Here is yet another post that I wrote as a comment somewhere else, but thought I should post for you, my loyal readers; an idea I explained here. This was in response to a commenter who suggested that I was placing too much trust in Obama.
I don't see what other choice we have. Because for as much as Obama might be attacked by the right, every other Democrat will have the exact same problem. And for as much as people say we should "fight," I have no idea what that means beyond what Obama's doing. The deck is stacked against us, and the last time we had a Democrat in the Whitehouse, he "fought" by adopting rightwing positions and eventually got impeached. And while he remained popular and hindsight shows that we "won," I fail to see how we had many political victories after 1994. While we all fought for Clinton's personal victories, the political victories never materialized. In essence, fighting did nothing but lose us more ground. I'm not blaming the Clintons for that, just saying we need a new plan.
And if anyone can do something different, it'd be Obama, and it'd be because of his post-partisan message. Now, maybe it won't work. I'm not naive and don't imagine it'll be easy, but at least it's a shot. Especially as the media seems to like him more than they ever liked the Clintons, Gore, Kerry, or Edwards; and that's the first step. He talks like a centrist and is smooth without being BS-y, which will appease the empty-headed Broders and Russerts. And yet he can tell a narrative that people find engaging and is good at sticking to his script even under pressure. And his post-partisan rhetoric sets him up so our opponents will look like the haters; not us.
But none of the Obama people are under the delusion that Republicans will just hand us victories, and maybe victory is impossible. But I fail to see what choice we have. Obama is the only candidate positioned to do what we need done, and if it can be achieved, he's the guy to do it. Maybe it won't work either, but he's looking like Michael Jordan right now and I'd rather give him the ball than someone who tells me they play good defense.
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6 comments:
As of the Fisa debacle yesterday, I'm sold. HRC can kees my ass.
Yeah, that was a huge mistake on her part. She should have at least voted for immunity while telling her telecom lobbyist buddies that it was just to appease the rubes or something (perhaps something Barack did, I don't know). And I think they both could have come out a little stronger, but without stopping it; assuming it was the telecoms they didn't want to piss off.
But campaigning in Texas instead? She really hurt a lot of her supporters with that one. I'm so glad that it was Obama who voted against it while Hillary abstained than the other way around. That kind of thing was really hard to defend. She'll lose a lot of support for that.
Here is yet another post that I wrote as a comment somewhere else, but thought I should post for you, my loyal readers; an idea I explained here. This was in response to a commenter who suggested that I was placing too much trust in Obama.
-- let's combine forces. Dr. Snedley's AWOL and you need someone to fix this boilerplate Blogger template. :)
Jordan was really no slouch on defense. :)
My (overwrought) metaphor: Hillary is arguing that she's Scotty Pippen and Obama's Allen Iverson — just because he makes a lot of steals, doesn't change the fact that he's pure offense.
But if it's late in the game and we're down, screw defense — we need to score. You go with Iverson and hope he blows up. And if he's already on a roll, it's a no-brainer anyway.
Needless to say, though, Obama looks more like Jordan than Iverson right now; and Clinton looks more like Sam Bowie than Scotty Pippen.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying about joining forces. I'm not sure how Greenwald gets away with posting once a day, but that blog model sure doesn't work for getting me traffic. In fact, I actually could write more than once a day, but I'm not convinced more people would come, which would make all the really good posts get lost. If people would come repeatedly, I'd do it. But most of my readers only visit every few days, so if I posted more frequently, they'd miss stuff. It's really a catch-22 kind of thing.
All the same, I've always been against the concept of the group blog, which is why I stopped reading Publius. I don't even like that Atrios, Digby, and Carpetbagger have guest-bloggers that help out. In fact, I keep forgetting that TPM isn't always Josh Marshall, as they sound alike and their names aren't on the part of the RSS feed I read.
I've heard I'm using an out-dated model and it's probably true, but I can't change that. I'm not a stubborn person when it comes to the important things, but there are certain issues where I hold my ground and this is one of them. That's also the same reason I don't have ads. I don't consider ads to be a sell-out (in fact, I think they make blogs look more legitimate). But all the same, I just don't want ads on my blog. Changing my name from Doctor Biobrain might help too, as I suspect that's the worst name in blogdom outside of "Hindrocket", but that's just no good for me either.
And what do you mean boilerplate template?! I happened to have spent a lot of time making the minor changes to this place that never really satisfied me. And then there were the minutes I wasted trying to enlarge the margins before realizing I was screwing everything up. There's nothing boilerplate about this. I took the standard blogger template and made enough changes to it that I almost want to change it back. I swear I used to have a better font than this. To be honest, I'd like a better template, but nothing looks right to me, so I generally don't bother. For someone as liberal as I am, I'm really not big into change.
BTW, Doctor Snedley's currently in Iraq, working in the no-bid contract division of the government. I don't know how he does it, but he sure does live well for a man working in the public sector.
Yeah, you probably wouldn't want the traffic from Texas law students, either, trust me. Oh well :)
The template is OK, actually -- I use pretty much the same one -- but it's mostly the header; it's the standard Blogger graphic, right? No matter what else changes, the graphic is so distinctive that I guess it just signals "Blogger template" to me and overrides everything else.
I was mostly kidding, at any rate :) Content is king, anyway. Or so I tell myself.
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