After the Future

Why Hillary Appeals to Blue Collar Whites

From an interesting article in today's NYT Magazine about Obama's prospects in Levittown, PA.  An excerpt:

On one of my days in Levittown, I visited with Janet Keyser, a childhood friend from the next street over who is now chairwoman of the local Democratic Party and the director of the water and sewer authority. “There’s not many $25-an-hour jobs anymore,” she said. “It’s very, very sad in Levittown right now. It’s not like it was, where the father got his son a job in the mill, and then when the son got out of high school, he came into the mill full time. We get the list of foreclosures and sheriff’s sales at the authority, and every month, it’s more. And these aren’t bums or people on drugs. They’re good people.”

Near the end of our visit, Keyser asked me if I remembered the milk trucks that came around and dropped bottles into boxes we had in front of our houses. She rhapsodized about the schools that we could walk to, the now-closed public pools and the Woolworth’s and W. T. Grant’s at the old shopping center. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is bringing back any of that. But Hillary Clinton evokes memories of eight years of better times, and she would bring back Bill — who, here in Levittown, is not a damper on her campaign but rather a security blanket.

In early March, Keyser’s Democratic Party endorsed Hillary Clinton. “She’s got the experience of being in the White House,” Keyser said. “That’s part of the asset. And she has Bill with her.”

From the diner where I talked to Keyser, I drove over to Gleason’s Bar, around the corner from my old house. That, too, was a sort of a reality check after spending a few days dwelling with Obama’s devout enthusiasts. Eight men sat around the bar, and not one of them supported Obama.

The cascade down the job ladder — with one job not as good as the last — is a particularly working-class syndrome. It is the sort of slide that makes a person less likely to take a chance and more prone to cling to the familiar. Marty Clark, whom I knew in high school, worked at the mill and then as a longshoreman and now has a nonunion job driving a truck. “I don’t know Obama that well,” he said as he sat at the bar at midafternoon on St. Patrick’s Day. “It seems to me like he’s got no experience. She’d be the way I’d go.”

Steve Woods sat drinking a Coors Light and talking with his buddies. A Philadelphia Phillies spring-training game was on TV, and he glanced up at it every time the audio picked up the crack of the bat. I asked him if the presidential campaign interested him. “Absolutely,” he said. Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about: “No. 1, gas prices. It’s killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms. In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age.”

I wondered if he was a Republican. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m a Democrat all the way. I hate Republicans.”

It would seem that a vote for Obama is hard for people who cannot imagine the future in any terms other than in reference to the past and to what they are familiar with. Clinton is not a natural vote for this constituency, but she has the advantage of being a familiar figure from the past.

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

Why was he a Catholic?  Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer."  In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or theorized about.  So the present age has no use for Christian faith.  But the believer, he thought, should count this as an advantage, and see the present age as preferable to "Christendom," when the churches prospered. "In the old Christendom," he explained, "everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it.  But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs."  From Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, p. 460.

That encapsulates the point of my "Cultural Identity" posts (here and here). Catholicism in the U.S., like Judaism, had been until recently countercultural, if we understand the mainstream culture to be defined by the tension in values between Calvinism on hand and rationalist modernism on the other, both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism. The Catholic world I grew up in is in most respects the one that Percy entered into in the 1940s, had very little to do with those three cultural frames, but that Catholicism no longer exists. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics stopped living in their own countercultural world and started living in Calvinist/Modernist/Consumerist America.

In pre-Reformation Europe, Christendom was the sea in which everyone swam, and the Catholic Church was identified with it and with European high culture the way Hinduism is identified with Indian culture. But that's a relationship it lost permanently after the Reformation, and the Catholic Church finally acknowledged that during the Council. Aggiornamento needed to happen, but it was the beginning of the end, much like perestroika was the beginning of the end for Soviet Russia.

I think that there are a lot of interesting parallels between Russia after perestroika and the Catholic Church after aggiornamento. Aggiornamento wasn't the cause of the Church's decline, but simply an acknowledgment that the real world in which most people live and the Church had lost touch. So the Church opened up to the world and in doing so lost its identity.  And now Catholic reactionaries are back in the driver's seat trying to get it back. Russia is now entering the stage of reaction similar to the reaction against the council which was engineered by these Catholic "restorationists", the current Pope being one of its more vigorous proponents. The Catholic restorationists think they can restore the church's relevance by reattaining the pre-council status quo ante. It's a futile, misguided project, as all reactionary projects are, and they cause more harm than good, but the world goes on, and any Catholic with a lick of sense looks the other way, but with confidence that if the hierarchy hasn't killed the Church by now it's not likely to.

The Catholic Church in America is no longer taken seriously because it is no longer a societal force. It could only be that when it had a base, and it lost that base as ethnic Catholics moved out of their urban neighborhoods and ghettos and melted into the American suburbs and ex-urbs. The extra-ghetto Church out in America was just one choice among many, and in some places had more vitality than others, but that had more to do with individual priests, nuns, and laity creating something at the local level that was Real, not because of what the bishops and other higher ups effected. There were exceptional bishops here and there, particularly in Latin America, but in the eighties, the Vatican did its best to suppress them, whether in Latin America or here in Seattle.  And the appointment of new bishops has mainly been that of those who will carry the Vatican's water.

But a of people in my generation either left the Church because they no longer saw any reason to stay, or they stuck with a Church often silly in its pandering attempts to make itself relevant. It didn't stand above the culture as a sign of contradiction, but pandered to the people in the pews who were being absorbed into the broader culture  defined by Calvinism on the one hand, and rationalist modernism on the other, both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism.

As such the Catholic Church as an institutional presence hardly matters anymore. From the modern rationalist side, It seems a dinosaur that managed to survive extinction, and somehow wobbles and wheezes in an environment that can't quite kill it, but in which it cannot prosper. From the Calvinist side, idiots like Hagee still see it as the whore of Babylon, when in fact all it aspires to be now is an ordinary friend and neighbor. Catholics in general, and certainly the conservative episcopacy that replaced the liberal group in the decade or so following the Council, do not have any desire to be a sign of contradiction, to exist as something apart, as a robust countercultural challenge--except when it comes to abortion. I think the Church is right about that, but it doesn't matter that it is, because it has hardly any credibility or moral authority, even among Catholics, and its concerns about abortion are as easily dismissed as its concerns about the American invasion of Iraq.

Its recent financial and sexual scandals have made it appear as its worst stereotype.  A fairly big deal has been made about the latter, not because it's surprising but because it confirms the broader culture's suspicions about the Church. Celibacy is no longer capable of presenting itself to the larger society as a countercultural sign, because rightly or wrongly, the larger society has come to see it as a breeding ground for sexual perversion. In its official form the Church has become for the broader culture almost as big a joke in this country as the Church represented by the Fallwels, Robertsons, and Dobsons. For many Americans there is no difference in the way they think of the fundamentalist crazies and the Catholics. Why should they? The most media prominent Catholic on the American scene is the crazy Catholic League President, Bill Donahue.

Those of us like Percy who remain Catholic in this time when the Church as Institution does not prosper do so because the institution is simply the house management, and that what matters is the sacramental drama that it enacts.  The Church as Sacrament is the Church of the Real, and it is one of those signs one finds at the periphery of the broader culture, not at its center. For the Church of the Real is almost always a sign of contradiction to what one takes for the real at the center.

The Church of the Real does not seek the prosperity sought by those at the center. The prosperity to which the Sacramental Church points is an upside down version of the prosperity at the center. This prosperity is found in the places the people striving toward the center do not want to look--in barn mangers, in bleak deserts, on blood-soaked crucifixes, and in empty tombs and barren wombs. The Church as Sacrament is always a sign of contradiction to what is important for those at the center who take for granted that sex, power, and money are the primary driving forces that make humans human. That's why the monks left the center for the wilderness and took vows of celibacy, obedience, and poverty.  They wanted to make as dramatic a statement as possible that the logic of their lives living according to the sacramental logic was the upside down version of living in the center.

Elie quotes Dorothy Day, who somewhere said that the saint is the one who lives his life in a way that would make no sense if God did not exist. The logic of faith, is therefore, the obverse of what makes sense in the broader culture. What is rich is poor, and what is poor is rich. What is fullness in the one is emptiness in the other. The proud shall be humbled, the meek exalted. What is powerful in the world is weakness in the eyes of the Church, or should be. If the Church as Institution truly understood this and organized itself according to this logic, it would not look at all the way it does. And its spiritual authority and credibility would increase a hundredfold. The world longs for such a Church.

In these times the Church's future lies instead with those who live the faith at the periphery, in the wilderness. It prospers where it is a prophetic sign of contradiction. And the people who have discovered the Church there know and revere what it teaches.  But that teaching is not a heavy-handed pedagogy.  Rather it's as if it were a reminder of what one already knew. It's anamnesis. That's the nature of a Church that is primarily Sign and Sacrament. It invites those in who seek what it celebrates, to remember what they already know.

That's Percy's point about the wayfarer looking for signs. Alienation from the Real was Percy's great theme in both his fiction and nonfiction. The trick, he seems to be suggesting, is to find a way of living that rejects the tension between Calvinism and rationalist modernity and that looks upon the sea of consumer materialism as a wilderness to be wandered in looking for signs. Percy accepts that our fundamental condition is one of alienation from God and from one's Self, and that the cure lies in the recovery of the connection between the two. That is a profoundly countercultural idea, but it is a traditional one. The Church is most at the service of the world where it provides a space and the resources for people who seek to effect that reintegration.

Elie recounts that one of the surprising things found in Thomas Merton's diaries was his rage after having read a letter from a priest who said that his faith and his ability to sustain his priesthood had depended on Merton's faith. Merton was enraged because he felt the man was living parasitically, refusing to discover what he must discover for himself and do the work that he must do for himself. But isn't this exactly what faith means for so many?  Isn't this precisely what the churches have depended on: that the faithful, because of the dearth of their own faith live, from the faith of the saints? It's one thing to lean on one another in times when we are weak, but we cannot live off of one another. We cannot lose ourselves by looking to embed ourselves in another--even God. God doesn't want us to be embedded in Him. That kind of religiosity is nostalgia for the womb. He wants to be in communion with us; he wants us standing on our own two feet, looking upon him face to face. We have to develop into substantive enough Selves in order to have such an encounter and not be ontologically vaporized.

Others are there to give us a hand or a needed kick in the ass, but not there to live our lives for us. And maybe that's why the Church as institution has had to wither so that the people might learn to walk on their own. An embedded Christianity is an immature Christianity in which the believer remains an undeveloped Self. This is, of course, what the Reformation was supposed to be about--to enable Christianity to come of age. To bring freedom, finally, from the domineering, always hovering, smother Mother Church--and to a certain it extent was. But the reformed churches became in their own way the servants of culture rather than its conscience, and they also have lost any culture-wide moral authority or legitimacy.

So now the People of God live in the desert, whether they know it or not, and it is there, as during the early days of the Desert Fathers, where it's more likely that they will find signs of the Real. That, at least, is what I think Percy means.  We will find signs of that which we long for most deeply where they are least publicly recognized or culturally legitimated. 

The Road to 270

From the NBC blog "First Thoughts":

Obama vs. McCain
Base Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NY, RI, VT, WA (168 electoral votes)
Lean Obama:  NJ, MN, OR, WI (42)
Toss-up: CO, IA, MI, MO, NV, NM, NH, OH, PA, VA (112)
Lean McCain: AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, MT, NC (81)
Base McCain: AL, AK, AZ, ID, IN, KS, KY, NE, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (135)

Clinton vs. McCain
Base Clinton: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT (172)
Lean Clinton: AR, MN, OR, WA, WI (44)
Toss-up: FL, IA, MI, NM, NH, OH, PA (101)
Lean McCain: CO, LA, MO, NV, VA (47)
Base McCain: AL, AK, AZ, GA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MS, MT, NE, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (174)

This is all very preliminary with a lot of unexamined assumptions, but it provides a place to start, and it identifies where the battle ground states are likely to be.

(One of the assumption is that the math is correct. When I add up the electoral votes for the base Obama states I get 181 rather than NBC's 168 -- and Clinton should get 187. Not sure where the discrepancy lies since NBC doesn't identify the electoral value of each state. I'll assume for now that NBC is better at math than I am, but if someone wants to take the time to check the numbers, I'd appreciate it.)

I'm sure this map will look very different once the campaign starts, and I would not be surprised if many of the tossup states in this configuration start leaning blue. I just think that general disgust with Republicans is a factor that is not reflected in this breakdown.

But assuming NBC is more or less correct, against Obama McCain gets 216 red and red-leaning electoral votes to Obama's 210. Against Clinton McCain gets 221 to Clinton's 216. So he has a slightly better red or red-leaning base than either candidate.  Arkansas's 6 votes make the difference between Obama and Clinton in terms of likely blue voting states. It is likely to go to McCain if Clinton is not the candidate.

According to this analysis, Obama is stronger than Clinton only in WA-11 while Clinton would be stronger in NJ-15 and AR-6. But both WA and NJ will likely go blue no matter the candidate. As mentioned already, Arkansas is the one state that would probably go to McCain if Obama is the candidate. GA, MS, NC, and MT are more competitive for Obama than for Clinton, but lean red. Clinton will be more competitive in FL, which is a tossup for her leaning red for Obama.

Obama has a better chance in CO-9, MO-11, NV-5, and VA-13 (total 38) if he is the candidate, because these states, according to NBC, all lean toward McCain if Hillary is the candidate.  And Hillary has only the advantage of AR-6.

So the question becomes: who will do better in the other tossup purple states: IA-7, MI-17, NV-5, NM-5, NH4, OH-20, PA-21?  Assuming Obama takes CO, MO, NV, and VA, he will need 22 more electoral votes to get to 270; Clinton, assuming she takes FL-27, will need 27 to get to 270. That means that both Clinton and Obama would need only one of the big purples--OH, MI, or PA and Obama and one of the smaller states.

What's the bottom line?  It would seem that the critical battle ground states will be OH, MI, or PA.  That would make the PA race a little more interesting this month, and it also raises questions about  whether MI will support Obama.  But bottom line is that I think either Dem candidate would win.  It's just a question of who would be the better president, and I've been pretty clear about my preferences in the matter.

P.S. Here's another site that might be a useful resource in tracking electoral trends. It assumes that Obama has won the nomination and has him starting with 174 base votes to McCain's 149 with 215 undecided.

Ending the Mindset

Fear makes us stupid, and its at the heart of Moby Dick Syndrome. When those in the stronger position are in the grip of MDS they fear an enemy who may not like them but has no desire or capability to destroy them.  MDS sufferers, however, experience an ungrounded fear that compels them to think the weaker enemy seeks their utter destruction. The MDS logic therefore requires that the weaker enemy  must be utterly destroyed before it destroys them.

MDS is all about a disproportionate fear getting the better of those who are strong enough not to worry that their survival is at stake. The insanity lies in the certainty that the enemy is capable of destroying them and will do so. And so the stronger's behavior toward the weaker enemy convinces the enemy that its survival is at stake, which isn't crazy because this enemy is far more vulnerable. So the weaker enemy responds with the unbridled rage of the cornered animal, and it does what it can to increase its power in order to defend itself and to inflict harm on the crazy MDS people who they think, rightly, intend their destruction.

Isn't this precisely what we are seeing in the Middle East right now? Are we not now dealing with a weaker enemy which has become far more dangerous and capable of harming us precisely because of American MDS? Only those who are completely ignorant of history can honestly believe that 9/11 was an unprovoked attack. I am by no means justifiying it. I think it was a barbarous act of criminality. And I would agree that sane policy requires that al Qaeda as a terrorist organization be destroyed. But al Qaeda is not Iraq and it's not Iran. It is not identified with all of Islam. It is in so many ways an American creation. And we cannot prevent future attacks unless we understand the role America and Europe has played in creating the conditions in which organizations such as al Qaeda thrive.

And that's why Obama is so important. He gets it. Spencer Ackerman has a good piece at American Prospect about Obama's foreign policy group.  Clinton on the other hand simply does not get it. She buys into the old fear-based mindset as "reality".  Obama does not.

"For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.

Refusing to allow fear to control our thinking starts at home with standing up to the conventional thinking that is in the grip of MDS. This is what Obama stands for, and it's an open question whether the country has enough sanity to embrace his sanity.  It will surely be tested in the general election. Already fools like Maureen Dowd are doing their best to make Obama look "whipped". (What is the matter with that woman?  Remember her bit about Gore practically lactating?  She is really creepy. Keep the children away from her.)

In any event Ackerman's article gives a good overview of who the key players are in Obama's foreign policy team, and it does a good job of describing their ambition to bring sanity back to our foreign policy.  They really do what to change the mindset. And people in the establishment understandably are confused because they only deal with established reality, no matter how crazy. Sanity puzzles them: 

To propose rebooting U.S. foreign policy now is, to say the least, ambitious. Many military leaders consider Obama an unknown quantity. At a recent talk, Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks said that officers and soldiers serving in Iraq thought that McCain and Clinton would both pursue a foreign-policy commensurate with Bush's, but Obama left them puzzled. Once in office, Obama might feel compelled to turn his back on the critique he makes on the trail.

But while the doubts about Obama contain fair points, they also, to a certain degree, reflect a triumph of the Iraq War mind-set. Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?

"He goes back to Roosevelt," Power says. "Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us." The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America's reacquaintance with its best traditions.

I know, such sanity sounds too good for anybody to take it seriously.

Moby Dick Syndrome

I don't like what the Clintons stand for. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Bill in his second term, but I did feel that he was unfairly treated by the Republicans and the press in the runup to his impeachment, which was bad political farce from beginning to end.  That's when it first became lucidly clear that the GOP was run by people who had lost touch with reality. They were living in something other than the real world, but their mutual reinforcement of it made it seem real to everyone within their world even though it seemed over the top to every one who stood outside of it. They were in the grip of what I think of as a collective complex I call Moby Dick Syndrome. Bill Clinton was their Moby Dick, and what made Republicans truly crazy in the nineties was their obsession to destroy him.

I find this idea of a complex or syndrome helpful to understand the way we organize, think about, and operate within a world that is fundamentally out of touch with reality, but nevertheless seems to be intensely real. We all experience complexes on a personal level, but sooner or later we recover and return to our senses. Think about infatuations you have experienced or times you were in the grip of a reality-distorting anxiety. The sanest of us experience such episodes, but if we are truly sane we come to our senses sooner rather than later, and when we do, it's like waking up from a dream. You wonder what all the fuss was about and feel foolish, especially if your public behavior was influenced by the syndrome.

When we wake from an intense nocturnal dream we recognize that what had a few minutes before seemed so real was not.  But complexes are like waking dreams; they take hold of us and organize our conscious perceptions of the world around us. They are bad enough when we experience them individually, but they are truly pernicious when they take hold of a group because they create self-reinforcing bubbles.

The feeding  frenzy we saw during the Clinton impeachment was a dramatic example. Normal people watching from outside the complex were disgusted by Clinton's adolescent idiocy, but they were more disgusted by the Republican response to it. Clinton was an idiot, but the Republicans seemed truly obsessed and borderline insane. They  in the grip of Moby Dick Syndrome.

Moby Dick Syndrome is particularly strong in America.  We see people in the grip of it when they become obsessed with eliminating or crushing Evil. It involves projecting Evil onto some thing or some group, and the projection makes it impossible to see the way a sober person would. The Pequod crew at first had no reason to look at Moby Dick the way Ahab did, but they got caught up in it, especially after the gold coin was nailed to the mast, and they were dragged along to their destruction, which is what happens to anyone who is seduced by demagoguery.  

Back to Unreality

McCain used to be a relatively sane conservative capable of discriminating between reality and unreality, but to the degree that he has sought the GOP nomination, to that degree has he lost his grip on reality.  He's living off a reputation based on what he was, not on what he has become. It's hard to understand how any objective observer can take what he is now seriously. Nevertheless he is, especially by a fawning MSM.  Greenwald this morning reminds us why:

The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates -- the more consequential the issue, the less establishment media attention it receives, the less real public debate there is over it. Instead, our elections are determined by the barren, petty personality-based distractions and mindless chatter that define the lowly Drudgian Freak Show, where our political life now almost exclusively resides.

For instance, did the FISA/telecom amnesty issue even come up once during the Dem debates? Did the issue of the unitary executive and the loss of habeas corpus come up? I didn't watch them all, but these issues did not come up in any I watched, and they should have been front and center in the discussion. Why wouldn't it I wonder.

The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.

These election-determinant themes are not merely petty and completely removed from what actually matters. That would be bad enough. Far worse is that they are complete fabrications. Virtually the entire leadership of the right-wing GOP is the complete opposite of these cartoon icons they are held out to be. Their lives are almost completely devoid of the virtues in which they are packaged. After all, their leaders are Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and the whole slew of tough guy pundits from Fox News and National Review, cheering on wars while imputing to themselves the courage and virtue of those they endlessly send off to fight and prancing around as moral guardians and defenders of individual freedom while, in reality, living lives that rapidly destroy those very values.

These are the same tactics that have been used again and again -- from the era when Ronald Reagan was transformed into the wholesome, horse-riding, freedom-defending cowboy to the current incarnation, George W. Bush, dressed up in ranch hats and fighter pilot costumes and transformed into the swaggering, brush-clearing warrior. And one Democrat after the next -- Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- was swiftly turned into the same, now-familiar loser archetype: the overly earnest, sniveling, dishonest, elitist, subversive weakling, who bore political journalists and provided an easy target for their adolescent derision.

That the right wing has been so successful in this kind of distorting branding has been the mystery for me, and a lot of what I have written here has been by attempt to understand why it works so well on swaths of the electorate that are otherwise sane and decent.  Kerry was a poor candidate in '04, but it nevertheless astonished me that George Bush could be taken seriously by sane, decent Americans after everything we learned about him by 2004.  The only conclusion one can draw from that is that people simply didn't see George Bush for what he is. They weren't paying attention enough to see past the propaganda. 

They bought into the way he was represented by the establishment media that operates within the Beltway bubble because "reality" and "sanity" are something that the people in the media lost touch with long ago. They only report on reality as it appears within the bubble. That's why they think they're honest brokers just doing their job. The unreality they report on is all they are exposed to.  Some like Bill Kristol are conscious propagandists and as such creators of the unreality. Others like Coulter and Limbaugh are consciously over-the-top entertainers who play with these distortions as their schtick. But most in the media are earnest, sincere types who think they are doing a fair job of reporting "reality."  Reality is the world shaped by the interests of those in power.

So for this reason, if you don't live inside the right leaning Beltway/media bubble, and you're active enough to get your information from sources outside of it, it's hard to take almost anything you learn from the people within it seriously.  Their concerns and chatter defy common sense.  And so when some one like Obama comes on the scene who actually talks sense, it's easy to forget about or dismiss the insane reality to which he offers an alternative. I, at least, find myself doing so

Kerry was an empty suit and easy for the right/media to brand along the lines Greenwald describes above , but Obama is not. I am cautiously optimistic that this time it will be different.  The right/media will try to do to Obama what they did to Kerry, but the American electorate has caught on to the fact that the world as represented by Limbaugh, Kristol, and even so-called reasonable types like David Brooks is like a carnival hall of mirrors. There is always some element of objective  truth in their representation of reality, but they distort it to such a degree as to make it hardly recognizable to anyone who sees clearly.

A word about Olbermann.  He can be annoying.  He has an ego the size of Rhode Island.  He often over-reaches.  I think he's frequently wrong or at least off base in some of his perceptions and comments.  But he's the one high-profile person in the MSM who seems capable to sometimes (not always, but more often than not) speak outside the bubble Greenwald describes above. He can be dismissed as partisan, but I would argue that he is a partisan of "reality" as opposed to bubble-enclosed unreality.