{"id":484,"date":"2008-09-09T16:46:45","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T21:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?p=484"},"modified":"2008-09-09T21:30:31","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T02:30:31","slug":"after-the-conventions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/after-the-conventions\/","title":{"rendered":"after the conventions"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I was finishing this piece when my current copy of Newsweek<\/i> slid through the mail slot. As Richard Cohen says in an article I quote down at the end, here: “Oy!” That’s one campy cover. In case you can’t tell from the thumbnail, that’s a shotgun the divine Sarah has slung over her shoulder. And the fine print tells you that Palintology<\/i> means “The Advanced Study of Sarah Palin and How She Sees the World.” The teaser inside the online edition isn’t much better, juxtaposing a promise to describe “The real Sarah Palin” with a picture of the newly notorious Governor of Alaska seated on a settee with a bearskin draped across the back. One trophy after another. My oh my! But as Barack says<\/a>, Palin’s bio . . . mother, governor, moose shooter (I guess he would include bear shooter) — that’s cool stuff.<\/p>\n

But that isn’t exactly what I meant to write about, though it fits. My argument starts with a Huffington Post<\/i> piece, in which Dave Winer<\/a> talks about how George Lakoff<\/a> explained Barack Obama’s rise last February.<\/p>\n

I talked with Lakoff about how the word “liberal” had been destroyed by the right wing<\/a>, and asked if that was going to be a problem for Obama. He said it wouldn’t, because Obama had figured out how to say what many of us believe, that the values people label with the L-word are actually American<\/i> values.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s no secret that a substantial reason for Obama’s popularity has been his appeal to patriotism and his reclaiming of some of the turf of patriotism for left-leaning politics and policy.<\/p>\n

But Obama now trails John McCain 44% to 49% in the latest Gallup Poll<\/a>, having only recently extended his lead to 50% over 42% for McCain. This isn’t news Obama supporters can afford to discount. According to Gallup analysis<\/a>, “candidates who lead after the second convention usually remain the leader a month after the convention.” McCain seems to have bet the election on an end run, not only around the issues and his party’s unpopularity, but also around Obama’s success as a patriot and a leader.<\/p>\n

Winer had more to say back in February:<\/p>\n

We already have more leadership from this man [Obama] who hasn’t even won the Democratic nomination yet than we have from the actual President of the United States. . . . [I]n the last two campaigns, I have exhorted the candidates to use the money they raise to solve important problems, and realize that Obama had done exactly that. He’s uniting us as a country. There’s nothing more important, once we remember that we’re all Americans and that that means something, we can do so much more than when we’re divided by the “wedge issues” of cynical political hacks. We always have had the option to take back our country, now we seem to be doing that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the cynical political hacks who are cannily running McCain’s campaign managed to reinsert all the tired wedge issues and also to steal Obama’s big theme and claim it for their guy at the RNC. According to Jonathan Martin and Jim Vandehei at Politico<\/a><\/i>, it worked like this:<\/p>\n

. . . [W]hile Obama was busy soft-selling the change portion of his campaign at his convention, McCain was busy stealing it \u2014 and busy downplaying the sort of issue-by-issue laundry list Obama delivered in his State of the Union-like acceptance speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, of course, the McCain campaign accomplished this by anointing Sarah Palin, whose wide-eyed cheerleading allows McCain to stand on his own mythic shoulders without appearing to aggrandize himself.<\/p>\n

Obama may be right to take on Palin directly, but he certainly shouldn’t be foregrounding her. Arianna Huffington<\/a> puts it wonderfully when she describes Palin as “a Trojan Moose, concealing four more years of George Bush” and argues that Obama must redirect his campaign away from Palin and “back to a discussion over the issues that really matter.” Says Huffington, “McCain’s real running mate is George Bush and the failed policies of the Republican Party. Even if they are dressed up in a skirt, lipstick, and Tina Fey glasses.” Then Huffington says something even more important, that Obama “needs to show some commander-in-chief skills” and that it wouldn’t hurt if he showed some anger.<\/p>\n

I’m not talking about calling Palin out for lying about his record and demeaning community organizing. I’m talking about grabbing the political debate by the throat. The country is already angry about what’s happened over the last seven-plus years — he shouldn’t be afraid to give voice to that anger. Obama has spent years adopting a non-threatening persona; but he can’t let his fear that appearing like an “angry Black man” (a stereotype not-too-subtly fueled by Fox News) will turn off swing voters keep him from channeling the disgust and outrage felt by so many voters –swing and otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like “grabbing the political debate by the throat.” I think that might just do it. It isn’t just that Obama is being swift boated, as Richard Cohen points out in today’s Washington Post<\/a><\/i>, in a piece that reviews Obama’s performance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos<\/a><\/i>. That’s been going on since the primaries. What sounded in the parade of the Republican also-rans, Romney, Huckaby, Thompson, Giuliani, and including Sarah Palin, amongst all of whom it would be hard to find a working brain, was nothing more than ordinary schoolground bullying. One can’t dignify it by giving it too much attention, but as Cohen says, an apparently diffident response sugggests that Obama, “for all his splendid virtues, seems to lack fight.”<\/p>\n

I don’t presume to know what Obama should have said when George Stephanopoulos asked him what he was thinking when Rudolph Giuliani mocked his experience as a community organizer. But I think Stepanopoulos gave him, perhaps meant to give him, an opportunity not only to fight back but also to let us know something about the bedrock of his life: as Shelby Steele has put it<\/a>, “what beliefs he would risk his life for.” Obama is a brilliant man; but sometimes his brilliance seems facile, and that invites bullying. I think he needs to open his heart, now, in this present contest.<\/p>\n

— And I hope he finds it in himself to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was finishing this piece when my current copy of Newsweek slid through the mail slot. As Richard Cohen says in an article I quote down at the end, here: “Oy!” That’s one campy cover. In case you can’t tell … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,20,21,24,22],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-lakoff","tag-obama","tag-palin","tag-polls","tag-presidential-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":520,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}