Doug-at-large

The Obama Delusion (Newsweek column)

See the entire column here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/113672/output/print

Here are some excerpts:

“Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation’s ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.”

…..

“Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscuration. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it’s his standard and also his campaign’s central theme. He has run on the vague promise of “change,” but on issue after issue—immigration, the economy, global warming—he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion.”

…..

“The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the mediapreoccupied with the political “horse race”have treated his invocation of “change” as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.”

…..

doug

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Election 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.