obama's "music" is as bland and unconvincing as Creed's. i think it was jon stewart who said of Creed: "making CDs for people who like to buy stuff". or something like that.

kinda how i feel about obama.

i'm not buying the 'music' he's selling. because the problem isn't that "we" are "divided". that's a "problem" that obama has invented so that he can sell us the "solution". nothing more than snake oil and inert 'tonics' if you ask me.

If you listen carefully you can tell the buttons he is trying to push, but unlike many other politicians’ speeches of the past few years, you don’t feel as if the speech was written off of the latest poll (although its contents were almost certainly tested).

That's one of the more unfortunate assumptions of our politics.

Being able to relate to people, and know what people really value, isn't just a politcal skill. It's called being human. Most people figure these things out to a varying degree in ordinary life, from dealing with family, coworkers, the community, and so on.

Not everyone is a gifted speaker or has Obama's resume and life experiences of course. But i do think Obama is actually more like most ordinary people than most politicians, in that he hasn't become so accustomed to power brokering, he can still remember what it's like to relate to ordinary folks. Especially becasue he comes out of grass roots community work, and there you have to be real.

That's one of the great ironies (tragedies?) of the beltway pundit class and other pols take on Obama. They think he's some kind of "magical negro" or "invisible man" or "incredibly talented politician" as Bill would say.

Sure, he's talented. And sure people like that he's not in everybody's face all the time like Sharpton. No duh.

But he's also just like my uncle in Ohio, who is just a genuinely nice, stand up, guy. Everybody likes him. He's white, knows just about all white people, but never had a racist bone in his body and has mixed relatives. He's a Democrat, a lifelong Union leader, Christinan but not really practicing, but not a hardliner partisan in any way. He's a pragmatist and all around decent person.

Or my aunt, who is another good person, very Christian, but also a pragmatist, and disillusioned with mixing politics and religion, and looking for a good practical leader. And she's also just a real nice person, who cares about many of the same issues as I do.

There are those people in the real world. Plenty of them. But they seem utterly lacking in politics.

Just watching the news the other night covering the Obama victory, it struck me how even the pundits on the same broadcast, were all kind of repeating each other in the echo chamber while taking petty little shots at each other. Which we mostly all do I guess, but it seems especially ramapant in politcs and the MSM, where it's all about power brokering, leverage, and undercutting each other.

There are plenty of exceptionally good stand up people in the real world. Any functional business, community, or family has them keeping things together and on course.

I watched a great interview with Sy Hersh the other day, where he got into a discussion on "space" in the New Yorker, and how he always needed more for his insider scoops and analysis. I was thinking how great Sy Hersh is, and how for his age it's amazing how he's still so incredibly prolific and probably the best investigative writer around, with truly meaningful and relevant news and analysis.

I was also thinking how swell the Internet is, with unlimited virtual space.

In Concord today, the crowd was generally local; middle and upper-middle class folks who actually looked like the people you may see browsing the aisles of your local Borders or grabbing a sandwich at the Panera just off Route 93 (where I sit as I write this).

Hey Ken. You're in my neck of the woods. I live about 5 miles away from that Borders and Panera, and am in at least one of them most weekends with a black iced coffee and a laptop.

Mr Baer's observations on Obama, as well as Obama's rhetoric itself, seems a throw-back to Clintonism. I marvel that after seven years of the divide-and-conquer Bush approach and eight years of the Republican witch hunt against Clinton, people still have an appetite for this kind of pablum. A friend pointed out the irony that the Southern White male is now the most progressive choice for president. But it's true. The media loves Obama. So what? The people have to live with the consequences of the vote.
And Mr Baer's observation about Obama explicitly linking "his campaign into the sweep of American life. That’s what Reagan did; it’s what Bill Clinton did; and it’s even what George W. Bush did. In short, it’s what presidents do." seems to me a ringing endorsement of two incredibly destructive Republican presidencies, and one that failed to stick up for Democratic principles.
This is more of the horse-race campaign coverage that degrades American political culture and gives us candidates that all essentially offer the same.
I'm looking for a real change and a candidate who isn't naive enough to think those with a monopoly of power are going to give up for a handful of "music."

That new speech he has recently unveiled in which we get the Obama take on American history really bothers me because I think it is revisionist history at it's worst.

Hope was the catalyst for, and got us through the American Revolution??

As well as for The Civil War, the Great Depression, defeat of fascism, and the struggle for Civil Rights?

Just bad, bad history.

In each case it was the moral test of the age.It was about facing reality at the time,determining that no further compromise or negotiation could achieve that which was necessary and standing firm and fighting for principle. Recognizing that it was a moral test.

When people accept that there is a moral test involved in a great struggle that is a movement. He just trashes the significance of the historic events he enumerates and minimizes the sacrifice of those who fought and died for more than "hope".

It is the part of his speech where I cringe every time I hear it - because it is so fundamentally intellectually lazy.

Hope was an ingredient, but it wasn't the be all end all he makes those instances out to be.

Sorry, I'm just not buying the Obamania and all this vague talk about unity and hope. Why is it when I listen to him I'm left scratching my head as to what his description of the problem facing the US is? Likewise, I'm left wondering what he proposes as the cure.
Edwards says clearly that corporate power has corrupted too much of American life. He says the widening income gap is a fundamental problem.
I notice that Edwards has become an increasingly inconvenient candidate for the media. After all, Hilary is a story in herself. The first serious black candidate is a story in himself - a man whose background curiously sidesteps the wider legacy of black America. But he's the media's choice. I know he is the media's choice because before I ever knew who he was, I had seen a picture of him in the offices of a big time New York magazine editor. And Edwards? Well, Edwards is proposing the kind of sweeping, substantive change that hints at a narrative the media and tastemakers, well, they might not be capable of covering it objectively.
Edwards close association with labor means the guys who wear mustaches and work with their hands will end up with more power. And where would that leave the class of people with a historical choice in setting the presidential agenda?
Talk about hope. I can't think of any more hopeful America than one in which the white collar guy doesn't feel vaguely embarrassed in the company of the blue collar guy who is obviously getting hosed down in the system. Talk about hope: I can't think of any more hopeful America than one where the blue collar people, and all people, are paid enough to allow them to live respectable lives. What did Cicero say? "Freedom is participation power"? How about an America where people from every background and color can look each other in the eye. But as Edwards says rightly, those holding the power aren't going to give up lightly. And going at them with hope and unity will get you something like the DLC, which presided over the Democratic Party not just when the middle class was dismantled but the core values of the Democratic Party were. Hope?...Hmpf...

Obama's not saying these things because they are his intellectual academic analysis of the problems of American society; he's saying them to get elected. The polling I have read indicates that he is the candidate most favored by Republicans. Given his obvious strengths with independents as well, he would be well positioned to chip away at small but vital edges Republicans used to hold.

That said, this is a primary and I am not focusing on his "electability" but rather on advancing my man, fierce John Edwards, to the nomination. But Obama would be a fine candidate and I'll take a Republican to the mat for him.

Martin Luther King:

“Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

Obama so disappointed me when he called Edwards naive for saying we can fight to reduce the power of special interest groups that threaten our democracy, then mischaracterized John Edwards’ passionate truth telling and call for constructive change as some sort of haphazard or destructive anger.

Edwards’s approach seems an honest one. Edwards has mobilized people by telling it like it is, acknowledging their legitimate frustration, and then directed those frustrations toward the main problems. There is nothing the special interests fear more than representatives and a president with a decisive mandate for constructive change.

Obama is almost doing the same thing as Edwards, but it also seems Obama is cleverly playing every side and assuring the status quo powers that he won’t buck the system too much. One could wonder if Obama is trying to get people going enough to vote for him, but also trying to put a cork on the power of a movement that could shake up the status quo.

Taking his cues from the MSM who have decided to try and discredit Edwards by calling him “angry,” Obama is now spending a lot of time stressing that “there is too much anger” in Washington, etc. (anger is the term the MSM media has attached to Edwards when they aren’t busy ignoring the fact that he came in second in Iowa, just as they attached “crazy” to Ross Perot and ignored him; just as they attached “compassionate conservative” to Bush’s name and WMD to Saddam’s name.) Anger is not a bad thing; it’s normal when there is injustice. Anger is only a bad thing when it is not harnessed in a constructive way.

And if the MSM implies something like frustration or anger is bad, those in the public who outsource their thinking to the MSM will promptly assume it is bad, too. So Obama’s making a good bet to ride the media deception at the expense of the truth. But it makes me ill that Obama seems to be taking part in that manipulation, or that he’d even want to win at the expense of the truth. I’d be more likely to vote for him if he convinced me he could do a better job than Edwards at creating change.

Fighting groups in Washington that would compromise our democracy is not going to hurt us, but deceit and allowing the media and others to shame us into accepting their self-serving definition of political correctness will. Time will tell.

This

old flannel banners line the walls

is a bit silly. It is obvious that the "old flannel banners" function as noise dampeners, and the older and more tattered that they are, the better that they work.

Again: none of these candidates are saviours, any of these candidates could leave us betrayed and disappointed in 2011.

The lists of policy positions that may be available on some website is not compelling if you've at all studied American history: Presidents are just as likely to do the opposite of what their platforms and campaign promises suggest. Sometimes that's bad and sometimes that's good (early FDR), the essence of it lies with the President and his/her advisors and their reading of the historical moment and what needs to be done.

So character does matter ... but in an age of hi-tech media smog, we're still left making our own guesses and judgements on character, just as we were in the previous ages of low-tech media partisanship and ignorance. (Check out what partisans said for and against Jackson, or Lincoln, for example.)

Both Obama and Edwards are media-savvy, well-spoken, highly ambitious self-made men ... and the Clintons were much like that too, as they rose in eighties ... their choices in rhetoric and advisors and policy positions are the clues they leave us to guess at their characters.

And here we should also mention that whichever one we end of electing (cross your fingers and work like hell!) will be selecting from approximately the same pool of advisors and potential Cabinet members and on down to potential postmasters. They will ahve to be working with the same cast of (poor) characters in Congress and in the media.

So to set up one as being SO GREAT and another as being SO BAD is the essence of my antipathy to kozmik and the other tendentious partisans.

Do we have to make a choice? Yes, if you're a New Hampshire voter or if you're lucky enough to be in the twenty-odd states with early primaries , you probably should make a choice. (The other half of the country, we should remain skeptical and somewhat neutral, we don't get a choice and we need to provide a counterbalance to the media hype surrounding the frontrunners.)

None of the top 3 Dems is as serious about ending imperialism in American foreign and military policy as I would like to see. I do trust that any of them would be marginally better than any Republican, at least in terms of possible Supreme Court appointments and in the sense "they might be willing to listen to us more radical leftists," while the Repubs will surely shut us out.

Having said all that, for the moment my guess is that the power of big corporations is a more serious problem than a "lack of unity" -- if we had all united behind Bush's war, as that was the unity being offered to us in 2002-4, would we all be happy and safe now ??? -- and my further guess is that Edwards is marginally less likely to disappoint us in actually working for the goals he professes to uphold. I absolutely don't like a Democrat who promises to have a Republican in his cabinet, why, which one, what for? What progressive policies will have to be sacrificed to THAT campaign promise?

Could I be wrong? Sure ! That's why all the Obama hype on this thread fails to move me, the commenters' sense of conviction and righteousness in their choice is a reason to reject their arguments, not a reason to accept them.