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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Carol Richards
Published Letters: 517
You are not focusing on the right points:
Barack is probably going to win. More people have voted for him and he has more delegates. He has won more states and...well...that's how you win. You get more people to want you to win.
But that's NOT the point.
Until Barack wins we have to really focus on his weaknesses. Ms. Walsh believes this will make him stronger. She knows that too many people think he is more than just ok. Her hope is that if we can see that he might even be worse than ok, then he will be a stronger candidate.
Our focus must be on trying to figure out if Barack is ok or worse than ok.
Hillary might be worse than ok, but she most likely won't be running for president, so we can imagine her strengths by themselves; since she won't have a chance to win or lose against McCain, we should really only focus on what is more than ok about Hillary. Then we can compare our imagination of strengths-only Hillary against the reality of maybe-ok Barack. She wins!!!!!
But democracy wins because the more we see how just-ok-but-maybe-even-worse-than-ok Barack is, the stronger he is to win the election! Joan teaches us this with her blogs and you can really read her last 15 blogs and see that she is not kidding. It's about focusing on the right things.
Exactly! Obama presents himself as somebody who will never make mistakes. He always says he is never unhappy or upset or angry. He tells us, over and over, that we should vote for him because he only ever feels inspired and will only ever look that way!
So when he looks tired or grumpy, we automatically know that Hillary is more honest. She does not claim that she is hopeful like he does. She does not try to make voters think she more than human, capable of huge changes and all that nonsense. Hillary says outright that she fibs now and then, she admits that she complains about election coverage, she admits to the mistake of voting for the war.
Every time we see Barack do something kind of grumpy, let's show how that proves he is trying to trick us. That will make him stronger.
I find it strange that people supporting Barack aren't bugged by the fact that he can do things that reflect fatigue. It's like there are people supporting Barack who are ok with him not always representing his promise to never appear less than perfect. They just accept him without reason. Hillary can flub up when she does because she has never said she was a special politician.
We somehow need to change Barack supporters if we want him to win in November. I can't figure out how.
No, I was being sarcastic in my comments.
I'm way past the point of believing that this comment section is a place to really talk about the reasoning people are using. At the same time, I'm not willing to use it to scream at people for being bad or to suggest that they will be responsible for a failed election and all that.
Like Joan, we must just say our thing and then react to people's reactions. Like Joan, we actually can use people's reactions as proof of our original points, but we never have to enter into a rational conversation about that point.
But, oddly, I like it here, still! So, I wrote sarcastically. It helps me. And I enjoy other people's sarcasm, as long as it isn't mean spirited.
I don't see any justification for how Joan is setting up different metrics and logics for Hillary and Barack. I've really given her the benefit of the doubt and I've shown that I try to see her reasoning (to the small extent that she shares with us the rational behind her conclusions), but I can't find it. I'm not one of those who is mad at Joan or expects her to be somebody she is not. But I can't change either. I think it is vital that modern discourse can step back from conclusions and talk about the reasoning process itself. That is not Joan's thing (at least not in this context). She is about reactions (her reactions and the reactions of the worst Obama supporters).
But sorry to confuse you with my earlier post. I've always looked forward to your comments in these here hills!
tbrandel, we can't afford to apply the same logic to Barack and Hillary.
It does us no good to compare them evenly. It is too easy to show that Hillary has said arrogant things that point to a sense of entitlement. It is too easy to show that Hillary has fixated on her grievances at various points in the primary. It's too easy to show that Hillary has minimized (some call it lying, but she calls it "mismatching" her actions to her words).
You could spend all day showing that Hillary is at least equally as flawed as Barack, but it does us no good.
I agree that Hillary is way messed up in so many ways. I agree that Barack's wider popular support partially reflects Hillary's weaknesses as a candidate. I agree that in an ideal world, Barack and Hillary would be seen in the light of the same metrics.
But Joan's point is that because he is winning, it makes him stronger if we compare his weaknesses to an imagination of a strength-only Hillary; that way, we can be sort of confused as to how he is winning and we can imagine that strength-only Hillary would have a far better chance of beating McCain. AND, we can suspect that weakness-based Barack is being elevated by an unusual amount of awful supporters for which we can find evidence just by looking at how some of them comment in the comment section of Joan's blog.
This is an important way to make Barack stronger!
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