I admit it. I am addicted to the writing of Roger Cohen. Here we have a man of South African Jewish descent, raised in England, who is now one of the most astute observers of the American scene. On Mondays and Thursdays I look forward to glancing at the op eds in the New York Times to see what he has to offer. Usually I find myself challenged, delighted or both. Often what he has written is so powerful and/or acute in his observations. Today is no exception.
In his column today, entitled as it this diary Republican Blues, Cohen explores a phenomenon we have all been observing - lifelong Republicans who have decided to support Obama. His focus is primarily on a man raised in Karachi who arrived in this nation in 1969 with an engineering degree and little else and is now wealthy. He also talks about a man originally from Idaho and a Cuban-American Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. But his focus is on the man from Karachi.
We might not be pleased about Fazal Fazlin, who now lives in a 5-acre waterfront estate once owned by Neslon Poynter who also owned the St. Petersburg Times and was a strong liberal.
Liberalism was never Fazlin’s thing. For most of his rags-to-riches American life, he was a Nixon Republican.
"I felt Nixon was a great President," Fazlin, a dapper 58, told me. "He opened relations with China, and that’s what kept inflation down. He had a really good command of the world."
And yet, outside the mansion on that estate one now sees signs for the candidate for whom Fazlin cast his early ballot, Barack Obama.
Cohen tells us he is not surprised by the phenomenon of life-long Republicans supporting Obama, something about which he has written before. He mentions Bryant Jones, who was raised in Idaho and volunteered for Obama in South Carolina, and for whom
it was disenchantment with "my-way-or-the-highway politics and the same old faces."
For Fazlin it was more that the Republican party had abandoned its roots. It had "forgotten itself," a phrase that clearly resonated with Cohen, who sees ideological exhaustion, and desperation in the "Hail Mary" selection of Palin as running mate.
Fazlin’s Republican Party, he told me over lunch, "was for less government and it was fiscally conservative. But look at the spending under Bush. We are trillions in debt. My granddaughter will pay for that."
He is further shocked by the entire sub-prime mortgage mess, remembering the hoops through which he had to jump to get his first mortgage. He remembers a Republican party which believed in a connection "between hard work and reward" and in "transactions based on reality."
Fazlin is also bothered by the cultural shift wherein the Republican party has become dominated by the Christian Right, which played an insignificant role in the party he joined. Fazlin is a Muslim, and Cohen offers two illustrations of how that plays.
- Fazlin sees an attitude towards Muslims he does not like, which he sees as linked to the rise of the Christian Right. "Muslim cannot mean terrorist, but some of the emails I get suggest Republicans don’t see the difference.""
- Fazlin was especially pleased to hear Colin Powell say: "Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?"
Fazlin founded his own high tech company in 1980, selling it for "a few bucks" 19 years later, and then buying the Poynter mansion. In June he had a gathering there of his family, some coming from Pakistan, Canada and Australia. They provided the impetus to move him to support Obama:
They asked: What’s happened to America? Why is it so heavy-handed? Why won’t it sit down, eyeball to eyeball, with its enemies and try to work things out? Fazlin considered those good questions.
He organized a fundraiser in Orlando, at which he met Obama and was impressed - he wasn't on a pedestal and he offered efficiency. They talked politics and Pakistani cuisine.
Cohen tells us he finds common threads among Republicans switching to Obama:
we have to do something different; we cannot be the party of fiscal irresponsibility; we cannot be the angry party of an "America-first" jingoism that alienates the world.
He then offers what I think may be the key part of his column:
There’s something more, something unspoken. Reagan’s line was, "It’s morning again in America." Bush has been about American dusk. Republicans are hard-headed but not to the point they want hope banished from the national vocabulary.
Enter Obama.
Cohen offers further support in his mention of Andy Gomez, from a family where the other five members are all Republicans, and of whom four are joining him in supporting Obama. They have gone beyond Cuba as an issue to things like education, health care and the economy.
The issues Gomez mentions are often those driving many who support Obama. So are the three core points Cohen mentions about Republican who have crossed party lines. We may not agree on every point, but when we sit down we realize how much in common we may have with those whose political starting point is different than ours. And this also why the words Enter Obama are so relevant. Note how Fazlin reacted to a man running for the president who did not insist on being upon a pedestal, but look him in the eye. Even with the soaring rhetoric Obama never fails to remind his audiences that this is about them (us), that change has to come from the bottom up. In watching the speech from Cincy last night, my wife commented on how the message of personal responsibility - turn off the tv and have your kids read, change how you use energy - is appealing to many of a conservative bent. It is yet another way in which we are drawn in to ownership of the problems and the possible solution.
Ownership - often we hear Republicans talking about an "ownership society" by which they mean things like privatization of social security and individual health savings accounts. That may be ownership, but no where in that construction do we encounter anything about society, about our common heritage and responsibilities towards people other than ourselves and our kith and kin. The real "ownership society" would be when we take common responsibility for our nation, seeing not only as a mechanism by which we personally benefit, but a heritage of democracy and opportunity in which the true success is when all can participate, not only in obtaining the many benefits it may offer but also the sense of contributing to its success for all of us. It is odd that so many who claim to be religious want to argue with Cain that they are not their brothers' keepers.
This diary is not the place in which to offer exact predictions about tomorrow's electoral results, although I am more than quietly confident. I have that confidence because of people like the "Obamacons" who are crossing party lines to support the Democratic candidate. I believe that the real historic nature of his candidacy is less his mixed race background than it is his ability to draw diverse people to common cause. Yes, that is a set of skills he began to develop as a community organizer and which he honed as president of the Harvard Law Review. Experience, however, is insufficient unless the material to which it is applied is suitable. In this case that is the personality, the character, the judgment of Barack Obama.
Fazal Fazlin and the other men mentioned in this column are not starry-eyed followers of a celebrity, but rather men who see clearly that our nation must change. They see Obama not as the prime mover but rather as an occasion. They are drawn to his candidacy because it enables them to feel as if they are making a meaningful difference, they are part of the process of changing this nation for the better.
When my wife came back from Arlington Obama headquarters last night, she had made 170 phone calls in the few hours she had to give. I read her this diary about the Richmond Virginia headquarters, and one paragraph stood out:
The campaign ran out of places to canvass in Virginia yesterday. That's because there were more than 13,000 people on the streets. More than 500,000 doors were knocked just yesterday, just in Virginia. More people knocked on doors for Obama than attended both McCain rallies.
We may be immigrants from Pakistan who have made huge fortunes in high tech. We may be students, or housewifes, or school teachers, or retired, or lawyers, or doctors, or high office holders, or disabled. we are male and female, straight and gay, every color imaginable, from every religion or no religion. We have been drawn to the opportunity to make a difference for our nation, by our participation, not just by our votes and our money.
Of course this will scare some people. But many thinking people, even if their normal political persuasion is from the other side of the aisle are also drawn to this, the true meaning of ownership society, of owning our society and our politics.
One more day. But even after the election, our task will still have only just begun.
Peace.