I gave money three years ago to his senatorial campaign and personally have never really considered voting for anyone else. I haven't yet advocated for others to vote with me because despite the rancor from zealots in both camps, Obama and Hillary are both centrists Democrats reading from the exact same hymnal. I don't know any married couples who disagree on less. All this talk of an historic battle for the future direction of the Democratic party is just the same kind of hogwash HBO uses to hype prizefights.
What has become clear, however, from the religious-like fervor of Obama believers and the venomous hatred from Hillary haters, is that she has been so wounded by this campaign that she will be too weak to lead us to victory in November. Hyper-capable as she is, she's a hard woman to love. At least on her own. Obama's breathtaking rise has at least already won him the VP nod but the strength of his current surge will, I believe, eventually win him the nomination.
Fairly or unfairly Obama has been christened the new Kennedy while Hillary has been tarred the old Nixon. I just don't see how she recovers from that.
Obama has unquestionably tapped into something profound and lacking in this country. Let us gather around him now and get ready for the real push, the real hard work, of wrestling power away from a handful of ultra-conservative plutocrats who, for going on eight years now, have turned this nation into one that we hardly even recognize.
Let's take it back with Obama.
(And if after voting on Tuesday you want to think about something other than politics may I recommend buying dozens of copies of my new memoir, Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood..)
Mr. Ellis
Thank you,
The Blueprint for Change, Obama’s Plan for America:
http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/ObamaBlueprintForChange.pdf
People who say he hasn't communicated his policies haven't been actually doing their research.
It's cheap and easy to gossip. Go to http://www.barackobama.com/index.php and look at Barack TV. There are videos of speeches going back to before the campaign. Have an Ipod? Try subscribing to his Senate podcasts through ITunes. The man is consistent, says the same essential things he did as an organizer in Chicago and people who have known him all these years have been willing to go on record to attest to his interest in what THEY were saying and his capacity to actually listen. That's always the first step in being responsive rather than reactionary.
My husband and I are part of the demographic the pundits say is voting for Hillary or some Republican. I can't help but think we are going to surprise those know-it-alls. Change is coming at us at a speed that they can't seem to track. Not all people our age (57 and 69) are set in their ways, "rank and file," or predictable. Obama is reaching across all generations and all artificial ways to divide one American against another. This is a political breakthrough candidacy and some people will resist, but in the end, when it's time for change, it's time.
Obama may not seem the politcally expedient choice to those who have been voting to cut the risk in recent years, but he is the voice of the expediency of change itself in the United State of American. All of the candidates in both parties have tried to pick up this mantle of change and proclaim it as their own, but everyone sees it as a reaction to the success of the Obama campaign and not as an authentic call to action as it is to Obama.
Hope...for what?
Transformational change....to what?
Obama's campaign has been one, long unfinished sentence.
I'm seriously concerned by the lack of scrutiny Obama has gotten and the more I learn about him, the more I feel he is not the progressive that he seems fine with people thinking he is. (Hey, anything to get more votes.)
We as democrats are going to be in trouble when, during the general election, people start scrutizing him the way they should've been doing for at least a year.
If Bill had shut up before South Carolina, Hillary would probably be able to match Obama's persona as the ground breaking leader of the future. Now she's stuck with the worst of the divisive hyper-partisan past in a country that wants to move on to a post partisan future.
Obama hasn't just "tapped into something" ..he is the change he speaks about..he's living it and though Trey seems to reject the comparison to JFK, it doesn't take a poet or a dreamer to make such a analogy. Read and understand your own history, America.
It almost seems like the Stockholm syndrome so many women have about Hillary; "I'm a woman, but I won't vote for a woman, because I just don't think one would make a good president!" It's bizarre, and I wish I had the answer, but these writers are paid to be more thoughtful than they are, and I have to say I just don't get it.
I think the campaign has revealed that she just isn't a very good candidate. Though smart and relatively knowledgeable, she isn't a compelling politician. She doesn't have a sense of humor or an attractive personality. She seems to lack passion and a willingness to operate on conviction. As a result, other than the people who will passionately vote for a woman (ie any woman), she fails to inspire passion or conviction in others.
The comparison to Nixon is telling. She is Nixonian in her paranoid, calculating approach to politics. She is Nixonian in her general unlikeability in her sourness when people disagree with her. (On this point, HRC is probably more like the rest of us than we would ever care to admit.) My sense is that we can do much better than HRC.
Here we've been asking young people to participate in politics, begging them even, and here they are in their millions. Now that the young have become electrified by a political candidate, it's not about this or that candidate. It's about a movement to take the country back. I agree with Mr. Ellis. Hillary Clinton just doesn't have the magnetism we need in order to really engage people--especially young people--in the Democratic party, and Obama does. It's just that simple.
As a woman I have been especially appalled at the "angry feminist" contingent in the Democratic primaries. To suggest that Obama is the divisive factor here is just laughable.
YES WE CAN
OBAMA 2008