Here's the New York Times' artfully-constructed redaction of Obama's recent headlong rightward charge, and the base's response. It's a thing of beauty, really -- the article, I mean, not the Obama campaign. The Times' capacity to disguise a political tract as a piece of bland, factual news reportage has got to be admired. I've snipped a good deal of flesh from the piece, the better to reveal its elegant bone structure:
Obama Supporters on the Far Left Cry FoulAnd the piece closes with that elegiac dying fall. The only kind of person who'd object to Obama's new trajectory would be an obviously crazy lady(*) like the evocatively-named Shade -- a "far left" "factionalist", a person who isn't "pragmatic," a "cranky" "idealist", the sort of "complainer" who "cries foul," very likely a Naderite (horror of horrors) and, needless to say, a "purist".PORTLAND, Ore. — In the breathless weeks before the Oregon presidential primary in May, Martha Shade did what thousands of other people here did: she registered as a Democrat so she could vote for Senator Barack Obama.
Now, however... Ms. Shade said she planned to switch back to the Green Party.
“I’m disgusted with him,” said Ms. Shade, an artist. “I can’t even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this ‘audacity of hope’ stuff, it’s blah, blah, blah...."
While alarm may be spreading among... left-wing bloggers or purists.... There is also a wide streak of pragmatism.... in a party long vexed by factionalism.
“We’re frustrated by it, but we understand,” said Mollie Ruskin, 22... “He’s doing it so he can get into office and do the things he believes in.”
Nate Gulley, 23... said... “It’s self-evident that he’s a different kind of candidate.”
David Sirota, a liberal political analyst and author, [said] “I don’t think there’s disillusion.... He is a transformative politician, but he is still a politician.”
... Many Obama supporters said the most vocal complaining... was largely relegated to liberal bloggers and people who might otherwise support Ralph Nader... or Dennis J. Kucinich....
Kari Chisholm, who runs a blog, blueoregon.com, and does Internet strategy for Democratic candidates. “They believe their ideology is the only idealism and Obama’s is very mainstream. I’m not surprised they’re getting a little cranky. They’ve always been kind of cranky.”...
“I don’t think the test on him is in an explicitly narrow set of check boxes that have to get filled,” said Kevin Looper, executive director of Our Oregon, a liberal advocacy group. “I think it’s about do his campaign and his message embody serious changes for the direction of the country?”
Rhys Warburton, a 25-year-old Brooklyn resident... said... “It doesn’t make the others any better or more attractive to vote for.”
... “Seventy-five thousand people do not attend political rallies unless something truly magical is happening,” Bob Blanchard wrote....
“When [sc. 'where'? -- MJS] are these people going to go, anyway?” Mr. Blanchard said of left-wing critics...
Ms. Shade, the Green-turned-Democrat-returned-Green voter, spoke about Mr. Obama while leaning out her second-floor apartment window, where she has placed homemade signs urging the impeachment of President Bush. Others say “Free Gaza” and “Occupation is Terrorism.” She said twice that the American political system was “rotten.”
“You realize,” Ms. Shade said, her voice fading with resignation, “that you’re talking to somebody who’s pretty far out of the mainstream.”
With enemies like Shade and her fellow loons, who needs friends -- or even reasons? It's "self-evident" that Obama is "different". Large attendance at a rally obviously shows he's "magical." He "embodies" everything that's good. He's not as bad as McCain -- in fact, he would have overtake and pass McCain in his rightward journey before young Mr Warburton would reconsider.
And oh yes, he's "transformative," the sage David Sirota tells us.
This last claim particularly interests me. I'm not sure what Sirota means by it, or why he believes it. The only transformation I've seen Obama perform is the transformation of thousands of bright, good-hearted young people into incoherent, babbling zombies.
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(*) Irony alert. I personally agree with everything Shade and her stickers say.
Comments (9)
“Seventy-five thousand people do not attend political rallies unless something truly magical is happening,” Bob Blanchard wrote....
This is probably one of the sacariest things about Obama. He has a large group of devoted supporters who blindly follow. How is this a good thing? Just because you have the numbers doesn't mean you are right. In fact I find quite the opposite. When has it ever been of the general opinion that a mob is always right? Or really, ever right? The more we get into this campaign, the more he frightens me. I'm at a loss as who to vote for, but I'm pretty sure I cannot bring myself to vote for him....I guess it will be green for me, along with all the other left-wing purist bloggers.
Posted by Drucilla | July 14, 2008 2:11 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 14:11
I've been asking all my pro-Gip-bama friends what they are thinking as he sticks a couple new blades in their backs every day.
The _universal_ answer?
"I haven't been listening to all that."
Given the audiological formulation, I'm pretty sure this is the putrid handiwork of Air America, which switched over into total Tass mode at the very instant of Killary's concession, and of course won't move the lever again until 2012.
Posted by Michael Dawson | July 14, 2008 2:16 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 14:16
What's up with the "mob" talk, Dru? The "mob" shattered Jim Crow and helped scare the overclass away from nuking Hanoi. In the process, it also shocked the culture part-way out of its Cold War coma.
We need a lot more "mobs."
Posted by Michael Dawson | July 14, 2008 2:22 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 14:22
I don't know from purity, but I listened to the Green convention candidates McKinney and Clemente and thought they had politics that I could vote for without getting the dry heaves. The Greens are trying to save capitalism from itself, which seems to me a hopeless exercise, but at least they're trying something outside of party line purity- which is all the O'Bomber forces have. Witness their carrying on about the New Yorker cover today. I suspect most people in this country barely pay any attention to the New Yorker until it's brought to their attention. Sound and fury etc.
Posted by Michael Hureaux | July 14, 2008 2:42 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 14:42
Jesus God, I watch too many zombie movies if I can immediatley identify that still as being from Shaun Of The Dead
Posted by anonymous | July 14, 2008 3:46 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 15:46
Shaun of the Dead or the last Yearly Ko$ meeting? So difficult to tell...
Posted by AlanSmithee | July 14, 2008 3:59 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 15:59
"We need a lot more "mobs."
perfect motto
for bastille day
as an unreconstructed or at least mal reconstructed
red guard of the easy chair
the zombo following seems peachy to me
but to make
"wild in the streets "
to act apon convictions like
"every one over 40 is a cookable duck"
ahhh
i fear t'ain't in their hard wires
Posted by op | July 14, 2008 4:09 PM
Posted on July 14, 2008 16:09
Drucilla writes:
“Seventy-five thousand people do not attend political rallies unless something truly magical is happening,” Bob Blanchard wrote....
This is probably one of the sacariest things about Obama. He has a large group of devoted supporters who blindly follow. How is this a good thing? Just because you have the numbers doesn't mean you are right. In fact I find quite the opposite. When has it ever been of the general opinion that a mob is always right? Or really, ever right? The more we get into this campaign, the more he frightens me. I'm at a loss as who to vote for, but I'm pretty sure I cannot bring myself to vote for him....I guess it will be green for me, along with all the other left-wing purist bloggers.
True, to a point. Let's not forget that in the fall of '02, when an antiwar mobe in DC drew well over a quarter of a million people, this very same New York Times tried to tell the rest of the country that only ten thousand showed up and received a sound ass-paddling, barraged with email and photos of the crowd that day from people who did the thankless job of peaceably assembling to protest the direction the country was taking and were royally fed up with being so flagrantly lied about in the media, forcing the Times to run a "correction" regarding the attendance at the Sept. 26 peace mobe.
I, myself, find myself eagerly wishing for mobs, like the ones in Chicago in '68, in DC in '70, or in Seattle in '99.
My DW – bless her – organized against the Vietnam war at GWU (class of '71), and complained often about all the mobs of scruffy, hairy, sloppy hippies'n'yippies coming around to all her group's nice clean liberal peace rallies. She also complains about the spontaneous protests and convergences in DC just after Kent State because, she claims, there was too much gratuitous destruction and disorganization – but I think she was just pissed off about thousands and thousands of people deciding the thing to do about Kent State was to go to DC and raise some hell about it, without official organizers or a telephone tree or a parade permit, nor controllable by a committee of white middle-class GWU kids.
Posted by Mike Flugennock | July 15, 2008 12:34 AM
Posted on July 15, 2008 00:34
Michael H. wrote:
...The Greens are trying to save capitalism from itself, which seems to me a hopeless exercise, but at least they're trying something outside of party line purity- which is all the O'Bomber forces have...
This reminds me. I've noticed recently an upsurge in Blogland of the bait-and-switch where it's wrong to vote Green because they're too far out AND A MINUTE LATER it's wrong to vote Green because they're not far out enough. Reverse. Rinse. Repeat.
Feh.
Posted by ms_xeno | July 15, 2008 2:19 PM
Posted on July 15, 2008 14:19