You people do realize that they're all horrible choices, don't you?
It's politics. The people who want to gain power, influence, and popularity, and all those other things we deem as shallow, have the advantage because they're doing what they want to do (and are presumably good at) in order to get ahead. The people who want to make a practical difference end up getting sidelined, because they spend their time researching the facts rather than trying to be a shining beacon of attention.
That may seem like a relatively cynical view of politics, but someone who is that way doesn't necessarily act in an immoral or amoral fashion. Put the right pressures on them and they will tend towards the right thing to do. Or, if they have some depth to them beyond all of the intensive networking, they'll be able to listen to the smart people who do know about the decisions that they have to make.
Obama strikes me as an idealist, but that's a commitment he'll have to hold to in office. He can't just reverse that and start giving corruption the all-clear or else there's no way he'll get elected next term. He's also in a position where he will be a name for the history books just because he'll be the first black president of the United States. He's going to have all eyes watching him, and the last black idealist who was in that particular kind of situation is not remembered for his politics but for his words. If Obama is in this just for personal power, he's doing a damn good job of pulling the wool over people's eyes. But I think there's enough of an idealistic statement at stake here to believe that some of that will affect him, and that the decisions he makes if he gets into office will have some moral, socially conscious aspect to them.
The most interesting thing about Obama comes from when I heard him speak. (I was standing about one row of people back from the round area that was cleared for him to speak). There were a couple of things, actually, that stood out about it to me, both centering around someone in the cloud who collapsed due to the heat.
The first was a comment by the man on the other side of Obama from the person. As the paramedics were on their way to deal with the situation, the man yelled, "Homeland security wouldn't have been that fast!" (paraphrased; it was definitely a negative comment about Homeland Security with that general phrasing)
Obama paraphrased that as, "He said he would hope that Homeland Security would've been that fast." Right, so Obama paraphrased it to make the comment positive, so he didn't look like he was passing on a politically barbed statement.
The second was watching Obama try to deal with this person. He'd been making some rather definite comments about the Bush administration, IIRC, when the person had collapsed, and he was put in the position of having to compete with that for attention. On the one hand, he couldn't appear inconsiderate by just ignoring the fact that they were in trouble (even though the paramedics were there) and he didn't know exactly what the problem was at that point. On the other hand, he was on something of a roll and would lose the momentum of his speech by stopping it clear out. So he stopped for awhile, asked how serious it was, got told it was just heat stroke, etc. Then he kind of made some half starts. Eventually, the person was carried away and he went right back into it.
It was interesting to see a politician have to react to something unplanned like that. (Disregarding some conspiracy to make Obama appear more genuine, which seems a little off the deep end to me, considering how he reacted.)
The other thing that I noticed about Obama was that he had confidence, not charisma. He seemed like the kind of person you would follow because you had made a choice to, not because you just felt some kind of attachment to him. I'm not sure if most other people there would mirror that opinion, though, I did not think to ask it at the time.
