Warren Buffett Says Obama Is The Leader We Need In These Perilous Times

In the euphoria of seeing one of my favorite teams (the Pittsburgh Steelers) marching into the Super Bowl game to take place on February 1st, I overlooked the interview of Warren Buffett by Tom Brokaw which NBC broadcast this weekend.

I'm a big Warren Buffet fan. I also love Warren's partner Charlie Munger (I've got a $75 book on Charlie which is a prized possession filled with many of his famous "Mungerisms")

Both men are class acts, and despite Warren being a supporter of Democrats and Munger being a supporter of Republicans, the two men never allow their politics to come between them in their lifelong pursuit of building Berkshire Hathaway on firm balance sheets minus all the recent smoke and mirrors accounting thievery which became the norm during the past 20 to 25 years of Crony Capitalism.

What Warren has seen and knows

As Tom Brokaw reminds viewers, Mr. Buffet has seen it all. He was born during the Great Depression. He lived through WWII when our America and Western Democracies were threatened. He was there when LTCM went down and when the Internet Bubble burst and now he is still with us to see what he calls America's "Economic Pearl Harbor".

Throughout the interview, Buffett calmly assures us that there is no one like Barack Obama to lead us out of this mess created by Crony Capitalism. He tells us Obama is an excellent listener and that he is calm under pressure (much like Mr. Buffett) and that he has the guts and fortitude to make well informed decisions based on the best intelligence he gathers from people with great minds.

Mr. Buffett's Outlook for America

I've heard Mr. Buffet say the following many times throughout his storied career to college kids eating lunch with him, to shareholder gatherings for Berkshire Hathaway or in his writings: America has seen rough times before and we always come out of it stronger and better as a Nation. It doesn't pay to bet against America.

He's right. He's my idea of a Capitalist I can embrace. I love my country. As a Veteran, I invested 3 years of my life in its Army without fully understanding at the time of my swearing in how screwed up our political leadership was to have invaded Vietnam for all the wrong reasons . . . much like the One Party Rule going out the back door today and which invaded Iraq, a country which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. When I look back at Vietnam and Iraq, I sense and hope that maybe this country will finally realize we can no longer invade sovereign countries under false pretenses. (I would have thought Vietnam would have wizened up all the Baby Boomers, and yet when the Greed bug bit the Boomers, they turned out to be more of ". . . same as the old boss."

I sense the times have changed greatly with Obama's election

Like Warren Buffett, I too voted for Barack Obama. I sensed this was one of these Historical moments, such as when John F. Kennedy became President against all the fear mongerers pushing prejudices in the South. I was a kid in Richmond, Va during those years . . . and attending a Catholic school to boot . . . so, I experienced overt prejudice growing up. And I never in my life back then would have imagined we'd have a President today with skin color which wouldn't even have allowed him to drink out of the same water fountains I used as child in Downtown Richmond during the 50s and early 60s.

Today's "kids" are more and more free of race consciousness than ever before. Whereas a black boy hugging a white girl would have been grounds for a lynching in the segregated South, now days, we have people of color narrating our news, starring on the football field, and directing giant corporations worth Billions of dollars.

And now here we are with a President whose father was a black African and his mother was a white American, whose white grandparents made sure he stayed in school and "did the right thing". This is a "librul" (as Rush Limbaugh would intone) who feels kids from two parent homes have a better chance in life, yet who came from a one parent home with assistance of grandparents whose skin was of different color than his own. When you look at Obama's past, one must marvel at how John Lennon's words "All you need is love" and how his words "Imagine" never rang truer than what we see in Barack Obama today.

We've come a long way, baby.

I, like Warren Buffett, am ready to turn another page in the History of this great country of ours. Like Warren, I feel the times were made just for Barack Obama to bring our people hope during the darkest of times.

You can see Warren's interview above and other related news (and many unrelated pieces of news, weather and sports) over on my A1A News blog . . . Key West's answer to the Drudge Report.

Enjoy!

Carpe Diem,
Rock Trueblood