Thank you, for the work that you've done here. I've never commented on anything that you've written because I don't know much about sports, but I'm writing now because I have been a grateful consumer of your writing. I hope I find your work in its next incarnation.

Thanks for your response. (And sorry that I misspelled your username.)

I've been impressed by Obama's and his campaign's strategy that takes him into areas that might have been written off as unproductively GOP-dominated. I see it as a no-lose strategy in that sense that it offers at least two possibilities: maybe it will work and turn enough of those areas that the enough of the state goes with it to produce electoral votes, or it won't work to turn the votes but in the meantime, people are talking (more generally) about Obama's willingness to work on potentially unfriendly or even hostile terrain. And the connection between this strategy and a more nuanced response to attacks on Obama seems to me to be a willingness to not perform the expected self-righteous indignation of anger in favor of getting the largest possible audience to at least wonder what is happening in every sense of the word.

I very much appreciate your posts on this subject. Thanks for them. Your username is interesting. Mine comes from just liking primates.

(I'm not a journalist but an academic. And read pretty widely especially where there's space for responses from among a diverse audience--like Salon's. My main interest is politics and race.)

No, I don't live in Grand Junction. But I once gave a talk in Colorado Springs, another Republican stronghold, so when I read about Obama's rally in Grand Junction, there in a county where there are only 20,000 registered Democratic voters and where the last presidential candidate to stop there was Truman in 1948, I was interested enough to check out the details.

I found it fascinating both that his campaign scheduled an event there and that about 6,000 people showed up to hear him. I'm very much interested in a more nuanced understanding of his public performances and his rhetorical ranges. That's why the entire discussion of his displays of anger or lack thereof seem beside the point.

Maybe part of the problem of those of us who are looking for more drama from Obama, especially more in the way of convincing (to ourselves and to an imagined audience) anger or even rage, is that anger is what we customarily associate with conviction, with passion. We don’t have much in the way of public models for participating in important, even life-altering discussions (as a presidential election is), from a position of strong consideration, thoughtfulness, and meditation. We seem to have been trained to think that only anger tells us what someone is *really* thinking or feeling. That only anger is a real display of valor or a proper prelude or accompaniment to fighting.

But haven’t we also learned that anger often masks fear and sadness? Watching Obama not display anger might be provoking our own fear and sadness which in turn produces the anger that we would prefer to feel because it’s association with power lets us imagine our own power. And thus the work of a strange kind of exchange is underway. We want him to *act* powerful and be angry because we *feel* powerless and fear that the worst is going to happen. He/we might lose. And even worse, for the lack of the *right* kind of performance, he/we might lose face or self-respect.

That’s not only too much pressure to place on a figure who is doing the work of trying to win the presidency, it’s too much of a burden for us to feel ourselves.

I find that the more work that I do for the Obama campaign, the less I need him to perform anger in order for me to feel better. I and the campaign’s army of workers (volunteer and paid) are finding catharsis in productive ways that work against our need for theater, for drama, for the performance of rage on Obama’s part.

And we don’t really know that the desire for anger that is a representation of what some of us feel or what some of us hope to see is shared across the board. When thousands of people show up to hear Obama speak in places like Grand Junction, CO, do we really think that they’re showing up to see him performing some necessary and sufficient drama of pissed-offness? Maybe they’re showing up to see whatever it is that he is conveying in whatever manner he conveys it?

(This has been my moment of zen. Yours may vary.)

Apart from my interest in ABBA themselves, I appreciate this really smart and concise article.