Feeling good about Barack

"Right now, he's a national Rorschach test, with voters reading into him their fondest hopes for what America can do and be."
Mort Kondracke - Roll Call

David Seaton's News Links
The problem with Obama is that we are not talking about Obama himself very much at all.

The fact is that instead of talking about Barack Obama, we are talking about how good Obama makes us feel about ourselves. We also are talking about how good it would make us look, if he were the next president

We are probably talking more about ourselves than about Obama, because he hasn't really been around that long or done that much and except for what he tells us about himself we know next to nothing about him... so there isn't that much to talk about.

Obama, who has been in the US Senate for barely two years certainly has the thinnest presidential CV I can ever remember, even Dubya had been the governor of one of America's most important states. If Obama were a successful two term governor of Illinois, which is a very complex state with a huge budget, this would be a much more serious conversation. If Obama had ever done anything outstanding in "private life", like most of the other candidates (Hillary excepted) have done, it would give us something solid to hang on to. As far as I can see, he has written a book about his search for who he "is" and given a couple of good speeches and that is about it.

The campaign(s) are going to be long and brutal and the question is going to be: will our own self-flattery finally be enough to carry the entire country behind it? DS

What happened to Hillary?

David Seaton's News Links
What happened to Hillary?

How about this?

Hollywood doesn't write any good parts for middle aged, American women... Hollywood's message to them is "drop dead" and in today's world of corporate concentration and infotainment, Hollywood and the news media are of one flesh.

However, look around you, there are many middle aged American women with a few extra lines around their eyes, with some furrows in their pucker, with a bit of sag in the chin, and with a little "rope" in the neck muscles, but who, somehow -- malgré Hollywood -- don't want to drop dead, just yet... and they can vote.

I have spent my whole life trying enthusiastically, but none too successfully, to understand women, but what little I have managed to learn tells me that it would be very difficult for a middle aged woman to join in publicly ridiculing and humiliating another middle aged woman... the empathy would be just too strong. That humiliation and ridicule are always just beneath the surface in too many places, even in their own homes, available to them all.

And beyond middle age, despite all the talk of a "youth crusade" around Obama, the old folks are the ones that really vote. Women live longer than men, so that among the elderly, women outnumber men, that means more women voting in the group with the highest voter participation.

So Hillary has been saved by her sisters, they rode to her rescue like the 7th cavalry in an old western... "Joan Wayne" saved Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. DS