Letters to the Editor
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Vague for a reason
I too noticed how vague Obama is on the campaign trail. But one thing not vague is the way he's treated the union support for both Clinton & Obama. His attacks against the union support shows me that he is more than willing to turn on Democrats whenever it helps him. Unfortunately we've seen far too many politicians that have this trait. So when Obama talks about unity and his willingness to compromise with insurance & drug companies I see a candidate willing to sell us out in order to benefit himself. When your primary argument is that you will bring unity to the country one has to ask but at what cost?
When this campaign started I thought Obama was a better choice than Clinton but now I don't see much of a difference. Actually the more I see of Obama the less I like him. The only candidate of the top three that I see who is truly going to represent average voters is John Edwards. AThat becomes more and more clear the longer the campaign lasts.
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Nouvelle vague, et al...
How's that for mixing two languages? Anyway, in case some are confused by Shapiro's French, Nouvelle Vague means "new wave" not "new vagueness" as some seem to be thinking. Possibly Shapiro intended it as a "double entendre" (yet more French).
Here's the thing about Obama from my point of view. I started off being very interested in him because of his hopeful rhetoric. Since then I've lost interest because his actual actions and policy ideas are often less well thought out. He does not seem to grasp what the real problems with health care are if he intends to sit down with insurance companies to solve the problem. The insurance companies ARE the problem. Sit down with doctors, hospitals, nurses, etc., and work out the problems with people directly involved, not insurance companies that are ONLY profiting on the problems, not solving them.
How is he going to work with republicans? Why should he is my point. They don't deserve being worked with, only defeated. They are not promoting in valid policy whatsoever, and thus have taken themselves off the table. Bringing them to the table is like adding rotten food to one's dinner, it won't make the meal more nutritious.
And adding that homophobic hate-monger ex-gay preacher (or whatever he is now) is yet another example of poor thinking. That'd be as stupid as bringing in David Duke!
Sorry folks, but Mr. Hope is not inspiring any in me, and his actions seem such a contrast to his rhetoric that I find myself hoping he loses badly, because I just don't trust him or his viewpoint. I wish I could, or at least I wish I could trust that it's just naivete on his part, and that he's learning to do better, but I'm not seeing that either. With all that, if he does manage to get the nomination, I'll still vote for him, and then I'll be the one with hope, hope that he's not actually going to be like he campaigns, which I'm afraid will be just wishful thinking.
--Ron Robertson
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Here's What You're Not Getting Walter
Democratic appratchiks and many "serious" liberal journalists have a common failing. They perpetually labor under the delusion that on January 20 of the year following an election, the Chief Justice of the United States administers the oath of office to a big stack of position memos, and whitepapers and detailed multi-volume policy plans. This delusion gave us Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and, yes, Al Gore v. 2000.
When this delusion results in the inevitable defeat, they collape in stunned perplexity moaning "but, but, but, how could we have lost? We had the best policy proposals, dammit!" Ably assisted by the serious liberal political press, they then re-review the ever-more insane policy pronouncements of the Republican candidate who won and deduce that his victory must mean that the the people are avidly in favor of giving more tax breaks to oil companies, gutting renewable R&D spending, killing more people and blowing up more buildings in foreign countries, and stay awake nights worrying that 400 dead multi-millionaries might have their estates taxed this year. Thus were the DLC and Clintonian tringulation born out of a desparate attempt to preserve the delusion.
Obama gets what the apparatchiks and "serious" reporters don't but the Republicans do. People don't vote for policies, they vote for an actual person. Given a choice between someone who seems more or less genuine and someone who seems either phoney (*cough"Kerry*cough) or like a big pile of musty old policy papers, they'll choose the one who seems the most genuine.
The Republicans have mastered a few techniques to fake authenticity, but those techniques have a limited shelf life and require periodic reinvention. They aren't working this year and they've got no new ones.
Obama, however, is trying something different: he is projecting a public face that, people sense, is basically the same as his private face, "integrity," in the literal sense. Unlike a Republican, Obama does, in fact, have heaps of policy positions and even has the musty position papers so craved by the appratchiks but he puts them on his website and only talks about them in detail when he's addressing audiences specifically interested in a particular policy. In his big public speeches and his commercials, he hits the high points and moves on. Real people, actual voters, respond to that.
This confounds the apparatchiks and the reporters. They sit there and stew and fume and think it must be some kind of trick. They instinctively, get all itchy because they aren't hearing about wonky-ass boring details of the policy proposals in the public speeches and commercials. (Interestingly, however, the "serious" reporters never respond this way to Republican fake authenticity, which they inerringly take at face value, be it Bush I's alleged pork rind fetish or Bush II's hastily purchased cattle-free dude ranch).
This election is for Democrats what 1980 was to the Republicans. Obama is our Reagan, the big picture vision guy, and Clinton II is our Bush I, the insidery well-connected uber-technocrat. Obama and Hillary are both smarter than Bush I or Reagan could ever hope to be., but the dynamic is the same. If the party apparatchiks and the people who think we need a big pile of position papers for a president will just get past their prejudices and let him, Obama could do for the Democrats what Reagan did for the Republicans. That is, to say, pull off a realignment that will let us set the agenda for the next twenty years and send the opposition into an abyss of timidity and intellectual sterility.
Sure its a bit of a gamble, but there is no gain without risk (another principle that seems to have elluded establishment Democrats for the last thirty years) and the downside risk is not that bad: even if he doesn't pull off the realigning landslide, he's at least as likely as Hillary to win a narrow victory. What's dead certain is that if we take the "less risky" path and nominate Hillary, a narrow win is the best case scenario.