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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (10566)	10/20/2009 10:14:07 AM
From: i-node	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

No matter how outside your own sense of what is appropriate he may be, he can't have so many people farther out there than he is and be deemed "radical." I suppose we could debate it forever. But I can't name very many politicians who are "farther out there" than Obama is. As long as his approval ratings are high, meaning he has support from the majority or even a large plurality, he can't, by definition, be radical. This, of course, is wrong. FDR was radical (some here have claimed he was even more extreme than Obama), yet he was very popular. Hitler was radical, and enjoyed significant popular support. You cannot measure "radicalism" by reference to popular support. Radicalism can exist with or without popular support. And popular support can develop for the most radical of leaders. This doesn't make him less radical. It just means he is convincing. "Radical" implies a departure from tradition, NOT a departure from the mainstream. In fact, one of the objectives of radicalism is to cause the views of less radical people to become more radical. The Federalists touched on this this concept when they were debating various forms of leadership. The concern is that even large numbers of individuals can be influenced toward the extremes for reasonably short periods of time. Jim Jones was able to assemble significant popular support for the Peoples Temple. Does that make him less than radical? It's all relative to the mainstream. By this metric having a radical leadership is impossible, since you define anyone with sufficient popular support to be elected as decidedly UN-radical. Historically unusual is not the standard. Of course it is. You can't reasonably define it any other way. That doesn't mean we have to refer to ancient history, or even the history of 1790 as the standard. But you have to put Obama's actions in some historical context to be able to comprehend whether or not he is "radical". You can't just say, "Oh, he's convinced the mainstream, therefore he IS mainstream." That is not at all a sensible approach to evaluating his political position. Not to beat the issue to death -- but consider also that his "popular support" stands at about 51% "approval" according to Gallup. Well more than half that is a base level of support that cannot be moved -- what some would call "Yellow Dog Democrats" and of course, blacks, a large percentage of whom we know will vote for Obama no matter what (and there is some overlap). What we've seen since January is an erosion of the support from everyone else. (Meanwhile, his "net" approval rating has dropped from >60% to now about 10%). On election day, he may have been believed to have been "mainstream", but as of right now, it is much harder to make that case. We can't say the extent to which his radicalism CAUSED the drop in his approval, but we also cannot use his approval as a metric to determine the extent of his radicalism. Obama has, if anything, MODERATED over the last 9 months. Yet, his popular support has coincidentally declined. Is he MORE RADICAL TODAY since his popular support declined? Was he MORE RADICAL on January 21 since his popular support was sky-high? Of course not. Popular support is not determined by nor is it determinative of a candidates "radicalism".