ooohh, i am not sure I want gore to be head of the EPA isn't his family in oil? This AM I read a good article on Obama's rise.
c)RealNetworks, Inc. All rights reserved.
(c)Copyright 2007 Rolling Stone
*Obama's Moment* Written off by the experts at the start of the campaign,
Barack Obama is now surging in Iowa - proof that some things in politics are
still not rigged Matt TaibbiPosted Dec 13, 2007 1:14 PM
Page 1 2<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17652931/obamas_moment/2>
3 <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17652931/obamas_moment/3>
All love stories are beautiful at the beginning, and what we're witnessing
now is the beginning of a new one: America and Barack Obama. The story
begins with the world spinning off its axis, the country mired in dark times
and the way of the fresh-faced savior seemingly blocked by a juggernaut
agent of the Status Quo. Only in the end, in the moment that sportswriters
die for and that comes once a generation in politics if we're lucky, the
phenom rises to the occasion, gets the big hit in the big game and becomes a
man before our very eyes. The old power recedes, and the new era is born.
That's grand language for a forum as vulgar and profane as presidential
politics, but this is the moment that Barack Hussein Obama was born for, and
it really is happening before our very eyes. Like Kennedy or Reagan or even
Bill Clinton, Obama is a politician whose best chance for success has always
been on the level of myth and hero worship; to win the Democratic
nomination, he must successfully sell himself not just as a candidate but as
an icon, a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century
multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy
of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the
Clinton machine.
With just weeks to go before Iowa, Obama is succeeding at that sales job,
thanks in part to an unexpected avalanche of positive press and in even
greater part to Hillary Clinton's recent performance as a creaky, suddenly
vulnerable establishment villain. In just a few weeks, the first real votes
in this insufferably long process will finally be cast, and when they are,
the Powers That Be may find that they waited too long to get the real show
started that the long wait gave America just enough time to decide that
it's ready to move on to something new.
For most of this campaign season, I doubted that Obama really was that new
something. Now I'm not so sure he isn't. Whoever Barack Obama is, there's no
doubting the genuineness of his phenomenon. And maybe, who knows, that's all
that matters.
After debacles in Iraq and New Orleans and mushrooming scandals that exposed
much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect
protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer, people simply do
not trust the politicians they vote for to be anything less than an
embarrassment. You get the sense they approach the upcoming election with
the enthusiasm of a two-time loser offered a selection of plea deals.
People hate the mechanized speeches, they hate the negative ads, and they
especially hate venomous news creatures, myself included. It's now so bad
that a poll last month found that fifty-six percent of all likely voters
agreed with the phrase that the presidential race is "annoying and a waste
of time" a shocking number, given that it excludes the forty to fifty
percent of Americans who already don't vote in presidential races.
People don't want to feel this way, but the attitude everywhere is the same:
What choice do these assholes give us? And it's that grim prejudice that has
pervaded this process for a generation, forcing the public to choose from an
endless succession of lesser evils and second- raters of the Kerry-Dole
genus, stuffed suits who offered nothing like a solution to the main problem
of feeling like shit about the American civic experiment.
Until now. Emphasizing that this is not necessarily a reflection of who or
what Obama really is, he unmistakably and strikingly attracts crowds that,
to a person, really seem to believe that his election will fundamentally
change the way they feel about their country.
"I just want to see if there's going to be a difference with this cat," says
Richard Walters, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker, who had come to hear
Obama give a speech at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater. "Because if there's
something different, we need it now."
"At this point, I'd be glad if he recited the alphabet correctly," says
Xiomara Hall, another New Yorker. Laughing, she and her friend add, "We got
hope. Change is *goood*!"
"I just want to see if he can do something, anything, to change things,"
says Shirley Paulino, another visitor to the Apollo event. "See if he is
what he says he is. We just we need it, you know?"
Normally the sight of prospective voters muttering platitudes about "hope"
and "change" would make any reporter erupt with derisive laughter, but at
Obama events one hears outbursts of optimism so desperate and artless that I
can't help but check my cynical instinct. Grown men and women look up at you
with puppy-dog eyes and all but beg you not to shit on their dreams. It's
odd to say, but it's actually moving.
An important component of this phenomenon is that the Obama crowds are
surprisingly free of the usual anti-Republican venom. As much as anything,
his rise is a reflection of the country's increasing boredom with partisan
hatred.
"I'm so tired of the president just talking to one part of the country, or
one group," says Malia Scotch-Marmo. "I was in my twenties with Reagan, but
I felt he talked to me, even though we were all Democrats. It would be great
to have a black president. It would be great for kids to see. It would be a
nice mind shift."
It's a mood thing, not an issue thing, and it stems entirely from Obama's
unique personal qualities: his expansive eloquence, his remarkable
biography, his commanding physical presence. I saw this clearly on display
at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was a foreign-policy discussion
arranged by his campaign that I thought was going to be a disaster. The
candidate's handlers had announced a start time of 8:30 a.m., but when
dozens of reporters and a hundred or so audience members arrived, we learned
that the candidate wouldn't be showing up until eleven. Up to then, the room
had to listen to a panel of academic corpses blather about the Middle East.
By 10 a.m., the press section was afire with sarcastic ripostes. "I slept in
the car," said one hack. "I had to. I already checked out of my hotel in
Manchester."
But once Obama showed up, the sarcasm evaporated. There was nothing
remarkable about Obama's speech and subsequent Q&A session, except that he
delivered every line with the force and confidence of someone who's already
been president for years. Obama's shtick is to sell his future presidency as
one that would recast America as the good guy of the world, one that would
be guided by the principles of basic decency ("This isn't just about drawing
contrasts. It's about doing what's right"), openness ("Not talking [to other
countries] doesn't make us look tough. It makes us look arrogant") and a
vision that embraces the challenges of this century ("The task of the next
president is to convince the American people that global interdependence is
here to stay. Global trade is not going away. The Internet is not going
away"). His presentation is deliberately vague on most counts, but the
overall effect is augmented by his emphasis on easily remembered concrete
positions like his promise to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within
sixteen months.
But mostly, Obama is selling himself. When he talks about "showing a new
face to the world," it's not exactly a mystery that he's talking about
*his*face. In person, Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a
stark
contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of
power in this country.
Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping ambition
sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a rain cloud
the vengeful impatience that hovers over Rudy Giuliani, or that creepy
greediness for media attention that strikes one like an oar in the face in
the presence of Mitt Romney. To use a sports clichι, Obama acts like he's
been there before, and his handlers are aware enough of how well their
candidate is wearing his climb to power that they've consciously chosen to
contrast it with that of his rivals.
In particular, the Obama camp harps incessantly, without naming names, on
the sense of entitlement that infects Hillary Clinton's campaign persona.
Poor Hillary: While Obama glows like the chosen one, taking Kennedy-esque
flight on the wings of destiny, next to him Hillary sometimes comes off like
an angry drag queen, enraged that some other tramp has been allowed to
"Danke Schoen" in her Las Vegas. Obama sees this and isn't above pointing at
her Adam's apple. "I'm not running for president because I think this is
somehow owed to me," Obama says. And people believe it. In Portsmouth, the
same crowd that had to suffer through a two-and-a-half-hour wait sent Obama
back on the road with a standing ovation. "There's just something about
him," says one middle-aged gentleman. When I suggest that his comment was
vague, he shrugs. "Yeah, but it's *good* vague."
Of course, underneath the veneer of fresh-faced optimism that Obama is
pushing note that the word "idealism" isn't appropriate here, because
Obama isn't selling idealism so much as a kind of reinvigorated, feel-good
pragmatism there operates a massive, well-oiled political machine no less
ruthless and ambitious than that of his establishment rival, Hillary
Clinton. Obama has raised $80 million, and it would be a grievous mistake to
describe his candidacy as a grass-roots affair, particularly when he counts
among his bundlers many of the lobbyists and political-finance pros who
buttress the Clinton run.
Even a cursory glance at Obama's money men is enough to confirm that fact.
The list includes Wall Street hotshots from Lehman Brothers, Oppenheimer and
Co., and Citigroup, a smattering of Hollywood players and Native American
casino interests, representatives of big pharmaceuticals and the insurance
sector in short, all the major food groups of reviled corporate
influence-hunters.
Worse still, Obama's financial backing is reflected in some of his Senate
votes and campaign positions, including most notably his support for
expanding NAFTA to Peru, limiting the ability of injured workers and
consumers to sue for damages, and pouring federal funds into E85 corn-based
ethanol, an alternative fuel for which the market is dominated by the
Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland Company. More than once I heard Obama
give stirring speeches, only to mar them with plugs for ethanol.
Obama's massive war chest allows him to compete not merely in the areas of
personal charisma and "hope" but in the trench warfare of local
pavement-pounding staff. He boasts thirty-seven offices in Iowa, maintaining
a presence in towns with populations as low as 1,400.
In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three early-primary states, Obama
has trotted out endorsements from an impressive cast of local pols support
that came under fire when it was learned that many of the politicians had
received campaign contributions from Obama's cornball-titled political
action committee, the "Hopefund." But here's the funny thing: When the
Clinton campaign decided to take aim at Obama for "using his PAC in a manner
that appears to be inconsistent with the prevailing election laws," the
criticisms fell on deaf ears even among crusaders for campaign-finance
reform. "Obama is being held to a higher standard," says Craig Holman of
Public Citizen. "It's hard to criticize him as long as everyone else is
doing it."
Indeed, it's Hillary Clinton who, if not for Obama, would be the story of
historic change in this race, the first woman ever to make a serious run at
the Oval Office who has been left to carry the million-pound cross of all
the ugliest recent sins of the Democratic Party, dragging to Iowa her Iraq
War vote, the Clinton record on NAFTA, and a list of corporate sponsors that
could keep Bruce Reed and Al From hard all night long.
In what may turn out to be the final cruel irony in a career full of them,
Hillary, at the climactic moment of her political life, now sees herself
transformed into a symbol of the corrupt status quo. At multiple stops on
the campaign trail, I've heard Obama voters say they rejected Hillary
because she represents the "old-boys' network." The irony is doubly cruel
because the same cozy coalition of moneyed insiders that foisted waffling
yahoos like John Kerry on the party rank-and-file and urged Democrats toward
cynical moves like support for the Iraq War, all in the name of
"electability," now find their wagons circled around a candidate Hillary
who may be the least electable of the Democratic contenders. In a stunning
Zogby poll whose release coincided with Obama's recent charge to the top, a
survey of prospective voters showed that Hillary would lose to all the top
five Republicans in the election, while either Obama or John Edwards would
defeat or tie every single one.
As for Edwards, he too lurks as a crucial character in a possible Hillary
death drama, a passionate Cassius to Obama's coolly pragmatic Brutus. In
town hall after town hall, in the remotest corners of states like Iowa and
New Hampshire, Edwards casts Hillary as an elitist creature of political
privilege bought off by lobbyists and indistinguishable from George Bush,
charging audiences not to "trade corporate Republicans for corporate
Democrats." Edwards delivers this argument with a healthy and convincing
dose of class resentment he is flawlessly playing the part of the
small-town favorite son returned from the big city full of devastating tales
of aristocratic treachery. He leaves behind crowds that are jazzed and angry
and suddenly wanting no part of the Hillary-Evrιmondes in charge of "their"
party. But while Edwards is running the more revolutionary campaign, it's
Obama (whose "differentness" is more visible on TV) who's getting traction
as the candidate of "change."
All of which adds to the whiff of destiny that lately seems to surround
Obama. At the outset of the campaign season, he was treated as a
not-ready-for-prime-time sideshow, with media pundits all in one voice
bitching about his "rookie mistakes" and "lack of aggressiveness." But now
that he's got the numbers and the momentum, even the most hardened political
cynic has to ask why *not* this guy? Would it be such a terrible thing for
America to show that it's big enough to elect a black president? Wouldn't
that be something all by itself? The very fact that the public, mostly on
its own, has lifted Obama past an arrogant establishment consensus adds to
his appeal as a symbol of the idea that not everything in our politics is
rigged, that not everything that they tell us is impossible really is.
So maybe it's OK to let the grandiose things that an Obama presidency could
represent overwhelm the less-stirring reality i.e., Obama as more or less
a typical middle-of-the-road Democrat with a lot of money and a well-run
campaign. Maybe it's OK because it's not always about the candidates;
sometimes it's about us, what we want and what we want to believe. And if
Barack Obama can carry that burden for us, why not let him? Seriously, why
not? The happy ending doesn't *always* have to ring false.
(c)RealNetworks, Inc. All rights reserved.
(c)Copyright 2007 Rolling Stone
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.zazzle.com/TamarMag*
Tamar Mag Raine
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www.cafepress.com/tamarmag
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
----- Original Message ----
From: Kathy <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2008 9:42:03 AM
Subject: Re: Hey Guys!!!
Best of luck in your hip surgery, Mag! I'll be thinking of you - what date
is it scheduled for, exactly?
As for the Iowa caucuses, I was only surprised by John Edwards finishing
ahead of Hilary.
I think Obama can win this thing even though I still wish Al Gore would've
jumped into the ring. I think we need a younger man in office because it's
so draining and we certainly need fresh ideas. I think Bush has been the
worst president, but if you see pictures of him on his first inauguration
vs. pics of him now, the change is shocking. He certainly has aged.
I know, I know....I'm beating a dead horse as far as Al Gore is concerned.
*sigh* Hey, maybe if Obama wins the election, he can appoint him as the
head of the EPA. Now that would fit!
Kat
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Tamar Raine" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 11:50 AM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.c-palsy
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Hey Guys!!!
> huh? what, did i miss somethng...........yawning......what time is it?
> where's breakfast?
>
> Just kidding. I thought it interesting Obama got so many votes.
>
> ON ANOTHER TOPIS< i'll be having hip surgery the last week of january!
>
> Mag
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