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Barack Obama: As Lucky as Forrest Gump?

by Christopher McIntosh
09/01/2008

[insert bad line from bad movie as bad lead to bad article]

Now that that obligatory line is out of the way, ask yourself this: what was the central theme of Forrest Gump? One man, lacking ability and experience, somehow through hard work and determination finds himself at the center of nearly every single major American event.

And he influences them for the good.

Now, I'll stay bipartisan (for the moment) and ask, with the possible exception of the last part, who does that sound like?

Obama may have the political instincts of an alderman from the South Side of Chicago, but he has had good fortune rivaled only by one Forrest Gump.

Obama did not go straight from Hawaii prep school to Columbia, but had a stop at relatively little known Occidental College first and then transferred into Columbia. That's hard. Real hard. Ask anyone who's been to college, that takes more than a little luck with the committee regardless of your credentials.

He was the first black president of Harvard Law Review. Apparently, this wasn't a unanimous choice, nor was it bestowed upon the student with the best grades, as some schools do today. He had to basically win an election. An election that catapulted him into being a national figure on the legal scene.

He wrote a book about his life story. More to the point, he could write a book about his life story and he did it way before Senatorial ambitions and beyond. That was his second book. He lived such a Forrest Gump style life, living in Indonesia and Hawaii, raised by grandparents with an absentee Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, that book companies were willing to let him write his story for fun and profit.

How many people are born into that opportunity?

Politically, his rise has been meteoric, but the number of times he's rolled the dice and it's come up seven is the stuff of myth.

Somehow, as a state senator running for Senate - against two other opponents who should have/could have beaten the state senator who's only run for national office resulted in a 2-1 defeat - he wrangled the keynote address at the 2004 convention.

Think there weren't a few other candidates for that speech?

Now this is only a rumor as I can't find another source for it, but there is reason to believe that the speech, the one that cemented him as a national figure and brought people to tears, was an audible. He had a validated speech that the DNC wanted him to give. He didn't like it and asked the faculty at Chicago what he should do. They said fire it up. He did, and he did.

As for said Senate race, as Obama's biographer put it, you couldn't make stuff like this up. Both candidates went down ahead of him. Tripped on their own shoelaces, both on scandals that couldn't be turned around, leaving Obama as the only choice.

The GOP decided they were so screwed that they imported Alan Keyes to run against Obama. I could win an election against Alan Keyes and I'm barely old enough to be senator. This is a man who's attacks on Obama included, "Jesus wouldn't vote for Obama."

While, barring the Second Coming, he's technically right, I don't think my Bible included a copy of the Republican platform or personal attacks on particular opponents.

Obama, shockingly, wins.

He gets into a primary battle with Hillary and somehow the political machine to put to shame all other political machines makes two crucial mistakes - they don't realize the primary contest doesn't end after Super Tuesday and even more inexplicably, one of her main strategists didn't realize the delegates were determined proportionally, not winner take all.

He wins. On delegates. Many from small states that he clobbers her in and then holds his own in the big ones.

Now we bring ourselves to the animus behind this column. The DNC has just put together a rousing convention with a concomitant bump and a speech by Obama in front of 80,000 screaming fans that may be one of the greatest of the last half century. The Republicans have had their chance to counter somewhat with the VP choice (ed. note: Caribou jokes involving former beauty queens are not sanctioned by this media outlet).

But here comes the RNC's rejoinder. A whole week of glorious media coverage of the televised speeches responding to and hopefully, exceeding, what the Democrats have put together.

There's just one problem. Forrest Gump has struck again.

Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on New Orleans and is set to be worse than Katrina.

I said worse than Katrina.

Guess what you can't do during a national crisis.

All of which, as usual, works to Obama's advantage. Barack Obama may have just lucked into either an abbreviated or altogether canceled GOP convention. No one could imagine an act of God large enough to nearly shut down the RNC convention.

But it's already happening.

And as usual, politicians are benefiting while New Orleans could be suffering a fate worse than it already experienced with Katrina.

Obama may be the lucky one, but I think we can all agree on just how awful the aftermath of Gustav could be.

Let's hope some of his luck rubs off on the Gulf Coast.

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