Good morning, Mr. President!

This is the day! All the world wakes up with America embracing a new era. God bless Barack Obama as he rolls up his sleeve along with the rest of the nation and its dreamers and believers of the possibilities of hope and change in this time of challenges.




















Click here to read my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu in celebration of this unprecedented moment of the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States of America. For the complete text of Obama's inaugural speech, click here.

No sand and fog at the White House

W hen the cauldron of the Democratic Party nomination boiled down to a face-off between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it was like choosing between coffee and beer for a post-prandial downtime at the porch. I can take both, you see, like it were broth.

Although I leaned more toward Hillary at the start of the campaign, Barack had been stirring my cowlicks with the fresh air of his conviction and the force of his character. Both, I believed as I do now, will make the White House live up to its color after the stain and smoke of the Bush administration.

It was a thrill to see them squaring off then. It is phenomenal to see them coming full circle now, and proving they can be "a team of rivals" steeped in the art of sporty statesmanship for a common concern larger than themselves--to overcome the odds in this awful yet awesome time in America.

Here's a toast, therefore, to President-elect Obama for tapping Clinton into the top echelon of his administration, appointing her today as his Secretary of State. In choosing Clinton, among other liuetenants in his Cabinet, Obama proves his governance will be set upon a rock amid raging waters.

"I assembled this team because I am a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions," he said. "I think that's how the best decisions are made. One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in group-think and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I am going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House."

Spoken, indeed, like a stalwart out to bowl us over with his "pragmatic use of power" and "a sense of purpose about America's role as a leader in the world." Salud!

Worthy of his words

W hat do prize-winning writers Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Jane Smiley, Rick Moody, etc. have in common? An ode to Obama, that’s what they might as well have written.

Writers welcome a literary U.S. president-elect, affirms an Associated Press article. “A peer, a thinker, a man of words--his own words,” thus they agree about the author of two best-selling books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

About the forthcoming White House ruler, the AP story also reveals that Obama used to write poetry in his college days and even caught the attention of critic Harold Bloom who thought Obama had the spark of a Langston Hughes.

“I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase. I was very impressed,” lauds Morrison, Nobel laureate for literature and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, about Obama’s Dreams from My Father. “This was not a normal political biography.”

Chabon and Smiley, also Pulitzer awardees both, agree. Chabon confesses he admires Obama because of “his writing, the quality of his prose.” Such is the source of his charisma, attests Smiley who appraises an Obama speech as “more convincing in a politician than the usual thing of speaking the words of a raft of hack speechwriters.”

So much has been said about how the Obama candidacy took the upper hand by tapping the tools of modern communication for whiz-bang organization and cohesion of campaign strategy. But without the instinctive undercurrent of character, something that Obama oozes enough for such abstractions as hope and redemption to hold water, his message would have left his listeners high but dry. The sheer force of sincerity beyond the electric gift of gab. That’s what drive his messages home, finally. That’s what surges through his unprecedented and almost improbable rise to power.

Small wonder he looms over the podium with an aplomb above the usual political lip service, as when he dares to be self-deprecating during a dinner talk, tongue-in-cheek candor matched only with a burp-worthy wit: "I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse."

At last here comes a talking head who can literally steer clear from the bumbling and rambling woes, the foot-in-the-mouth affliction, of a George Bush.

Regarding possibilities despite the daunting tasks ahead, it’s easy to see why an Obama speech is enough for writer Rick Moody to be teary-eyed.

“I think the larger issue is cultural,” he explains. “There's a trickle down from the top in the way art exists inside and outside of the culture as a whole. Here in the USA, you could feel in the Bush years how little regard there was for it. People who disliked art, literature, dance, fine arts, they had a lot of cover for this antipathy.”With a president who seem to carry the torch for writers, that rag-and-boneshop-of-the-heart tribe, Moody thinks, “There's reason to believe that we are in for a much better period.” You bet, so far so good.

Attuned to the swathe of sweetness and light in the wake of Obama's election, here's a new stomp-the-feet-at-the-rooftop song and video just launched by Will.I.Am (the genius reponsible for the stirring "Yes, We Can" MTV, which proved popular among YouTube viewers, and cued in Oprah Winfrey to believe the rap song is partly responsible for this watershed moment in world history.) Sway, all together now, and sing: It's a new day!

When America rocks

Whoa! The rest is history, yes, as we witness this meteoric phenomenon: the presidency of Barack Obama.

Never mind that I'm merely a kibitzer with no partisan flag to wave over what might as well be a stardusted chapter of an American fairy tale. Yes, I'm not a voter. That, however, did not stop me from getting myself stuck on the telecast since the start of the counting of the ballots up to Obama's rousing but sobering victory speech.

“Even as we celebrate tonight we know that the challenges tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime: two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century,” Obama told a sea of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park. "This victory alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance to make that change."

Ah, to bank on the belief that the American electorate would rise to the occasion. Though I don't have their privilege of getting my voice heard and counted, let me seize this opportunity to give them their due of a standing ovation. Whoa, I say again. For proving true, at least, what an essay on transcendence by an Associated Press writer affirms.

En route to the inaugural, optimism does a moonwalk along with my mood to the tune of James Brown and the pop-eyed creature in this following video:

Today, while the world watches

It's heady to come from a country where elections are an exercise for voters to bend backwards through their threshold of tolerance. And so being in the midst of the 2008 US election has stirred in me a strange cocktail of outrage and fondness regarding the way we Filipinos make a circus and a chainsaw massacre out of our right of suffrage.

Indeed, as my latest column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star reveals, America's election season has primed me into missing the mess of the political festival-cum-pestilence back home.

Out here, it's good riddance for the mosaic of candidates' posters and streamers more than enough to convince you that blessed are the blind. None here, too, are TV ads jolly with campaign jingles to jazz up any clown's routine. A galaxy apart, indeed, from what I've been accustomed to see in Philippine elections: a litter of sample ballots swamping the streets and a crowd jostling, sweating, and squinting for their names at the voters' list tacked outside the classrooms.

Early today when I sent my son to school, it was sort of disorienting--pleasantly so--not to see a throng of voters to the polling precincts. In the main hall of the school where the voting booths were set up, I could have sneaked in for a catnap. Which nearly fooled me into thinking that Americans (at least the Kansans) were not hot about this election. Wrong, they and the rest of America did cast their votes in unprecedented numbers. The calm and the orderly manner rendered this election all the more affirmative for an airtight process of polling with technological leverage.

So much for the ease of voting and counting the ballots through computerization--a process that remains an alien concept for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) whose prehistoric conduct has spawned watchdogs as rabid as woebegone protesters.

Later tonight, the outcome of the Obama-McCain duel--widely seen as historic and seminal--will be known. The choice America takes will be crucial, no doubt, at a time when Washington's agenda on the economy, the environment, foreign policy, terrorism, etc. have flung shadows looming all over the planet.

For those watching America as a beacon of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among others, may the hope for a sea-change cast ripples elsewhere about the necessity for and the possibility of change for the better. Go hum, whistle: The best is yet to come.

Here comes history, Mr. Obama!

Now that the air is acrid with the stench from Bush's pisspot at the White House that leaks all the way to Wall Street, being here in America may be wrong timing for any migrant dreamer out to raise the stakes for better opportunities.

But it's also a thrill of a time to be in the midst of history in the making, hovering in the wings of change. (This, in a nutshell, is what my opinion column says in today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu.)

Economic uncertainty, notwithstanding, it's great to witness America bracing to redeem itself from its excesses and the ignorance of its arrogance and prove what greatness it is capable of.

With hope and in honor of the next President of the United States of America, I echo what will resound a few days from now: "Yes, We Can!"

Here's a music video from the Black Eyed Peas and a host of celebrities supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama.