Kotori magazine editor-in-chief Wasim Muklashy has weighed in on the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, and in particular the inherent difference a lot of people feel between a vote for Hillary Clinton and a vote for Barack Obama, with the implication being that he’s cast the former, but now feels a twinge of regret. “I love my country,” Muklashy writes. “Although I hate and abhor
some of the things it has done and continues to do, I do… I love my
country. Yet even more importantly than that, and undoubtedly more
patriotic than simply loving my country, I love what our country still
has the opportunity to be.” That hope, and chance for something different, Muklashy argues, resides in the junior senator from Illinois.
Yes, there’s no doubt that some of the golden sheen of Obama as an avatar of the new has been diminished by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright dust-up. And future issues will further bring Obama down to Earth. Both the reptilian nastiness of general election fear-mongering and the gear shifts of imposing practicality in governance will do that. But Muklashy gets it, what a lot of people — particularly younger voters and those drawn into the process for the first time in a long time, if ever — feel about the double weight of a positive vote. That is to say not just against one candidate, but heartily for another — and the collective, surging sense of societal optimism which that in turn can elicit. Pooh-poohers will continue to deride this as only ephemeral, but there are real-world consequences to taking new roads, and making bold choices, especially when it comes to getting America’s best and brightest again interested in public service over private sector lucre, and invested in politics as a honest, forward-leaning tool for societal betterment, not personal power and gain.
