I was not in the least surprised that Jann Wenner, the driving force behind Rolling Stone magazine, endorsed Obama. After all, I first “met” Wenner politically while working on Jerry Brown’s original “We the People” campaign. Joe Trippi was a part of that campaign, and Jodie Evans of Code Pink was the fantastic campaign manager.
But reading Wenner’s words, he’s deeper than I even suspected. Here’s what he has to say, in his article, titled brilliantly, “A New Hope”:
first learned of Barack Obama from a man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush’s political organization through two presidential campaigns. He described the first-term senator from Illinois as “a walking hope machine” and told me that he would not work for any Republican candidate in 2008 if Obama was nominated. He challenged me to read Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
The book was a revelation. Here was a man whose honesty about himself and understanding of the human condition are both deep and compassionate. Born to a white mother and an African father, he was raised in multiracial Hawaii and for several years in Indonesia. He drifted through some druggy teenage years — no apologies! — before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School. He chose to work as a community organizer in the projects of Chicago rather than join the wealthy insider world of corporate law. And as a young adult, he searched, in the distant villages of Kenya, for the father and family he never knew.
…
Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him “frankly, naive” for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America’s most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton.
Wenner really lets Clinton have it, and rightfully so:
All this was made clearer by the contrast with Hillary Clinton, a capable and personable senator who has run the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so discouraged about our politics. Her campaign certainly proved her experience didn’t count for much: She was a bad manager and a bad strategist who naturally and easily engaged in the politics of distraction, trivialization and personal attack. She never convinced us that her vote for the war in Iraq was anything other than a strategic political calculation that placed her presidential ambitions above the horrifying consequences of a war.
His closing few paragraphs made me catch my breath a bit. I wonder if you’ll feel the same.
Read the whole thing. I promise, you’ll feel so much better.