Letters to the Editor
Timelagged
Published Letters: 244 Editor's Choice: 12
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To Joan
[Read the article: Looking past Pennsylvania]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]See, where I disagree is with the notion that most, or even any, of this is truly a matter of Obama “doing” things, or not doing things.
When an offhand comment he makes to a group in California is picked up and trumpeted by the Clinton campaign, and then the news media, to the point where soon Wolf Blitzer is saying things like “the continuing controversy over the so-called ‘bitter’ comments by Barack Obama..” and at that point it’s become shorthand for “scandal” despite the fact that few probably even know the details, thus the need for the code “bitter” by Blitzer..
And suddenly, Obama has “not closed the deal” and all the rest of this nonsense. When in fact, Hillary Clinton was always going to win PA, and she was going to win it by a far larger margin than she did. So after months of catching up, making a huge rise in the state, something that in any other situation would be called “huge momentum” and her 12 point drop (or even more, by some accounts) would be seen as bleeding support at an alarming rate—instead, Obama not closing the gap by 9 MORE points in addition to the 12 he already did gets turned into “he can’t close the deal”.
This is what’s annoying, and it seems to me, disingenuous. Instead of reporting that things played out as expected in PA, in fact much better than expected for Obama going by months ago, instead the manufactured controversy is blamed for his “poor showing”. And a man who was raised far from anything that could be called elite circumstances, who spent years doing organizing on the wrong side of the tracks, is now an “elitist” who dislikes poor and working people, and a deeply religious man is now someone who mocks and hates religion. And all of this is taken as true, and then turned to rationalize why he “can’t close the deal”.
This is what bugs me.
When I see David Brooks doing this it’s at least expected. His recent comments about how Democrats “are seen as not like the voters” and that’s why they don’t win were the most annoying and transparent kind of vapid nonsense, but this is Brooks. First he and the other pundits pick up some Swift Boat smear, they push it non-stop to the voters (i.e. John Edwards is a sissy boy whose hair is too nice) and then, when gullible voters hear this non-stop and start repeating it themselves… then Brooks says “See? That’s what voters care about!”
I expect it from him. I don’t from “progressives”. And yet this is exactly how many of us view nearly everything that's happened in the past weeks in this primary. That's how it looks to us. And I can't help thinking that if it weren't for your desire for Clinton to win, you'd be right there seeing it the same way.
It would be nice if you were. We need everyone at this point.
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It's not a stalemate
[Read the article: Whose fault is the Clinton-Obama stalemate?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obama is ahead and has been for some time. To the point where Clinton can't catch up.
That's the whole point. The Pennsylvania results for example were expected. He was ahead before they happened, and nothing has changed after. But because the Clinton campaign puts out press releases spinning her 12% plummet in support in PA as a sign of huge upward momentum instead, you and others start trumpeting the "stalemate" again. That's the only reason.
Put another way: Who's responsible for the "stalemate"?
You are.
You and the other pundits who invented it.
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@clamshell Huh??
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"blue collar Sarkozy"
I'm wondering if you don't know what the phrase "blue collar", means, or anything about Sarkozy. Or both?
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No, you're not on the left
[Read the article: Why Jeremiah Wright is so wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sorry, but this is too much.
Is the next column going to be about lapel pins?
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Joan "covered" the Wright "story" earlier today already.
[Read the article: The return of the Rev. Wright]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So Salon has already fulfilled its Hillary Clinton campaign propaganda organ role on that one.
You should be onto other pressing topics. Lapel pins say. Maybe a story titled "But really, why does Obama hate America?", continuing the weighty questions raised by the lapel "issue", laced with rationalizations about why it's not really a right wing-imitating Clinton propaganda piece.
How weird that This Modern World cartoons are now satirizing no publication as precisely as Salon itself. Check this week's and you'll see what I mean. There's something self-referentially strange-loopish about it all, which would almost be funny if it weren't all so depressing.
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@clamshell Huh again
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm exaggerating a bit saying Sarkozy is blue collar. My point is that Sarkozy, like Obama, is a bit of a mismatch for his culture's image. Americans drink beer and listen to Aerosmith, while Obama appreciates good wine and Debussy. The French appreciate good wine and Debussy; Sarkozy goes for beer and Aerosmith.
Nicolas Sarkozy may not be the farthest thing from blue collar that you'll find in France, but he's awfully close to it. He was raised by royalty in perhaps the richest town in Paris, just adjacent to Paris, where he became mayor. I know it well. You've mistaken the critiques of some of his popular tastes to mean that he's some sort of working class guy but nothing could be farther from the truth. For one thing it doesn't translate, just as Americans hearing that he's on "the right" gives them the mistaken idea that his right and our right are the same or even similar. They're not.
What gets criticized often in France is how he takes vacations with billionaire friends and is photographed on their enormous yachts. In Antibes. Or Monaco. It's the blatant display of exclusive wealth that they find distateful for the most part, which is more frowned upon by the French than here. When he's reffered to as "The American" that's what they're getting at, since that's one of the big differences, how Americans are seen there as unihibited displayers of lurid amounts of wealth.
There is virtually nothing "blue collar" about any of it.