Journalist Cassandra West has this article in the liberal magazine In These Times, which echoes my own most significant criticism about the candidacy of Barack Obama: he’s got a lot of nice platitudes and unfinished sentences, but he rarely, if ever, talks about what it is he proposes that can be done or changed or hoped for or whatever the nebulous-buzzword-du-jour-he’s-using’ed.
It’s no secret that, in general, Americans vote based on emotional response to a candidate rather than a reasoned decision — that’s how 49% of the country decided to vote for George Bush TWICE! He was “the guy you wanted to have a beer with” and got lucky enough to face two stiff and awkward (but vastly more intelligent and capable) guys in a row. Bill Clinton “felt our pain” (and our boobs). But, as the two aforementioned examples point out, that really hasn’t worked out too well. Frankly, I don’t know if this country can stand three charismatic-but-empty presidents in a row.
Sam Smith, writing on his blog The Progressive Review, explores the issue of Obama’s silver tongue in a little more detail. Smith says that he finds Obama’s platitudinous speechifying “boring”:
Then there are his words. The embarrassing truth is that Obama bores me. I find him platitudinous, single toned, , sometime pompous and often guilty of that classic Washington sin described once as confusing somberness with seriousness. To be sure, I don’t like listening to most politicians these days, but there is something so predictable and annoyingly didactic about Obama, as though he was trying to bring a bunch of freshman students up to speed, that I tend to turn him off and read the text instead.
That’s worth thinking about in the context of his speech earlier this week where he did a whole nifty tapdance around the undeniable truth about race in America. If you read the speech rather than listen to it, it is long (he spoke for more than half an hour), borrows unnecessarily from the Founding Fathers for rhetorical flourish, ends in a series of meaningless bits about unity, but offers little except a lecture to clueless white people about why black people are angry, a position which he is very clear to distance himself from.
Smith nails a couple of points right on the head: when you look beyond the color of his skin, Barack Obama is just another Harvard-educated lawyer with delusions of self-importance. To quote:
…an intelligent, analytical, somewhat self-possessed and arrogant fellow of innate caution and limited imagination. The sort of person you’d want around to handle your divorce or complete your merger, but far from the prophet whose role he has been assigned.
Moreover, when Obama finally does get around to specifics, it turns out that he’s far from progressive: he supports “No Child Left Behind” and the PATRIOT Act, he’s pro-death penalty, his healthcare plan offers far less than Clinton’s, and he’s been accused of lying in public about being against NAFTA. So what is it exactly that he proposes to change?
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
