, but is now over and forgotten. Ditto the war against Islamofascists.
That's why, considering the vast numbers of people around the world who sit up late at night trying to find new ways to destroy us and our way of life, I prefer leadership with experience and a proven track record.
Which brings me back to Barack Obama.
He's a likeable guy with tons of poise and charisma. He is, without question, the American Idol of this political year.
But I find his lack of legislative accomplishment and experience disturbing.
I visit the Willamette Weekly website occasionally because my son Sean turns up occasionally in the pages of the Portland, Ore., alternative newspaper.
The most recent issue has a story by Todd Spivak, a reporter who covered Obama as an Illinois state legislator. Spivak knows as much about Obama's political history as any reporter out there.
Spivak quotes Illinois State Senate President Emil Jones Jr., an African-American legislator from Chicago's southside, as boasting that he launched Obama's U.S. Senate career by putting Obama's name on virtually every high-profile piece of legislation during Obama's last year as a state legislator. To do it, he took bills away from their original sponsors - the men and women who had done all of the hard work on the legislation - and gave them to the young man he was grooming for a U.S. Senate campaign.
I won't belabor the point, because I'd rather you read Spivak's piece in WW.