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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (274989)	10/17/2008 7:49:15 PM
From: JustLearning	9 Recommendations Respond to of 793911

Hi Nadine: They have to attack this Joe. If he represents the abstraction of the average Joe, then it blows apart their fundamental views. Their abstraction is a Joe who is miserable, helpless, irrational, and clings to guns and religion because he cannot comprehend or deal with reality. This Joe is their worst nightmare - he seems rational, logical (caught Obama in a blatant contradiction which most of the media cannot detect or refuse to detect), who thinks of himself not as humble and poor, but as proud and a future (quarter) millionaire. His ambitions are rooted in reality and seems to be a rational progression of his career so far. It also raises another related issue - that this average Joe was able to figure out a complex economic concept (that Friedman would have been proud of), without going to an ivy league school - that the Harvard educated presidential candidate, his Princeton educated wife, and rest of his coterie could not figure out or explain, except through contradictions. They have to attack this Joe, and they have four ways to do it: (a) vicious jokes about his ambition and treat it as you would the bravado of a child (b) bring about issues about his personal life -"you cannot pay attention to the questions, look at his character". And of course ignoring their own contradictions on this issue. (b) Bring forward other instances of Joe, who represent their views and who think they should be given a handout. (c) concentrate on something else like Dianne Sawyer did. Her interview was vicious, focusing on his 10 minutes of fame and how lucky he is ("you won the lottery, so remember that and be humble"), talking about mundane matters such as his appointments for the day ("you're only an ordinary miserable plumber and don't you forget it"), and dissing his ambitions by ignoring them completely. And missing the important point - that the central actor here is Obama and Joe simply was smart enough to provide the scenario for him to hang himself. If this Joe is the abstraction of an average American, their entire view of ordinary America, and hence their core philosophy of social and political organization - based on distribution, planning, and regulation - is blown out of the water. And it would be a blow to their self esteem - that you don't need an elite education to understand basic common sense economics - that ordinary Joes are more than capable of seeing through their chicanery - that we don't need elites from Harvard to plan our economy - that is we don't need them.