Obama's poker face comes into play

UK media is full of Barak Obama today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/10/wobama10.xml

When he was a young state politician in Illinois, Barack Obama played his cards right. "He had the stone face," said Senator Terry Links, who hosted weekly poker games at his home. "He didn't stay in hands if he didn't think he had a chance of winning."

"Barack wasn't one of those foolish gamblers who just thought all of a sudden that card in the middle was going to show up mysteriously. He's as competitive in politics as he is in poker. It's not like he's going to go into something without a course of action mapped out."

Today, Senator Obama, 45, is due to map out the journey he hopes will lead him to the White House in January 2009. If he triumphs in what promises to be the most open and enthralling US election in 80 years, he will become America's first black president.

He has chosen to announce his candidacy in Springfield, capital of Illinois and the place he honed his poker-playing skills. It was there in 1858, at the old state capitol where Mr Obama's speech is scheduled, that Abraham Lincoln declared that America could not remain a "house divided" over slavery. With inexperience the biggest question mark over his candidacy, the comparison with America's 16th president is a shrewd one. When Lincoln was elected to the presidency, he had served eight years in the state legislature and two in Congress - a background that, propitiously, is mirrored exactly by Mr Obama's.

...that Obama will have served four years in the Senate by the time the election rolls around... but who's counting?

I said it before and I'll say it again: Obama is a black man from the Land of Lincoln who's also a decendent of Jefferson Davis. I can't think of a better man from a symbolic stand-point to heal the century and a half old wounds of our nation's civil war.

That's not an endorsement (I'm backing Kucinich), but I wouldn't be sad to see him win.

which relies heavily on positioning himself as a 'different' type of Democrat and that, in trun, employs the campaign tactic I dislike very much - reifying.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/3/121715/7260

:hi:

I like the author's use of "enthralling" to describe this wide open election.

Hekate