Read other letters about this article

• Thursday, August 28, 2008 10:42 AM

  The media likes the suspense...

  Suspense sells advertising; Predictable situations do not.

  The last three times we voted to change the President, including this one, there has been a media-encouraged spoiler.

  • Ross Perot ran for one reason: to pull votes from Bush in 1992. He did so. Combined with the problematic 1992 economy, Bush lost and Clinton won. The right-wing and the media immediately laid into him, during his first weeks, to fulfill every campaign promise right then. The crippling "don't ask, don't tell" military policy was from that fight.

  • Nader ran in 2000, with a lot of followers who were happy to tell us that the two mainstream candidates were identical corporate stooges. We have seen, in the past years, just how un-identical they are: one has a Nobel Peace Price for publicizing ecological issues; the other has been fighting his way to the lowest position in Presidential histories. (He passed Nixon, three years ago, and makes us pine for the days of Bucchanan and Grant.)

  • Now, we have the media encouraging a stay-at-home Mom, in the form of pissed-off Hillary voters. They have a legitimate point -- that women have been second-class citizens, and it seems like it isn't ending any time soon, so why bother -- but they'll end up with the greater of two evils by staying at home.

  Hillary is one of the brightest, and the most important thing she said in her speech was not "no... no... no mccain." It was:

  And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.

  If you hear the dogs, keep going.

  If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.

  If they're shouting after you, keep going.

  Don't ever stop. Keep going.

  If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

  It is the bald truth, that we all have to confront in politics: you don't always get everything, and you sure-as-heck do not get it all at once. Every good idea gets its day, and even if that day seems to end, people will remember the good idea and bring it back in another form. Kennedy died, and there's been a lot of bad water under the bridge since, but the idealism of his time seems to be remembered fondly. Some of it seems to be upon us, again. We see that now. We can encourage it, or bitch that the original version went away in 1963.

  —Jeff Bowles Read Jeff Bowles's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel