Why I’m Kinda Fonda Obama (And More So Each Week)by David Michael Green
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/25/9183/Some of us who like Barack Obama get accused of having drunk the Kool-Aid - or perhaps love-potion would be more accurate - and thus being too smitten by his rhetorical enticements to see him clearly for what he is.
Maybe that accurately describes many of his fans, but it’s definitely not me.
I warmed up to Obama slowly, and I’m still rather dubious about what he would actually do as president. Moreover, I found his rhetorical gifts to be, if anything, both overstated and simultaneously a bit off-putting. For a long time, I never thought that Obama was quite the magician at the microphone that he was supposed to be. And when he was eloquent, he raised my hard-earned suspicions about those politicians who can make people feel good with words, whilst deftly picking their pockets at the very same time. We had a president like that in the 1980s, and then another one in the 1990s. It didn’t work out so well. (Although it did work out better than the current one, who skipped the rhetorical foreplay altogether and jumped directly to the royal screwing.)
(snip)
He’s also smart in the way that he’s now transitioning into the general election. The simplest way to win this year is to morph John McCain into George W. Bush. It ain’t exactly a giant, unfair leap to do so, either, but leave it to any other Democrat running for president to somehow forget. Not Obama. He’s been labeling McCain as George Bush’s third term for months now, which is precisely the language he should use. As long as voters believe that - and they should, despite McCain’s absurd and absurdly late efforts to distance himself from Bush - everything else that follows beyond that perception is mere commentary. Not for nothing is ‘change’ the operative word of this election. Voters are ravenous for the opportunity to reject the status quo, and Obama is making sure that they have that opportunity by (rightly) chaining McCain to the sinking ship of Bushism that McCain helped launch and keep afloat all these years.
Obama is also brilliant and gutsy to use Karl Rove’s rule of attacking an opponent’s strength, although in his case it is legitimate to do so, whereas for Rove it’s always breathtakingly nauseating when he goes after someone in the cheapest and most deceitful fashion. McCain’s supposed to be Mr. Clean, right?
This week, Obama reminded us how a decade ago McCain had proposed barring lobbyists from working on campaigns. He went on to note that, “John McCain then would be pretty disappointed in John McCain now, because he hired some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign. And when he was called on it, his top lobbyist actually had the nerve to say the American people won’t care about this.” For the life of me, I can’t visualize John Kerry or Michael Dukakis or the Al Gore of 2000 exhibiting either the smarts or the courage to toss a heater right down the middle like that. Which is why they all lost and Obama likely will not.McCain would like very much to position himself as above the fray in the coming campaign, based on his POW experience and his supposed clean government agenda. That would be an outrageous gift, and one which it looks to me that Obama is smart enough not to bestow on him. After all, McCain has been very much part of the problem, not the solution, all along. The regressive right and its electoral vehicle - aka the Giant Oleaginous Pukefest - have made a shambles of this country, and it is more than fitting that McCain should be hoisted by his own petard. Yes, it’s true that he is not as monstrous as some of them, but he’s also far less the ‘maverick’ (can we please just ban this word for the rest of this year?) than he’d love for you to believe he is. In any case, with the right’s record - ranging from Iraq, to exploding debt, to Katrina, to global warming, to a wrecked economy - anybody still willing to call themselves a Republican deserves everything they get this November. And they’re gonna get a lot. At this point, they literally cannot even win a congressional seat in Mississippi (Mississippi!!), and that’s in a district that Bush won by something like 24 percent less than four years ago.
A third reason I like Obama is because he is reaching people and mobilizing them. That is important for winning, and it will be important for governing too. Participation in politics is off the charts this cycle - at least by American politics’ standards - and a fair chunk of that is attributable to Obama (though George Bush certainly deserves a lot of credit for bringing out voters, too, much to the chagrin of his party). Moreover, Obama is raising unprecedented amounts of money from unprecedented numbers of contributors. Again, this will be crucial to both winning and to governing. He has already demonstrated the former, stomping Clinton after her fat-cats had already maxed out and not too many other folks were much interested. As for governing, a President Obama would have a lot of stakeholders expecting big things from him in the White House, people that he dare not disappoint. Equally important would be the stakeholders he wouldn’t have. Nice folks such as Exxon/Mobil, Blackwater, Halliburton and the like.
I’m also warming up to Obama, fourth, because I think he’s tough enough to throw a punch. It took the Democrats thirty years to figure this one out, but it looks as though they finally have. (Cont....)
Very goo read at link:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/25/9183/
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