Just two days away from Super Tuesday, it looks like things are going to get very very close. On Saturday, Steven Hill wrote a very interesting piece in the Washington Post about how Super Tuesday and the way the primaries work are actually not working. The way the present system is set up, Hillary is at a definite advantage to Obama.
The past two days, I have run into two former colleagues who both expressed their desire for Hillary to be president (Obama was their second choice). I was shocked, almost as shocked as the man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he encounterd the lunatic who had still not heard that God was dead. Doesn’t anyone remember the 90s?
As one of its reasons for endorsing Obama today, the Los Angeles Times the pitfalls of another Clinton:
By contrast, Clinton’s return to the White House that she occupied for eight years as first lady would resurrect some of the triumph and argument of that era. Yes, Bill Clinton’s presidency was a period of growth and opportunity, and Democrats are justly nostalgic for it. But it also was a time of withering political fire, as the former president’s recent comments on the campaign trail reminded the nation. Hillary Clinton’s election also would drag into a third decade the post-Reagan political duel between two families, the Bushes and the Clintons. Obama is correct: It is time to turn the page.
What is interesting is how people really believe the false spin, and the greatest falsity in this election is that somehow Hillary, the candidate with the least amount of years in elected office, has the most experience and is the most prepared.
Could someone please tell me in detail what her experience was? And being first lady is not the answer. If that were the case, I think we should all vote for Laura Bush in 8 years. Her and/or Bill really need to finally be open with the American people and let us know what she did do at the White House and why, at the time, we were not informed of such.
Of course, avoiding a dynasty is not the only reason to vote for Obama, and the L.A. Times eloquently makes that argument:
An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world, nor could any political experience surpass Obama’s life story in preparing a president to understand the American character. His candidacy offers Democrats the best hope of leading America into the future, and gives Californians the opportunity to cast their most exciting and consequential ballot in a generation.
In the language of metaphor, Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something that the nation has been missing far too long — a sense of aspiration.
Grave Error 
Yes We Can!
LOLOLOLOLOLOL … Score, leave it to the L.A. Times to pull the race card right up front.
If simply putting an ethnic looking face in the White House garners America a cessation from “anti-American sentiment”; then I win on both counts:
America has no character as a nation, and humanity is summarily plebeian to the most disturbing degree.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL …. mmmmmmmmmmm, hominids, can you taste the hypocrisy, the mendacity, the outright and overt sublime beauty of absurdity? Can you? Take it all in, tell me, what’s it taste like?
The fact of the matter is that Obama’s face is not a Clinton’s or a Bush’s face, and those faces represents American hypocrisy. Everyone else is part of the club, including McCain and Romney who are especially part of the club.
Teo,
Thanks for the video.
So then you are admitting the fact that as a nation, a singular political representative quantifies and qualifies the character of the nation?
If so, then the character of America as a nation is merely the vapors and mist of a prevalent appearance. That doesn’t strike you as at least moderately absurd?
Let’s not, in any form, make Obama’s contribution a matter of his mind. No, let us play to the most base assumption that simply a change of race/ethnicity in a political position is the more “meaningful”.
But then, that is exactly the meaning elicited by the L.A. Times piece, (using “piece” in both known contexts here.)
I see your point, and it’s taken. In that vain, I would disagree with the LA Times, but I think that Obama’s distinction, at least in foreigners’ eyes, is not his race but his name and what he says. He is NOT a Bush, he is NOT a Clinton, he is NOT a McCain and he is NOT a Romney — all part of the establishment.
His message is not about his race, it is about wanting to do things differently and fresh. Just saying it and getting people to believe that it is possible is a huge step away from the Clinton’s and the Bush’s out there.
I have serious doubts he can maintain that message clearly and with precision into a Presidential slot … and I’m not certain who should be responsible; the media or the citizenry?
Even more serious doubts exist that although he represents a needed changing of the old “blackguard politics” …. he will be able to be effective against a government of just that type of poltician; who are very likely to take open offense to his victory.
Hopefully, I am shown to be completely in error for my thinking.
Isn’t that the disgusting, shameful catch 22? In other words, this notion that we need “just that type of politician” to deal with “just that type of politicians” in Washington.
I think that Obama’s question will be whether, if he wins the ticket, he can sustain the change argument over the long months ahead without people getting bored of it.
I think cugino, that is where we have to start, (pipe dream), looking at the word politician, both as the sema and denotata it is and has become.
I think Ronald Reagan’s take on it is philosophically correct:
“Politics is the second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
Maybe that’s the problem of the first order?