Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Enemies, enemies everywhere!
Zogby likely voter poll now has McCain five points ahead of Obama. There's a few reasons that would happen. The Georgia crisis; the Russkies are back. Falling gas prices. Obama's vacation. The patriotic flavor of the Olympics. McCain's aggressiveness. He's floating Lieberman as a serious VP candidate & gave Giuliani the convention keynote address, which telegraphs that he 
intends to downplay the religious right moral stuff - he assumes he's got them no matter how suspicious they are of him - & emphasize the Enemies, enemies everywhere! themes. The Repugs will treat the hard religious right the way the Democrats treat African-Americans. As long as the magic formulas are invoked, where else they gonna go? McCain took Obama's measure & correctly concluded he was no Bill Clinton. Or Hillary Clinton.
I've always thought Barack's support was soft. I don't trust the strength of youth crusades, never have, even when I was a youth. In the jargon of the day, you had to fight "The Man," & The Man was where the power was at, & The Man wasn't gonna give it up. So the best you could do, probably, was to take the long view & chip away at the attitudes of the people who supported The Man. To replace The Man, you had to be like The Man. & that involved serious compromises to be sure.
Americans have very short attention spans, no patience for detail, & a general disinterest in facts. & we're bullies, not colonizers. We're waiting for the Iraqis to accept the hard reality that they have to give us their oil. As soon they demonstrate they can be trusted to do it, we'll pull back to our enclaves & let them behead their uppity women, , if that's what they want. Morally, we're very flexible. All we want is affordable gasoline.
John McCain is the candidate for lower gasoline prices. Rising pump prices made Bush policies a failure. Falling gas prices make them a success, or less of a failure. However, if prices stabilize for awhile as neither here nor there, not too painful, Americans will think about the cost of other stuff, & maybe less about the enemies who threaten our gasoline, & that favors Democrats.
I 'd like to believe that Obama's campaign is smart & what they're doing this summer is working the edges. Visit the slightly laid back Republican protestants in Southern California, the ones who eat fresh guacamole after church. Take a working vacation in Hawaii; reminds the press that it ain't Crawford Texas. Pretend they're serious about contesting North Carolina. & now comes the VP pick & the convention & they unveil the full presidential version of Barack Obama. I sure hope so.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
intends to downplay the religious right moral stuff - he assumes he's got them no matter how suspicious they are of him - & emphasize the Enemies, enemies everywhere! themes. The Repugs will treat the hard religious right the way the Democrats treat African-Americans. As long as the magic formulas are invoked, where else they gonna go? McCain took Obama's measure & correctly concluded he was no Bill Clinton. Or Hillary Clinton.I've always thought Barack's support was soft. I don't trust the strength of youth crusades, never have, even when I was a youth. In the jargon of the day, you had to fight "The Man," & The Man was where the power was at, & The Man wasn't gonna give it up. So the best you could do, probably, was to take the long view & chip away at the attitudes of the people who supported The Man. To replace The Man, you had to be like The Man. & that involved serious compromises to be sure.
Americans have very short attention spans, no patience for detail, & a general disinterest in facts. & we're bullies, not colonizers. We're waiting for the Iraqis to accept the hard reality that they have to give us their oil. As soon they demonstrate they can be trusted to do it, we'll pull back to our enclaves & let them behead their uppity women, , if that's what they want. Morally, we're very flexible. All we want is affordable gasoline.
John McCain is the candidate for lower gasoline prices. Rising pump prices made Bush policies a failure. Falling gas prices make them a success, or less of a failure. However, if prices stabilize for awhile as neither here nor there, not too painful, Americans will think about the cost of other stuff, & maybe less about the enemies who threaten our gasoline, & that favors Democrats.
I 'd like to believe that Obama's campaign is smart & what they're doing this summer is working the edges. Visit the slightly laid back Republican protestants in Southern California, the ones who eat fresh guacamole after church. Take a working vacation in Hawaii; reminds the press that it ain't Crawford Texas. Pretend they're serious about contesting North Carolina. & now comes the VP pick & the convention & they unveil the full presidential version of Barack Obama. I sure hope so.
