Yes we can, Mr. Obama? Who said you couldn’t?

Let’s all get excited! Sure! That’s fun.

Let’s all get involved! Wait a minute… I think I’m already busy.

“Yes we can” is one of the talking points of Senator Barack Obama’s current campaign and evidence that far too many among us still prefer playing the role of victim to rising to the challenges of leadership and “Yes we did.”

“Yes we can” requires no action. “Yes we did” means you had to get up off your ass and lend a hand.

Politicians like Obama and Clinton and McCain love these meaningless but motivating phrases because they play to many people’s misguided mindset that they are being neglected, ignored, bypassed, or beaten down by the system.

Like a moth to the flame, the victimaniacs crowd into town halls, meeting places, corner coffee shops, and any available nook or cranny they can hear smooth-talking politcians preach the hope of a better tomorrow.

But that is often unfortunately as far they want to get involved—or as deep as they want to probe. Once they hear what they want, they spread back out across the land to wait until election day so they can cast their vote and then sit back and wait for nirvana.

Heaven forbid they bother to pull their head out of their shallow euphoria and put their face deep into a book or news magazine to research their candidate’s background and biography. “Just a little information here, please, I’m trying to cut down.”

In just a few hours, using the library or a computer, you can drill down deep on just about any aspect of a candidate’s past and find eye-opening and sometimes troubling “talking points.” But who wants to do that? It’s far easier and safer to merely scratch a candidate’s surface rather than to extract the proverbial pound of flesh.

After all, the more you know, the more likely you are to discover that your shiny candidate isn’t quite as shiny as they first appeared. The wax begins to melt away and you are left with unpolished finish underneath.

Voting blindly is as distasteful to me as not voting at all. Maybe more so. You owe it to yourself, your family, and your future, to find out absolutely everything you can about a person before you cast that next vote.

This isn’t American Idol. The outcome really does matter here.

So the next time Barack Obama, a wealthy, Harvard-educated, United States Senator, says, “Yes we can,” I hope someone nearby has the courage to interrupt him and ask, “Senator Obama, who was it exactly that said you couldn’t?”