5 posts tagged “election”

It's already being suggested that John McCain lifted his "cross in the dirt" moment - recounted at Rick Warren's Mega Church the other day -  from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago".

It would be a shame if he did. But I'm willing to allow that the experience could have happened and move on. Or even that McCain conflated Solzhenitsyn's experience with his own after reading "Gulag Archipelago." I really don't care. And I don't want to see the partisan wrangling over whether he lied or just "misremembered."

I think we've got more pressing concerns at this point. Among many other things, I want to know how he or Obama are going to handle Iraq (notice I didn't say "get us out of..." 'cause that's a pipe dream). I want to know how they're going to try and stem the tied of our collapsing banking system. I want to know what emphasis they're going to place on the monstrous rise of HIV (especially in black and gay communities). I want to know how they'll handle Iran, Israel, and Syria (to name a few). I want to know about their long range plans for a sane energy policy.

I've read several commentaries and a couple FriendFeed threads on the "controversial" New Yorker cover featuring Michelle "Angela Davis" and Barack "Osama Bin Laden" Obama (I won't bore you with a pic, it's everywhere). Try as I might, I can't get worked up about it. Perhaps because I'm old enough to remember real radicals? Even met a couple.

The Obamas are far from it. They are as about as upwardly mobile mainstream as it gets. Harvard, Hyde Park, big law firms, impressive political resumes. Remember?

And I think that's the point of the cover. It's so over the top as to be ridiculous.

I'm really trying here, but to say that this plays into the hands of virulent racists is beside the point. They're already virulent racists. This cover won't make them more racist.

As for what's being termed as "hipster racism" (or perhaps more accurately, "Hipster Smugness"), I'm familiar with the phenomenon. It's the coda of the post-ironic world. Everything is tired and passe. I get it. We're all rubes outside of New York.

But I don't get that from this cover, especially when it's juxtaposed against what I hear is one of the stronger themes of the article; namely, Barack Obama is a savvy political insider who cut his teeth on Chicago politics.

But perhaps I'm just not hip enough for the room.

So occasionally it has to be made apparent to me that without spin, the candidates are pretty much the same. It used to appall me. Now? Not so much. Which is not to say that there a not good choices and bad choices to be made in any election. I just take it all with a grain of salt.