2008 Primaries Thread 2: THE QUICKENING

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

oh the poor thing

Morbs, what happens if we all fall in love with Obama and we're generally not disappointed? Perhaps the difference between us is that, despite us both being old curmudgeons, it's really me the more 'old and bitter'; I don't have any great hopes about politicians changing the country since they're often behind the wave actually, and I certainly don't agree with all of Obama's points, but I think the way he's running and the better part of his priorities are sound.

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.

I'm not against you, bro! Let's just say I wanted an update.

i'm going to forgive the fact that Obama got that Faulkner quote wrong

Yeah, ditching his pastor would have been the most cynical move.

It's fairly clear from my posts on this and the other threads where my sympathies lie. I'm trying to read my, er, coalition.

at least he's attributing now, akm

well Michael, I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent clip of him saying that the debate about the Palestinian situation is more wide-ranging in Israel than it is here; which is why I found today's "stalwart ally" quickie a bit of a regression. Maybe someone told him the previous remarks were too much like Hil's "kissing Mrs Arafat" photo.

me gotta go

yeah he got the quote wrong but hey he quoted faulkner

"I think he's a great motivational speaker, but what I hear from him I could go hear at my church on Sunday from my pastor, and to me he just seems all fluff," said 40-year-old Maria Aguirre on the morning of the Texas "primacaucus." "If Clinton doesn't manage to win the nomination, then I will vote for McCain, because he's got experience and if someone has to answer the phone at 3 o'clock in the morning and if it can't be her, I'd rather it be McCain."

who are these idiots

i like obama a lot more than how my post might read, btw, so much so that i can't imagine how weird and kind of awful it would feel to vote for hillary in a general election.

lol is that quote real or did you cut and paste that together from the various media narratives over the past few weeks.

if someone has to answer the phone at 3 o'clock in the morning and if it can't be her, I'd rather it be McCain.

tracy morgan otm

one of my least favorite things about watching news shows give the viewers' opinions is they basically just post a bunch of comments from viewers who have swallowed one narrative line - "obama too inexperienced!" "obama will bring change!" rather than people offering any kind of insight or unique perspective

lol is that quote real or did you cut and paste that together from the various media narratives over the past few weeks.

-- The Brainwasher, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 4:20 PM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

very real

I rather think it was Maria Aguirre who has been mentally cutting and pasting from various media narratives.