Barack Obama's nouvelle vague

[journalist3072]

In this Salon Op/Ed, Walter Shapiro makes some of the same arguments I've been making about Obama: high on the hope; light on actual substance (policy).

And as I've said before, I need more than the "politics of hope" to get me to the voting booth.

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Barack Obama's nouvelle vague

We know he's a "hope monger," but the rest of Obama's unconventional message is elusive.

By Walter Shapiro

Jan. 1, 2008 | PERRY, Iowa -- As Barack Obama hit the familiar chords of his stump speech in a gym here Tuesday morning, I sidled over to admaker Jim Margolis to ask in a whisper what he believed was the essence of his candidate's campaign. Margolis, who created the only memorable TV spots in the 2004 John Kerry campaign, replied, "The fundamental core message is that we're one country -- and we don't have to be divided." Just then, as if on cue, Obama hit the point in the speech when he decries the fractious politics of "tearing your opponents down instead of lifting the country up." As a small roll of applause swept across the room, Margolis smiled with the satisfaction of a mathematician who had just proved an obscure theorem and said, "You see?"

Nothing in politics is ever that simple, and Margolis did not claim that it was. But there remains, at least in my mind, something elusive about Obama's political appeal. The crowds are consistently good in Iowa, as they are (mostly) for Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. The revamped stump speech -- which was unveiled Thursday in Des Moines and which I have also heard in Mount Pleasant (Saturday) and now Perry -- is rich in inspiration and light on policy prescriptions. Again and again, the well-crafted 35-minute address repeats, with different words, the same formulation, the same inner logic that propels Obama's candidacy: "Americans all across the country are hungry for -- desperate for -- a new type of politics. Something different. A politics focused not on what divides us but on our common values and our common ideals, not so much on ideology, but practicality."

To someone schooled in traditional politics, Obama's rhetoric does seem at times vague. Although the famous line was briefly stripped out of the speech when it was delivered from a teleprompter Thursday, Obama is now back to mocking those who call him a "hope monger." As he put it in Perry -- in a reference that could apply to both Clinton and Edwards -- "Now we hear some other candidates speak almost scornfully about this idea of hope. They make it out that somehow your head's in the clouds. That Obama, he's talking about hope again. He's so idealistic. He's a hope monger. They imply that hope means you're naive or passive or you can't fight."

Skeptics can find a certain defensiveness here, a whiff that the attacks may be irking Obama as the Iowa campaign hits the finish-line tape. But now that we have reached the point in the Iowa race when all the leading Democrats candidates are depending on the power of repetition –- delivering the same speech in every setting -- there is the risk of seeing more in a few altered words in the candidate's delivery than was intended.

Source: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/01/obama/

[aquart]

1. All talk. Like going to a revivalist meeting.

[durrrty libby]

2. Only a dope would vote on hope. It is silly and empty

[rodeodance]

3. at times I am inspired as I listen to him--then I wonder what I can 'grad' onto that is material--