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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (49179)	2/14/2008 10:25:20 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543106

I'm more interested in the false promises/false fear thing. I don't like politicians who stir folks up without a sound basis. To some degree, that's a pax on all the pols. I can't recall a one in recent years, at least one that has been successful, that hasn't crossed that line in large ways. And I see a distinction between sinners here. In Obama's case, I see some of what bothers you going on, but I also see this attempt to alter the political culture. That's what his comment about Reagan was about; it's what he thinks we need now. If one of the things culture does is conceal and reveal, you can argue that Obama is trying to reveal the consequences of unbridled and unreflective tax cutting; the very thing the Reagan generated political culture neatly and intentionally concealed. I'm not going to go out and buy Obama's book. Maybe if I read it I would find something to enable my trust. Given what I've seen of your political convictions, I would not expect it to generate anything like trust. I recommended it as a way to understand his sense of his place in the world, the way his surprisingly complicated self reflection works, the grounding of his political convictions, and the way he talks to himself when he is not running for political office. It's not great literature, nor does he pretend it to be. But it's not bad literature. It's close to a classic, I'm guessing, in the rather small field of books written by politicians before they ran for office without a campaign in mind. I'm willing to believe that Obama is a post-partisan politician, which I think is a very, very desirable thing, but not that he can meet the expectations he's fostering with two fish and five loaves. If the conversation changes, who knows what multiples of fishes and loaves might appear from unknown ponds and ovens. The community organizers mantra here is not that a community waits passively for provisions but rather organizes itself to generate them.