Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Maureen Dowd Nails It

This morning, Maureen Dowd talks about Barack Obama’s speech yesterday (New York Times Op/Ed column--"Black, White and Grey"). She says Obama has finally entered the realm where politicians actually live—the realm of ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity. Dowd says Obama’s speech on race was “momentous and edifying”. She also said “facing up to his dubious behavior toward his explosive friends, he had his first rude introduction in his political career to ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity.” That’s for sure. Obama has constantly slammed Hillary for her vote on the Iraq war. His refrain has been that from the beginning he was against the war. And yet, at the time the vote was taken he did not have to vote. He could not have voted. He didn’t have to confront the ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity that our Congresspersons were faced with at that time. But now, as Dowd says, “he was finally confronted by a problem that neither his charm nor his grandiosity would solve.” He has finally entered that grey area where politicians spend 95% of their time. Dowd signs off with this: “Leaders don’t need to be messiahs. Gray is a welcome relief from black and white.” I could not agree more.

1 comment:

Barry Schwartz said...

I think you misunderstand Barack Obama. Barack Obama gave exactly the speech I expected of him, not massacred by his youthful speechwriters (whom I imagine he hired because he wanted to appeal to young adults).

Maureen Dowd, who never outgrew the high school clique structure, and so fixates on candidates' choice of clothes and haircuts, doesn't have the intellectual capacity to write about Obama's speech. Considering that Maureen Dowd is stuck in high school forever (along with much of the SCLM), I give her an F.

The idea of Barack Obama as some kind of "messiah" is a jealous slur against him by the high-schoolish likes of Maureen "Edwards's Haircut" Dowd.

Having observed Obama for a while now, I have seen many very promising but utterly surprising indications, and so I googled for connections between Obama and "general semantics", and discovered that Trinity United Church of Christ includes general semantics in its recommended studies: http://www.tucc.org/black_value_system.html

I began to suspect something like that was going on, since the day I observed Obama attempting to make an audience immune to wingnut abuse of the term "liberal". Democratic commenters stuck in the corrupt methods of advertising accused Obama of negatively "branding" the word "liberal"; so it goes. Yesterday Obama did the same immunization with the word "conservative". It will take a long while and many repetitions for such simple measures to have large and lasting effect, so, when Obama says he doesn't expect to turn things around in one election cycle, he probably realizes that he is making an understatement.