Letters to the Editor
BryanS
Published Letters: 329 Editor's Choice: 1
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@ edwardblake
[Read the article: The haunting of the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This article is fatalistic, and as a (once long-time suffering) Red Sox fan, I understand the mechanism at work all too well.
But look at the Red Sox now, things do in fact change, even for the better once in a blue moon, and (sorry new-agers) but my fatalism made no difference either way in effecting the outcome.
It wasn't until I read this that I realized that I (a fellow Sox fan) have been generally been more optimistic over the last few years as well. Is it possible that the breaking of the Curse was even more profound than my conscious mind realized?
Anyway, excellent post. And if I might use the Massachusetts connection to force a somewhat awkward segue, I'd like to ask why the writer didn't bother to mention that Obama has some strong parallels to another Democratic presidential candidate, who ran a slightly more successful campaign in 1960.
I know that even hinting at a comparison between Obama and Kennedy is guaranteed flame-bait for the Hillary crowd. So go ahead and get all of your accusations of hopeless romanticism out of the way now. Finished? Then I'll continue:
Before he was posthumously deified as the Greatest President Who Ever Lived and Died, Kennedy was a very human politician with feet of clay. Like Obama, his résumé was on the slender side. Like Obama, he was a member of a socioeconomic group that was viewed with suspicion by mainstream American voters (Catholic vs. African-American, or Secret Muslim, if you prefer). Like Obama, he gave a well-received speech that put many of these voters' fears to rest on the issue -- not all of them, but at least enough to get the job done.
Both men created a savvy political organization that drew support from traditional Democratic voters and also effectively mobilized a massive youth movement. Both gave speeches and wrote best-selling books (Profiles In Courage vs. The Audacity of Hope) that inspired the nation to dream bigger. And both managed to use new and emerging technologies (television then, the internet/YouTube now) to their advantage, practically writing the playbook for how they should best be used in a political campaign.
I'm not saying that there's a direct one-to-one correlation to be made, and there are plenty of areas where they don't match up. Obama doesn't seem to relish verbally jousting with reporters, for one thing. But he also doesn't seem to have much trouble keeping it in his pants either, which is a plus.
I understand that, at three pages, the writer of this article was already pushing the word count to its limit. (I believe that Stephen King referred to the condition as "diarrhea of the keyboard.") But it would have been nice to see a piece that offered some gloom-and-doom warnings, while also balancing that by reminding us that sometimes, despite their best attempts to defeat themselves, the Democrats actually manage to pick one hell of a candidate and win big. Is it too much to ask that instead of the "loser by association" photo that the piece ran with, we might have gotten a "Kennedy or McGovern" image?
Of course, to write a piece like that, there has to be some kind of acknowledgment that Obama might be a candidate on par with an FDR or Kennedy or Reagan. And the thing I hate most about the way Hillary has run her campaign so far is that you're mocked as a naïve moron if you even consider that we might actually see another one of those in our lifetimes. The fact that we're up in arms and worried that either candidate might not win against a flip-flopping cranky old man whose jaw looks like it's going to fall off every time he speaks is a sad testament to this kind of small thinking. If the Democrats aren't going to dream big and shoot the moon in this presidential campaign, they'll never do it, and we'll be stuck with middle-of-the-road triangulators who live and die by petty wedge issues and whose greatest accomplishments are that they only allowed the Republicans to get some of what they wanted.
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@ Christopher Carrington
[Read the article: The haunting of the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The very fact that you imagine that Hillary Clinton botched the effort for health care in 1993 suggests just how vacuous your analysis of politics actually is. I am not supporting Hillary, but anyone who blames Hillary for the defeat of the 1993 health care effort needs a basic education in how corporate and industry interests influence our political process.
So, it's not Hillary's fault that her plan failed, because she was up against stiff opposition? Isn't that the sort of thing she should have expected and prepared for? Was she not aware that for-profit healthcare is a multi-billion-dollar industry? Did she think that her initiatives were just going to be licked into law by kittens?