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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Asymmetric who wrote (156486)	12/19/2008 7:42:57 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 361716

Post 'O The Day. Thanks. Still room for more.

To: Asymmetric who wrote (156486)	12/19/2008 7:56:22 PM
From: Mac Con Ulaidh	Respond to of 361716

you said that awfully well and poetically. and yeppers. which is part of why I am fine being outside the circle that day. all good things in time.

To: Asymmetric who wrote (156486)	12/19/2008 8:08:10 PM
From: Travis_Bickle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361716

Why the hell would I want to be on the same side as those ***holes?

To: Asymmetric who wrote (156486)	12/19/2008 8:21:53 PM
From: altair19	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 361716

Asymetric, < It's like a Sun Tzu kind of a thing > That's a fascinating point of view. Altair19

To: Asymmetric who wrote (156486)	12/19/2008 8:38:34 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361716

Are Obama's "New" Politics Really New? tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com By Greg Sargent - December 19, 2008, 2:25PM Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post about the Rick Warren mess, which he uses as a jumping off point to argue that Barack Obama's "new" politics isn't really new at all. Greenwald's basic point is that Obama's efforts to placate the right by picking Warren -- and the effort to get the left to scream that pundits have claimed was behind the decision -- isn't really different from the bait-the-left politics that Democrats have practiced for decades now. And they simply haven't worked. As proof, he points out that Bill Clinton all but perfected the art of baiting the left and throwing cultural bones to the right, and all he got to show for it from Republicans was "hatred so undiluted that it led to endless investigations" and "accusations whose ugliness was boundless." That's true. But there is an important way that Obama's politics is new, and the landscape is different from 1992 in key ways that give him an opening to use his own brand of politics to disarm the right and potentially clear the way for big progressive achievements. Warning: I'm making this case at some length. As this blog argued recently, one thing Obama's victory represented was a potential death blow to the 1960s-rooted cultural politics that has held sway for the last four decades of the 20th Century. It's telling that Obama defeated both of the leading practitioners of this brand of politics -- the Clinton machine, and the Rovians who hijacked the McCain campaign -- by explicitly running against politics as they practiced it. Obama won the primary, and in the general election disarmed the power of the right's narratives, by employing not just a standard claim that he's above partisanship, but by making a new political argument: Only someone who had not gotten caught up in the cultural and political wars of the 1960s could achieve the sort of transformation of our politics that this historical moment demands. The voters agreed. It's true that in a narrow sense, efforts to placate the right by picking Warren doesn't represent a "new" politics, as Greenwald says. But the Warren mess aside, Obama is and has been making a larger argument than simply saying that partisanship is bad and that we need to unify. Old Culture-War Tactics Lose Their Sting More specifically, he's arguing that certain particular disputes and emotions must be left behind because of the need to meet the challenges of this particular moment. These disputes -- largely ones rooted in the 1960s culture wars -- took the form of efforts during the campaign to paint Obama as anti-military, elitist, unpatriotic, and non-Christian. Where possible, Obama, to a much greater degree than past Dems, simply chose not to engage these arguments -- also something of a new political approach. To be clear, I'm not arguing that particular cultural issues -- abortion and gay rights, to name two -- matter less to voters or won't carry future emotional appeal. Rather, what I'm saying is that more generic right-wing culture-war attacks on Dems' values, patriotism and alleged elitism have lost much of their ability to sway opinion, largely because of who Obama is and partly because of the aspects of his political argument and style that are indeed "new." This has a very clear bearing on the present: The "new" aspects of Obama's argument actually do have a better prospect of succeeding in the present than Bill's efforts to disarm the right did. Compare the 1992 landscape with the present. Bill Clinton won a plurality of the vote, while Obama won a comfortable majority. In 1992, conservative ideas were still ascendant; now they're broadly discredited. Polls show broad public support for liberal domestic and foreign policies. The electorate is now 17 years more removed from the 1960s than it was when Bill took office. Old Attacks Will Fail Add all this up, and here's the bottom line. The GOP and the right -- even if they're not co-opted by Obama's rhetoric and remain virulently hostile -- simply won't have the political latitude to obstruct and attack Obama with 1960s-style culture-war tactics, as Clinton's enemies did with attacks on his patriotism, pro-gay rhetoric and general godlessness. The crisis has raised the stakes for Obama's success, and Obama's "new politics" argument -- that it's imperative we move past old emotional disputes -- may prove an effective shield, and even a deterrent, against such tried-and-true Republican attacks, making him that much more effective. To be clear, I'm not remotely defending the Warren pick or bait-the-left politics. I'm simply saying that certain aspects of Obama's politics are genuinely new, and have a chance at accomplishing more than past variations of "post-partisan" politics did.