Sunshine Through The Clouds

A bonus PS for you.  For another view about SOME voters in this country & what the rest of us are up against, I would also suggest "The Push to 'Otherize,' Obama," by Nicholas D. Kristoff, NYT, 09.21.08, published 09.20.08.  Go to nytimes.com.

Rich K

You should be pleased, I looked where you said to look. It made no difference in my basic stance, but I would like to point out a few things regarding the articles.

Dowd

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks "The Flintstones" was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say "thanks but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said "Thanks." You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word "patriot" back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

This is a nearly perfect example of why people talk about the "intellectual elite." The condescension comes so easily it is evident the writer doesn’t even realize how condescending she is. "The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it." Translate this into "if you don’t vote for a Democrat you are stupid." It relates to the oft repeated "bitter people clinging to guns and religion" quote. People are offended when it is repeatedly suggested that they are idiots because they fail to be in lock-step with every aspect of liberalism.

Rich

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he

claims to have overseen

"every part of our economy." He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of

, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

References to Gramm and Fiorina mean nothing to me. I’m sure that Rich thought that was a real zinger when he wrote it, I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing that strikes me as preaching to the coir. The same with references to alternative reality and Rove. They are the kind of things that sound clever if you already believe them. I don’t understand the fascination with Rove. As I am a conservative you will have to clue me into what Rove was supposed to have done.

Kristof

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.comhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to "otherize" Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome

First, this suggests that opposition to Obama is prejudice, and that religion is racism. It also suggests that conservative christians think that Obama is some kind of anti-christ. This is an old song, that anything which is traditionally American but does not lead to democrat votes is stupid and evil.

Second, the idea that journalists haven’t taken sides is laughable. In the primaries the media picked the most liberal member of each party. Now there is considerable bias in favor of Obama, no big surprise. That McCain is doing so well Obama’s supporters controlling the flow of public information just shows that either 1) you can’t fool all the people all the time, or 2) you can lead horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.