Confidence: Nothing Quite Like It

The game's afoot, and what seemed, only several months ago, a tediously long, drawn-out process has miraculously been transformed into a fascinatingly tedious, long-drawn-out process. The U.S. presidential primaries has engaged, infuriated and compelled its audience.
They focus on reading all the exhaustive explanations and descriptions and prognostications all the political pundits cared to reveal.

In the process exhausting peoples' patience with the absurdities inherent in the process and within the repeated candidates' declarations of sterling intent and experience that places them head and shoulders above their competitors. Political passions have been unleashed, and the zeal of partisan supporters for their candidates of choice is both uplifting and irritating; depending upon one's own personal choices.

And while the Republican campaign has speedily narrowed its choice in the best of all possible promises for their future in a candidate who appears to embody the choicest characteristics of a patiently decent human being who has experienced a good deal and come out of the harrowing of his life with a world view that can only be good for the country, the Democrats struggle in what has become a surprising dead heat.

And what's the first signal that a winning campaign has come up against an immovable object? What does a sport team of high repute and immense popularity do when its winning streak has been impossibly muted by a series of losses? Why, fire its manager, its coach and hire more promising specimens. That Hillary Clinton has taken that route sounds a death knell to her aspirations.

And Barack Obama is standing taller than his mortal height at the moment, while promising to gain height as his supporters heft him higher and higher on his winning momentum. He's telling them what they need to hear, to inspire them toward a new, a different country. They've become sick of what their country has aspired toward and sadly, achieved.

They don't have the answers to make themselves well again, and neither does he. But he's promising to find them, to find a new direction and make the required changes. He believes in himself, and they believe in him. All one needs is confidence and the ability to enthuse and inspire, and confidence becomes transformed into success.

There will never be an Obama-Clinton ticket. And, good a candidate as he is, there will not be a President McCain any time soon. He fought the good fight, however. Imagine: Even President Bush has endorsed Mr. McCain - kind of. Much as he has slagged Mr. Obama for intimating he would "attack Pakistan and embrace Ahmadinejad".

This is the U.S. president who thought fit to wage a war his father before him declined. Something about a father-son complex where the son sets out to demonstrate to his father his ability to outdo him, and in the process restore his personal sense of dignity, integrity, honour. An extremely costly little conceit that has cost many lives.

A process and a set of military procedures that has seen many who helped launch it fall by the way; some, like Colin Powell, who might have deserved better if he had known better. An unfortunate decision that has cost the U.S. treasury dearly.

And given that it was under this Republican president's watch that the American economy seems somehow to have found itself near collapse, and given that the U.S. military finds itself mired in an unpleasantly malodorous stew of societal collapse and fratricidal frenzy, and given that the United States holds a leaden burden of debt, there is a price to pay.

Ready or not, here comes the first black man to assume the mantle of President of the great United States of America.