Quote of the Day: Bradley Burston

"There will be those for whom race is the deciding issue, but I believe their numbers are few. For many more, well-meaning and tolerant people, I believe the reason is fear. It is fear of the unknown, but not only fear of the unknown Obama.

"I believe that the real fear is finding out what lies behind the big lies of George Bush, and, more ominously by far, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and a host of other neo-con-artists...

"This foreign visitor doesn't believe that this election is about race. It is about the difficulty and the sacrifice involved in changing course, acknowledging error, actively working for a better common future.

"It is a battle over the kind of complacency and fear of change that put into the Oval Office its most underqualified occupant in living memory. Perhaps that is how the joke statistics should be understood - and taken seriously.

"But what the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray "Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things are all right, after all."

"Someone like Bush." 

(By way of M.J. Rosenberg. Read more.)

Comments

[forestwalker]

"It's morning again in America."

[Jack Whelan]

"It's morning again in America."

Could a majority be that dunderheaded to buy this kind of nonsense again? It really is kind of frightening. But as the Navasky quote above suggests, Americans will vote for what they are comfortable with unless there is a reason not to. Given the choice between robo-pol McCain and robo-pol Obama, they will vote for McCain because he's the more comfortable choice. They will only vote for Obama if he is perceived as offering a compelling alternative. The question is whether he and his people will understand this in time to make a difference.

In a way I think it would have been better for Obama to start as the underdog in this race; it might have forced him to take more risks. This playing it safe makes him look like everybody else, and I suppose if he continues to do it, he is like everyone else. Tragedy is that the has the potential to be so much more if he would seize the opportunity.

I will be listening tonight and tomorrow to see if there is any indication that Biden and Obama will rise to the opportunity. With all this nonsense about the Clintons behind us, we can focus on whether these guys get it or not.

[Jack Whelan]

Another thought. Perhaps the best analogy for what I hope for Obama is that he could be a transformatiive figure, not like Reagan in reverse, but more like Gorbachev. MG had to become a trusted member of the Soviet system in order to advance to the position of power he eventually achieved, but he was a man for the moment. He rose to power when the time was ripe, and by the power of his personality and his formidable persuasiveness he was able to ease his nation into a non-violent dissolution of a very sick system.

The military industrial complex in this country is the analogue to the soviet system pre-1989. The question is whether it is now as rickety a structure as the soviet system was.

I don't know, but probably not, and if it isn't ready to collapse because of internal lack of faith in it, then it won't. But Obama has some of this "man for the moment" quality. So it's a question, really, whether the moment is ripe or not. For Obama or anybody can't do anything unless he has allies within the system who see how rotten it is and who would support an American perestroika. Gorbachev would have got nowhere if there was not internal support for his perestroika.

Obama may or may not be that guy, even if the moment is right. But in my more optimistic moments I think that Obama's election might be part of a perfect storm of events that might combine to effect such a significant reorientation of this nation's government. It's more pipedream than anything else, for sure, but these hubristic systems always collapse sooner or later, and if we're lucky when it happens here, there will be a Lincoln or a Gorbachev, i.e., effective communicators who understand what the stakes are, to ease the transition.

From where I sit, it's hard to believe that things could get much worse, but it's more likely that the rot has to progress much further than it has in the American system for the timing for such an historic transformation to be realistic.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack:

CC: Forestwalker

BCC: Mike McG (wherever he might be...)

In terms of wondering why or how McCain could get elected, just consider Hillary's speech last night, a perfect illustration of how easy it is to grab people with emotionalism and tugs at the heartstrings, thereby distracting them (entirely) from discussions of salient issues in an adult manner:

Hillary's speech last night was, undeniably, a speech with many warm, human, emotional segments/sequences/passages. Any American woman of a certain age would understandably find the references to Harriet Tubman and others to be quite powerful. Stylistically, several portions of Hillary's speech came across as being gracious and generous, not necessarily because of what was said, but how Hillary said it. On a purely human level, there was much to embrace and admire about Hillary's speech, on the surface of things.

But.......

(You knew that was coming at some point...)

.....for anyone who has truly done his/her homework and has looked beneath that surface, beneath that exterior shell of candidates' words, one can only make this conclusion: after having done that homework--which is all about identifying a candidate's public record, policy positions, and lobbyist/insider connections--the truth plainly reveals the words of Hillary Clinton last night as the false statements they are.

Hillary did once fight for women and the poor, but that was a product of the 1970s and 80s, all the way up to the 1994 Gingrich revolution. Since then, Hillary has become a different person and politician. Any casual look at the record would indicate as much.

Hawk on foreign policy.

Major money-grubber from not just mildly bad, but iconically evil corporations and individuals (Monsanto, Rupert Murdoch, health care goliaths).

Proponent of NAFTA and like trade agreements.

Proponent (or perhaps merely willing/compliant accomplice with Bill; one could wrestle with that point) of the 1996 welfare legislation that has plainly not improved the lot of the least fortunate in our land, all while the Democratic Party has been corporatized under the Clintons' watch and supervision.

Women in the audience in Denver--ostensibly smart and learned women of maturity and experience--were in tears, moved deeply by the genuinely human words Hillary spoke.

But while those words are genuinely human in a universal sense, they were not and are not true to the political life Hillary has lived in the past 14 years.

So we have a fundamental disconnect: people are drawn to the emotions and the personalities of the campaign, with all the symbolism attached to them; but that very honest and understandable human attachment also blinds people to the realities of issues and public records, especially when the very people uttering those human words are also being untruthful with respect to their accounts of their own beliefs and achievements.

Hillary was genuinely, deeply, powerfully human in her speech.

She was just as genuinely, deeply and powerfully misleading about who she is and what she has done during her time in the highest political realms and arenas.

All the women in Denver and throughout America who think she made a great speech--and who believe in her so fervently--are not able or willing to see beyond their emotions. Ditto for various other constituencies, who will never be willing to admit their own shortcomings or see the planks in their own eyes.

Hillary's speech, at the end of the day, reminds me a great deal of Tim Russert's journalistic career and the wider reaction to it: that which is deeply human in a positive sense is forever enmeshed in what is dark and corrupted in the human organism. People will see the goodness, but that goodness exists on a small level in theory and word, but not in deed, where the larger darkness exists.

This is why we'll never get to the bottom of things in the attempt to solve and fix our problems.

[Jack Whelan]

I don't think the emotionality was anything more than the Dems making a choreographed effort to patronize the Clinton dead-enders, i.e., to make them feel appreciated so they'll lick their wounds and come home.

Have you ever been to a movie with an audience which had made up its mind before it sat down it was going to have a good time. And they laugh at every gag no matter how unfunny it is. That's what the emotions were like last night. Everybody decided (or were told) beforehand that they would be emotional.

She said everything that was expected of her. She's a hack; she did her job. Let's hope that's the last we hear of her for a good long time.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

You're missing something (and I think Mike McG would agree, but I would want his take on all this, because it plays to issues and tension points that he cares about...), and that something is simply this:

For the Hillaristas (or Hillraisers, or whatever you call them), the emotions are most assuredly NOT manufactured. I've had live in-person conversations with several women, all of them much older than me, who are militantly in Hillary's corner for no other reason than her presence as the first serious female presidential candidate. These women feel robbed, jobbed and slighted by Obama and the Obama camp. They feel real resentments and searing frustrations that run very deep, so much so that they're thinking about either voting for McCain or staying home.

The ultimate question in this election could be framed thusly: will the numbers of crossover McCain Democrats and stay-at-home voters--two groups of people from the alienated Hillary camp--outnumber the amount of stay-at-home voters and crossover Obamacans--two groups from the alienated ranks of McCain-hating Republicans?

For many women and Hillary voters in particular, these emotions are real, and that's what's both sad and dangerous about all this.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

Maybe I am missing something, but when you consider the other crisis-level issues we're facing in the political sphere, the disappointment and injured egos of these women and the Clintons is so far down on my list of concerns as to be almost irrelevant. They lost; they should get over it just as you or I would get over it had Hillary won and Obama lost. The Clintons seem to have done it. This isn't a miracle or some sign of great personal magnanimity. It's what normal politicians and their supporters do when they lose.

If I knew someone like the person you know, I'd be civil to her, but I would find it hard to take her seriously if she really was thinking of voting for John McCain because her candidate lost. If such Hillary supporters are sane, they're understandably disappointed; I get that. I don't get this prolonged, over-the-top mourning for Hillary. I know it's real, but It's a little crazy, and I really wonder how many people feel that strongly.

I just find it hard to believe that there are that many silly Democrats who would vote against Obama because Hillary lost. I suspect this is more a media creation than a widespread reality, and many if not most of the ones that feel that way are DINOS or they are Republicans or independents who simply latched onto the Hillary candidacy because of women identity politics aspect, but have no interest in solving real problems.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

Fair enough, but as you've reminded me, these kinds of political/electoral decisions are anything but rational.

And as Will Rogers said, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

This is the 40th anniversary of Chicago '68, and the 36th anniversary of the "Friday morning sunrise service" at Miami Beach in '72.... and the Kennedy-Carter train wreck that was 1980 in New York.

Democrats have a history of shooting themselves in the donkey, I mean a--.

It's why they've lost 7 of the last 10 presidential elections, with Ross Perot being the only reason it wasn't 9 of 10... and Watergate being the only reason it wasn't 10 of 10.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

You're right to be concerned that the Dems will blow this. But it will be more for the reasons Navasky and Burston talk about in the quotes I put up yesterday.

The Clintons are part of the problem more than they are the solution. I just don't have much sympathy for people who see them any differently. I'm not saying their emotional involvement in Hillary's campaign is unreal, just relative to other things they and we should be concerned about, those concerns are just not that important.

My point about the manufactured emotionality was that the whole convention erupting in this seeming wild euphoria for Hillary was choreographed by Obama supporters as a way to make the Clintonistas feel better. It worked, I guess. Hillary called off the roll call.