This week's double issue of Huffington arrives in the brief lull between the Republican and Democratic conventions. It is, of course, all about the November election. In a sweeping overview of President Obama's first term, Ryan Grim and Sam Stein describe Obama, just three months before election day, suffering from an "engagement gap," an almost unthinkable predicament for the man who stirred such passion four years ago. The reason, Grim and Stein write, is that "Obama has come to resemble the creature of Washington he campaigned against" -- not the transformational leader his supporters were expecting. In mapping the journey from Campaigning Obama to Governing Obama -- including a compelling re-telling of the legislative jostling around the stimulus bill -- Grim and Stein portray a president who entered office embodying the hopes of millions, now bracing for an election that is likely to be a lot tougher than anyone would have predicted. "How," they ask, "did a candidate who drew two million individuals to his inauguration and retained a 13 million-member email list lose that magic?"
And at a time when the polarization of our political discourse is seen as a given, Michael Calderone examines its effects on one of the newest and most robust cottage industries of our time: the Obama biography. Examining the spectrum of Obama treatments -- from Edward Klein's The Amateur, which tags Obama as "a narcissist" and "a bungler-in-chief," to David Maraniss's Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply-reported chronicle of the president's family history stretching back generations -- Calderone finds that the political book industry reflects the wider national trend of polarization. According to a recent Pew study, Americans' "values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years." As Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter and author of The Obamas, explains, the atmosphere of polarization greatly influenced the way her book was received: there was "confusion about whether this was on the left or right, a Fox book or an MSNBC book."
Elsewhere in the issue, Alice Hines reports on one of the more colorful pieces of political stagecraft: what the candidates eat. The tradition of public food consumption in American politics goes back to the barbecues thrown by Southern politicians, rowdy affairs with roasted pigs and free whisky and rum. Today, it's photo-ops at greasy spoon diners, roadside bakeries and ice cream parlors. Hines even catalogues President Obama's intake in a 48-hour period last month, mercifully without a calorie count: "Bacon, eggs, grits, buffalo wings, ribs, sausage, pepperoni pizza, iced tea and Miller Lite were only the start. At a farm, the President purchased fresh peaches, strawberries, sweet corn and cherries; at a bakery, it was a dozen chocolate chip cookies and an entire apple pie. At one café, Kozy Corners in the village of Oak Harbor, he was photographed sharing strawberry pie and whipped cream with a young boy." And then there are musings on candidates' indulgences -- President Obama's fondness for beer, and Mitt Romney's weakness for coffee-flavored ice cream, made even more notable because of his no-caffeine Mormonism. So, for the undecided voters still mulling it over, there's always the beer vs. ice cream tiebreaker.
This piece appears in Issue 12/13 of our FREE new weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, in the iTunes App store.
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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Will the Democrats Speak for the People?
If this is in any way true, our political system has a serious maturity problem. Most of the places I look, we are hailing one candidate as a hero, and the other as a villain. Standard campaign ads are almost always attack ads. And anytime a moderate article comes out with the potential to tell both sides of an issue, the comment section explodes with people taking the level of debate back to black and white, hero and villain.
I'm ready for a change. I believe we all deserve one. I have a proposal: let's encourage American politics- and the people who talk about them- to grow up. This means being mature enough to consider alternate sides to each story. It means that even if we disagree with someone, we can still acknowledge the good in them. It also means getting past our differences enough to work on solutions to our problems.
I'd like to jump these discussions up a level or two. Is anyone with me?
This coupled with a No Nuance Beltway Media (which is another way of saying Republican Apeasers & their Lie Repeaters) who repeat Repbulican Talking Point Lies as if Fact:
This boils down to this. While few things in life are black and white, this means that some still are. In this case anyone who cares about our Quality of Life and Standard of living must do everything they can to make sure the Nuanced Democrats win!
Otherwise Republicans, who've been looting the US treasury, working for Predatory standards for large corporations, destroying the Government WeThePoeple to protect our interests
while blaming Democrats for what they, The Gas&OilParty, perpetrated upon us...They will
Privatize our Government WHICH IS MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE FOR MUCH LESS!!!
Real Men vote Democratic!!
Only reason for this is Obama's unfortunate habit of bending-over-backwards for & compromising his agenda with the other party who from the beginning wanted him to fail and did everything in their spiteful ways...
Seriously isn't there someone stuck back in government that understands real life, knows what's good for the country, doesn't jump at war as a yeehaa thrill and can motivate congress and still come into the future?
The stock is in the animals!
One is between the two political parties. The other is between the ruling class and the working class. The two are interrelated.
The two parties are groups that are fighting for power. They appeal to different constituencies, and speak with different messages, but their differences in action are actually slight. Both are funded by powerful interests and primary serve those interests.
The ruling class and working class are as different as can be. The former is a distinct minority, yet holds all the power in society. This is a mystery -- unless one realizes that it is the two political parties that maintain the fiction that either one represents the people.
The two parties are the only means of expression for the majority. The plutocrats who control the parties also control the media, so the majoriy are informed only insofar as the minority wants them to be. Without their own political voice and the means for that voice to be heard, the majority -- the working class -- has no way to effectively organize and speak on its own behalf.
The working class needs an effective means of communication, with the ability to convince its own constituency about the lies and betrayals of the ruling class parties, the viability of working class control of the government, and the possibility of change originating from the bottom.
Labor Party 2016.
It is his "OPUD" style. Over promise. Under deliver. People get tired of constantly being disappointed.
My most notable, personal disappointment? A much hyped program in 2009 to get laid off or retired corporate employees into teaching jobs. Thousands would be fast tracked into fulfilling teaching roles in public schools. But guess what? The program was little more than a D of E web site that linked you to your local school district and the usual teacher application forms. No special help at all, just some impenetrable forms and unfathomable credentialing processes that had not changed in years. That, in private business, would have been cause for an FTC action or class action law suit alleging fraud.
How true that is. I was a campaign donor and voted for him in 2008. But I can hardly bare to watch Obama anymore, given his constant negativity and cynicism. He is always blaming. Castigating others. Launching outrageous ad hominem attacks on his opponents. Pitting one group against another. The "You didn't build that" jeremiad was especially outrageous. Many of us have worked hard in our lives and to ascribe our success to just plain luck and government intervention is just so wrong.
When people go on TV and tell America straight out that their main goal is make Obama a one term president and follow suit with being against everthing Obama is for,you damn well better factor that in as major polarization please. The GOP is even against their own damn ideas if Obama is for them. Stop this mess of statements like he's become what he campaigned against....Really? The man can't even get he entire support of his own party thanks to special interests and greed.
When you decide to publish "nifty" aricles to spark comment and debate please sit back and realize some do use our brain as best we can. Despite the best efforts of his detractors President Obama has managed to slow walk this country in a positive direction. We all know it could be a lot worse and a little help from the GOP will have things here in good old America even better......
OBAMA 2012
Polarization is the artfully designed, meticulously instituted, tool of the 1% which they will use to consolidate their control over the 99%, and finish their stripping of the assets of the middle class.
Polarization has joined fear in the armamentarium of their weapons locker. The battlefield for the deployment of fear, and now polarization, is their corporate media. They have consolidated absolute control over the printing press, the airwaves, and even, to an extent, the ether of the Internet.
Look at what they have done to us. Cowering in fear behind an outrageously bloated military, an incredibly offensive TSA, and an imperial Executive Branch increasingly freed from the fetters of our carefully designed Constitutional protections.
Reduced by their media top shrieking at one another with invectives rooted in the polarization they have nurtured. Everyone talking, no one listening. Conventions of civility long ago cast aside. Terminally divided and ripe for picking as low hanging fruit on the drooping tree of our republic.
It’s us vs. them. The 99% against the 1%, in the jungle of anarchy into which we have descended. We are in this together, and they, the 1%, their media, and their owned politicians, are our common enemy.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans will take up our cause.
We must have another option.
http://www.voterocky.org/solutions