Basically, I think the world boils down to two kinds of people: the kind who have guts and the kind who don’t.
I’m talking the visceral down and dirty kind of guts it takes to look down the barrel of life and choose to say what you mean and live what you say. It’s a hard road to live that way. And most of us don’t.
Most of us live quiet and not-so-quiet lives of desperately trying to avoid the truth of who we are, what we believe, and what we’ve done.
It must be exponentially harder for presidential candidates to maintain any semblance of guts; but in my book, Barack Obama has guts to spare.
It takes guts to admit you smoked some weed and maybe toked a line or two in your youth. It takes guts to go on record – and stick to it – in supporting a woman’s right to choose or not choose an abortion. It took guts to oppose the war in Iraq from the very beginning: “I don’t oppose all wars. . . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Straight talk, smart thinking; way back in 2002 (at an anti-war rally in Chicago).
And, Obama’s willingness to forego the easy route of adding Hillary Clinton to his ticket shows he has a specific kind of intestinal fortitude that John McCain just doesn’t.
Obama wants to win the presidency on his own merit, not just because he appeased a female electorate. Most women can’t be bought that easily anyway. As much as women might enjoy a man who gives them what they want, I – along with almost any woman worth her salt — would never want to be placated at the expense of a man’s integrity.
Obama understands that instinctively. By choosing Biden and eschewing Clinton (who by her husband’s account, didn’t want the Veep nod anyway), in one fell swoop Obama showed he respected women enough to not try and buy them off, and showed that even though she would have made a sure-win ticket, he thought too much of Hillary to offer her second place at the big brass ring.
It took guts for Obama to risk the ire of Hillary fans. It always takes guts to respect another human being enough to accept the fact that they might not choose you – whether that’s in love or in politics; but it takes even more guts to respect yourself enough to not try to curry that choice, that love, that vote.
McCain’s chose of Palin revealed a staggering condescension toward American women, including Palin.
McCain apparently thought American woman are dumb enough to be manipulated into voting for a man simply because he’s got a woman standing next to him on the ticket. He apparently thought we’d be flattered by him tossing us the bone of a female Veep – perhaps hoping to distract us from the fact that his politics run so clearly contrary to women’s rights, equality, and sovereignty over our own bodies.
And, truly, he knew Palin was too wet behind the ears politically to stand up to even the soft pitches of Gibson and Couric; yet he had no hesitation asking Palin to throw herself into the kind of pressure cooker that has undone far more experienced men and women – even without the particular personal challenges Palin is juggling with a months-old, Down Syndrome baby, and a 17-year-old, unwed, pregnant daughter.
In my view, McCain has used Palin pretty ruthlessly. He wanted her on that Republican Convention stage as a pretty face talking the party line, but since then he’s essentially kept her tightly wrapped in the media equivalent of a burqa.
That’s not a maverick; that’s a manipulator.
And it’s the difference between having guts and being gutless.