5 posts tagged “obama”
Oh, and the source for this map is: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html
Yes, we are within hailing distance of The End Of The 2008 Campaign. Depending on how close things are tomorrow night, the election itself may drag on for days, but frankly I'm happy to have gotten this far.
Tomorrow I'll be canvassing with Redzilla in an undisclosed location in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, being my most wholesome, apple-cheeked, Campbell-Soup-Kid-visaged self, channeling a much younger and idealistic Spucko.
Right now I'm thinking about that younger self. In fall 1988 I was a senior in high school, but not old enough to vote. Reagan was wrapping up his second term. George the Elder Bush (who knew he would EVER seem like an elder statesman, comparatively?) had selected Dan Quayle of Huntington, Indiana (as a gaffe machine, Biden pales beside him) as his running mate, which caused a lot of excitement in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana -- excitement which I did not share -- because he may have been an idiot, but he was our idiot.
On the Democratic ticket were Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen (who, as several pundits in this election have pointed out, seems positively sprightly, even youthful, compared to McCain). I wasn't excited about them, particularly, but despised Reagan's foreign policy (yes, I was a nerd, but even in Indiana we'd heard reports about the Iran-Contra affair by then), and was eager for an end to the Reagan years. (I had to wait until 1992 for that, unfortunately.)
So election day found me spending an hour or two at the local Democratic headquarters, making calls and asking people to get out and vote. I didn't ask them to vote for a specific candidate, just to exercise their right and responsibility to choose their elected officials, which is what I intend to do tomorrow.
I remember one of the Democratic campaigners working with me gave me a sort of appraising look as I placed one particular call, and said something to me about how touching it was. In that moment, I felt as though my youthful sincerity was being sucked into and exploited by a giant political machine.
I have never since volunteered for a political campaign, never given money to the Democratic Party (or the Republicans, for that matter, although I'm pretty sure a buck or two of my money has ended up in the Green Party coffers via some benefit show or other in some college town bar) until this year, when I contributed to the Obama campaign -- not to the Democrats, who are Way Less Evil Than the Republicans but still a bit shifty. And tomorrow I'll be donating a bit of shoe leather, too.
Wish me luck. I wish us all luck.
This morning when I tried to visit www.barackobama.com, my browser timed out on me. I tried just now and the page took a loooong time to load (5 or 10 seconds - I know, I'm impatient, but this is a high-speed network connection). This typically means that the site is being inundated with hits.
John McCain's site? Got right in with no waiting. And was immediately annoyed with it, because of this:
So of course I had to "make my own little sign" (with apologies to the Five Man Electrical Band - did you know they are Canadian?):
I filled in my real email address and zip code, but oddly enough, they haven't emailed me my sign yet.
David Brooks, one of the few conservative columnists for the New York Times, wants to find some fault in Barack Obama, but just can't seem to do it, and unlike less squeamish GOP shills, he doesn't just want to make stuff up. So here is what he's stuck with saying:
There has never been a moment when, at least in public, [Obama] seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.
When Bob Schieffer asked him tough questions during the debate Wednesday night, he would step back and describe the broader situation. When John McCain would hit him with some critique — even about fetuses being left to die on a table — he would smile in amusement at the political game they were playing. At every challenging moment, his instinct was to self-remove and establish an observer’s perspective.
Through the debate, he was reassuring and self-composed. McCain, an experienced old hand, would blink furiously over the tension of the moment, but Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.
...
He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.
That sounds good, right? For Brooks, this is an Obama love-fest. But he can't just say Obama is the better candidate, because then he would cease to be a conservative columnist. (I would still consider him a conservative columnist, but the GOP would string him up by his thumbs right next to Christopher Buckley. None of this "let the best candidate win" nonsense.)
So to try to salvage some modicum of conservo street cred, Brooks gives us this tepid warning:
Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. New presidents are often amazed by how much they are disobeyed, by how often passive-aggressiveness frustrates their plans.
It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader. Rather than throwing himself passionately into his causes, he will stand back. Congressional leaders, put off by his supposed intellectual superiority, will just go their own way. Lost in his own nuance, he will be passive and ineffectual. Lack of passion will produce lack of courage. The Obama greatness will give way to the Obama anti-climax.
We can each guess how the story ends. But over the past two years, Obama has clearly worn well with voters. Far from a celebrity fad, he is self-contained, self-controlled and maybe even a little dull.
There it is. He hasn't thrown tantrums like McCain, nobody has been able to find any personal dirt on the guy, he's smart, he's built an extremely effective campaign by enlisting the help of very smart people who have different opinions and abilities than he does (something obviously foreign to the current administration).
So...um...I guess the argument is that he's boring? And maybe those qualities that have enabled him to succeed in his campaign won't, um, they somehow won't matter if he gets into the White House? He'll be too smart to lead? He'll be too calm in the heat of a crisis?
While Palin is making People Named Sarah cringe on a daily basis, comedian Sarah Silverman is...also making people cringe on a daily basis, but in a good way.
Now she's promoting a fiendishly clever plan to get seniors in Florida to vote for Obama: by having their grandkids emotionally blackmail them into it! Yay! But this isn't just a job for good liberal Jewish kids everywhere -- if you have grandparents in Florida, you can do it, too. Find out more at thegreatschlep.com.
