Walter Hinteler wrote:2 Speeches Show Contrasting Campaign Styles
Quote:Obama Offers Inspiration; Clinton Details Action Plan
...
Obama has generated considerable enthusiasm on college campuses as a candidate who promises the sharpest break with the polarized politics of the past decade, while Clinton is counting on support from younger women to help fuel a potentially history-making campaign that is more grounded in the political establishment.
I'd lift another paragraph from that article, namely:
Quote:The speeches by the two leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination underscored the basic differences in their campaigns: Obama offering words of inspiration and hope for a new politics of citizen engagement that can transform the country, and Clinton providing a blueprint for putting government to work to deal with the problems afflicting ordinary Americans.
Snippets like this echo, to me, the
New Yorker article on Obama that I finally got to read - and which strongly had the opposite effect of what the author must have intended. They are actually reconciling me tiny little bit by tiny little bit with Hillary - still a long way to go until I find her halfway palatable, but at least I am starting to listen. And they go a long way in actually turning me off from Obama.
I'll return to the New Yorker article later (I promise, no really, soon, I just need a little time to elaborate). But basically, my perspective is this: the Bush Jr. administrations were, together with the Reagan administrations, the most radical that the US has had since WW2. They went a long way in utterly transforming political discourse, policy, and the political apparatus. For the worse, much worse. To be able to repair the damage even partly, you'll need a Democratic president with a clear focus of purpose and strong willpower, a tad of ruthlessness even; and that focus needs to be singlemindedly on implementing progressive policy.
At this point in time, you do not need a Vaclav Havel like philosopher-king (and I say that as a great admirer of Havel), because you can not possibly risk wasting the potential chance of a new Democratic presidency the way Bill Clinton did. After Reagan completely turned US society upside down, destroying any kind of social safety net and even the societal notion of social solidarity between rich and poor itself, Clinton proceeded to tinker on the margins for eight years. In 1996, Steve Earle sang, despondently, about the best we could hope for now being "four more years / of things not getting worse". You can not afford to leave it at that again.
You need someone
a) who is aware of how deeply conservative "machine" politics has entrenched itself; cross-aisle cooperation is fine, but any illusion that if you'll just be reasonable enough and focus on sensible proposals enough and you show that you're willing to collaborate, things will just start happening, is dangerously naive.
b) who is eager to be co-operative, but willing to be combative. Who looks for coalitions, sure, thats good - but who is not restricted by any innate uneasiness with conflict and urge to avoid it whenever at all possible.
c) who has both the ideas and the willingness to launch policies that will tackle the systemic basis of problems, rather than just the implementation that can be improved here or there. Sure, you'll still not get half of it through, and you'll still need to build coalitions in Congress to get success with anything. But if you already start off with more of a tendency to just observe general trends in society in a passive voice and maybe propose various sensible and practical little adaptations of policy, then you're guaranteed to remain another Bill Clinton, and thats really not what you want right now.
Anyway, all of this in turn is rather vague and general, but like I said, I want to come back to the New Yorker thing in particular still later.
Ossobucco:
