Do we need a Pinoy Obama?

Years from now, wikipedians, historians and pundits will look at the past two weeks as the reasons why Obama won the US presidency in 2008. There are 5 main reasons why Obama won:
1. Sarah Palin (if she is not lying, she is fumbling)
2. Presidential Debates (to go or not to go)
3. Economy (it's the economy, stupid)
4. Campaign Ads (Lipstick on a pig)
5. Iraq War (tell that to the Marines)

Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr. will be the first African-American president of the USA, not a descendant of a slave traded in colonial times but literally the son of an African-Kenyan and an American. He is an intellectual heavyweight with humble roots. His parents met in the University of Hawaii, where his mother earned her PhD in Anthropology. His father Barrack Obama, Sr. was a graduate scholar in Hawaii, and later earned a Master's degree in Economics from Harvard. (Can a Ravanilla be the first Asian-American president of the US?)

Barrack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, has degrees in Political Science from University of Columbia and Law from Harvard. He worked as a community organizer, a law senior lecturer at University of Chicago, an Illinois State Senator, and a US Senator of Illinois.

Obama runs on a platform of change and hope. With almost everything screwed up in the US today, he has a lot of things to change: the economy, budget, housing, finance, labor market, two wars and everything else in between. The task is enormous and it makes Obama's HOPE mantra more powerful.

In difficult times, more than the ability to make difficult decisions, pick the right people, and push difficult reform provisions, a leader must be able to inspire people. The need to inspire is the same reason why people vote for politicians they can relate to, candidates who can feel (or at least appear to feel) their pain.

(This is the same reason why Erap became president and why he remains popular. He does not have a college degree, the same with about 60%-70% of Filipino adults. Erap would love to talk with the average-hockey-mom from Alaska, and they will have thousands of things to talk about.)

The ability to inspire people to do things for themselves separates good leaders from less notable ones. More than just being the highest technocrat or bureaucrat, leaders who inspired people leave a lasting memory, they move a nation for a greater cause... Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Ramon Magsaysay and Junichiro Koizumi, to name a few.

With the crisis the Philippines is facing, do we need an Obama? Probably not... as Obama said in one of his most mocked statements "we are the ones we have been waiting for." We should not spend countless hours looking for people to inspire us, we should strive hard to be an inspiration for other people.

We do not need to look outside to find great inspirations, we have Among Ed Panlilio of Pampanga, Grace Padaca of Isabela, and Jessie Robredo of Naga City. But what have we done? Local politicians in Pampanga are trying to unseat Among Ed. Robredo and Padaca are trapped in a system that it seems they cannot be elected to a higher office. And we are left with politicians on the national level rewarded for mudslinging, defamation and grandstanding.

Reform and change are very difficult. We need leaders with the political will to do the reforms, the technical skills to implement them and the charisma to rally the nation behind him. Not just rhetoric and showing off, We need a change that we can believe in.