2008 Primaries Thread 2: THE QUICKENING

the man's immense .gifs

I think he means the whole narrative of Obama as a "post-race" figure and all that stuff.

which is and always was bullshit but a lot of people ran with it

Obama's success as a death knell to "the race problem" / "if barack can do it why can't you" etc.

who's saying that, exactly?

Every Obama critic I've ever met harps on his "cult's" fascination with his specialness – how he won't "play the game," he'll avoid partisan clichés, etc. But this is totally incorrect. To me he's a superb politician who doesn't appeal to people's fears, which means, of course, that opponents twist this to mean that he fills their head with uplifting banalities.

just because an Obama critic says something about Obama's supporters, it don't make it so.

Not one of the Obama fans I know regard him as "transcending race" or "lifting us" out of partisan politics. The dude seems like the only politician of his generation who hasn't squelched his natural intelligence in the way that Garry Willis once accused Nixon of doing for the sake of victories.

just because an Obama critic says something about Obama's supporters, it don't make it so.

erm, that's my point! But now that we're on the subject, why are some of you guys supporting him?

Start at the beginning of the thread...

he's got a better u.s. serving/self serving ratio then most pols, let alone those running for president.

he went to my college

I am supporting Obama because his positions and record align more closely to my own beliefs than any other candidate running.

he's a babe

also it is not totally painful to listen to him speak - which is not the case with Dubya, or Hillary, or McCain

Robbie Baitz puts it well:
If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones, those doubts were laid to rest by Barack Obama's magisterial speech today.

insofar as Obama's blackness is not the primary characteristic I ascribe to him I guess he does "transcend race" - but implying that he should somehow NOT transcend race seems, well, implicitly racist.

he's a babe

-- horseshoe, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 1:32 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

OTM

"like omg a black man is running for president and the first thing that comes into your mind isn't that he's black! you CRAZY"

alfred, i wouldve been 100% behind you before today (and i was 100% an obama supporter before today) - i understand where yr coming from but todays speech was without question not 'clever' or politics as usual in any way. it was a guy telling america what he believed & why he believed it.

maybe im naive, i dunno. im open to arguments that say as much.

i don't really think a president by him or her self can change things in any drastic way but obama seems like a sort who could do a little bit more in a positive manner than anyone else, and what he would represent as a face and a name to the rest of the world might be a little bit better than the assholes we've had over the last 28 years. mccain is barely better than bush and i don't trust hillary to do anything other than tread water, at best.

There are a lot of reasons, really:

1. I think that the coalition that Obama has amasses will really help the democrats win elections nation-wide, get a working majority, and they'll be able to actually CHANGE things instead of bitching about how they don't have enough votes to do anything. Foster winning that House seat is a good example of how powerful the Obama brand can be.

2. His approach to foreign policiy (more fluid, less dogmatic) and the people that he surrounds himself with (Samantha Power, Susan Rice,etc.) make me confident that his approach to leadership will be a lot different than what we've seen for the past few decades...

3. Judgement. I know it's become one of his talking points, but I really do believe that he has displayed superior judgement to both Hillary and McCain, and he does have the "judgement to lead".

4. He seems like a nice, centered, moral and I'm just going to be blunt - it would make me proud to have an African-American president. It won't change the way our government is run, obviously, but symbollically it would be incredible.

Initially I was rooting for Joe Biden, so it's not as though I was always for Obama, but he has really impressed me. The way he has run his campaign, the way he has stood tall and gracefully in the face of conrtoversy, etc. His honesty and forthrightness is refreshing. I think he'd be an excellent president.

I am supporting Obama because his positions and record align more closely to my own beliefs than any other candidate running.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 8:32 PM (7 minutes ago)

and this... though I disagree with him on a few things.

yeah i think barack has very real convictions but is too pragmatic about them to earn the trust of a certain sector of the left (gay middle-aged men living in nyc). ive thought about this previously, that he's somehow compromising himself; ultimately i think he just realizes its necessary to make some compromises to accomplish what he wants to. which i have the nerve to surmise are good things. xps

yeah I disagree with him on a few things too, whatchagonnado

The war, his stance on PATRIOT, the smart people he surrounds himself with w/r/t foreign policy, plus homie talks a real good talk and that would be a welcome change for public perception of the US after 8 years of duh-bya.

not disowning rev wright was about the most telling and awesome part of the whole speech today, btw.

also the most unexpected, from a traditional political strategy standpoint

letting the guy off the campaign bus without throwing him under it, dude is a new breed of candidate for reals

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=cfa88bd9-5eba-4bfc-b775-62079514d9d9

I think this is pretty much otm.

i think the key was more this:

"Black anger" and "white resentments," he said, have "distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze: a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed."

yeah i think obama's clarity & transparency is maybe what impresses me most - the playbook for dealing with unpopular or controversial friends is to either not mention it ever never or disown them completely... saying outright that its complicated and that dude has a lot of good traits but also some bad ones and then tying this to the black community and then everyone.... that is some honest, upfront shit

I'm sure Rush characterizes that as alternately class warfare and/or "ignorance of basic economics"

x-post

many xposts

which is why I'm curious what effect this will actually have

I think the mainstream (non-Fox) media will be wowed by this and change their coverage accordingly

on the other hand, it's a really nuanced speech and you can pull all kinds of little bits out of it and misrepresent them ... according to TPM fox put up a headline "Obama: Wright is like family"

The second way in which Obama's speech may have come up short was the scant attention it devoted to social failures within the black community. This, again, was a theme that Bill Clinton used masterfully to establish himself as both a student of black culture and someone unwilling to indulge its worst excesses. It's true that Obama did urge blacks to avoid "becoming victims of our past," and take "full responsibility for our own lives--by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them." But this was a small part of his speech and not at all its tonal emphasis. Yet it seems quite likely that millions of white voters still see black America as indulgent of criminality and insufficiently devoted to education and work. Obama's fleeting lines about victimhood and reading to children do little to address that audience. As an alternative, Obama might have benefitted from invoking the example of Bill Cosby, who has morphed from comedian to one of black America's sharpest internal critics.

uh

LIKE YOUR CRAZY UNCLE

xpost uhx1000 who said that shit?

new republic article someone just linked

that is some honest, upfront shit

He could have taken the tried and true route and ditched Wright, but he opted for a certain level of candor and ambiguity which speaks well for him both intellectually and morally. I'm not doe-eyed but he seems pretty decent for a politician.

Everyone's got someone in their family with views more extreme than their own, so it's a fair enough analogy.

Drudge printing the entire speech means that a lot of folks will read/see it in its entirety versus the sound bites. As I've said earlier, I think this year is a turning point as far as the Rove/Atwater strategies that relied on voters not being able or willing to find primary sources themselves. Now, with YouTube, etc., TV news and commercials are not the be all and end all of information.

what omar said (really)

Yeah what I'm talking about is the central point that this isn't necessarily going to appeal that much to people who don't already like Obama, not so much the stuff about Bill Cosby.

yeah WTF with the Bill Cosby riff

then why so hard on us, morbs??

Also: could Obama really have gotten away with completely ditching his pastor of 20 years? It was brave of him to defend Wright but at the same time I think it was kind of his only option.

I'm not trying to be hard, deez. Just trying to add a little balance and/or tamp down undue optimism.

Morbs theme song: "Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"

yeah WTF with the Bill Cosby riff

you gotta be pretty deep in the weeds to see that speech as a real missed opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment

from another mess. board:

I listened to about 15 minutes of Rush Limbaugh today. One dittohead after another found the speech inspiring, and Rush sounded like he was about to have an aneurysm. He finally stopped taking calls and went solo to explain "what's really going on here", at which point the show descended into complete incoherence.

hahaha awesome

hahaha cognitive dissonance