The Vaporware Candidate?
Robert Samuelson admits to having been impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. Impressed with his intelligence, his apparent willingness to rise above partisanship and a number of other things. He is not, however, impressed with Obama's current agenda as opposed to Obama's stirring rhetoric. He judges the agenda very harshly.
It's hard not to be dazzled by Barack Obama. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken.
As a journalist, I harbor serious doubt about each of the most likely nominees. But with Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, I feel that I'm dealing with known quantities. They've been in the public arena for years; their views, values and temperaments have received enormous scrutiny. By contrast, newcomer Obama is largely a stage presence defined mostly by his powerful rhetoric. The trouble, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views.
The subtext of Obama's campaign is that his own life narrative — to become the first African American president, a huge milestone in the nation's journey from slavery — can serve as a metaphor for other political stalemates. Great impasses can be broken with sufficient goodwill, intelligence and energy. "It's not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white," he says. Along with millions of others, I find this a powerful appeal.
But on inspection, the metaphor is a mirage. Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation's ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.
By Obama's own moral standards, Obama fails…..
Read it all, Samuelson points out that despite the rhetoric, Obama is really not offering any change, merely more of the same. A regular, unoriginal series of proposals that ignore the underlying issues that make those problems hard to solve in the first place. The promises of change and hope ignore the intractable issues that have led to the various impasses in the first place.
In the computer world, grandiose announcements of miraculous software that never materializes are known as vaporware. Is Obama a vaporware candidate? Samuelson seems to think the answer is a resounding yes.
By Yuri, Wednesday, 20 February , 2008 @ 9:44 am
IMHO what you call "hard problems" are due to the fact that population of this country has much more diverse opinions about pretty much everything compared, say, to Europe. You ask a simple question "is affordable healthcare a right that all people in the US are entitled to?" and you get a huge range of opinions, which results in politicians who hold representative opinions being elected (let’s not focus here on how corporate money are spent forming and biasing public opinion). Now the Clinton’s and Bush’es style of politics seems to be a trench war a la WWI. This pretty much leads to where we had been at since 1992 (and arguably earlier). The result is the same as in WWI - millions dead and the front lines do not move. This is got to change. I can not believe that this country in unable to find a middle ground, and hope very much that it does not need events like the Great Depression or WWII to do that (although Bush managed to divide the country even deeper then it was before 9/11). Case in point here is Obama’s health plan. Clinton here really tries to have it both ways: on one hand Obama is an "empty hope", but on the other his plan "does not go far enough". In truth it looks like his plan is a workable compromise between the sides - it does not require people to buy in and provides a path for simplification of the system. (I think we can all agree that the current system is too complex. Right now the successful doctor’s practices are not ones with better doctors, but ones with better clerical stuff that determines the percentage of claims that insurance companies deny. This and un-transparent and intentionally confusing coverage rules just have to go…)
By MikeO, Wednesday, 20 February , 2008 @ 11:20 am
Yuri,This country is deeply politically divided because it needs to be deeply politically divided because between people like me and people like you, there is no common ground.I do not accept the premises that it is the federal government’s business to finance health insurance or that, "This is got to change." and we need national unity to "progress" further toward collectivism.Grossly simplified, the federal government is here to provide for the common defense and to enforce the demarcation point where your rights end and mine begin to maximize individual freedom. Even when the earth is a cold cinder orbiting the brown dwarf remnant of Sol, I will never willingly cede one speck of the overlap between the rights I claim and the rights you claim no matter how many unsubstantiated talking points you glibly toss about corporate money’s biasing of public opinion; President Bush’s divisiveness; or health insurance that is too complex, too quick to deny claims, and intentionally confusing.
By martian, Wednesday, 20 February , 2008 @ 3:23 pm
(although Bush managed to divide the country even deeper then it was before 9/11)
Yuri, that is a mis-statement of fact so bald as to be ridiculous. President Bush did not divide this country. It was the Democrats and their deep visceral hatred of Bush, opposing everything he said or did - good, bad, or indifferent - that divided this nation as it is now. If you want to blame someone for the deep divide in this country, blame them.
I am 53 years old and I remember all the way back to the Kennedy years. Never before in my life have I seen members of either party spend so much vitriol on a president of the other party. Even Richard Nixon wasn’t attacked and disparaged by the Democrats the way President Bush has been. Jimmy Carter, as useless and mis-guided as he was and is, was never treated this badly by Republicans. Even that criminal sexual predator Slick Willie was treated better than George Bush has been.
Blame the Democrats, Yuri - that’s where the fault lies.
By Yuri, Wednesday, 20 February , 2008 @ 9:57 pm
I disagree. On 9/12 I was supporting the president. Pretty much everyone in the world, not just this country supported the president. On 9/12 NATO countries for the first time in the history of the alliance invoked the article that provides for support of an attacked member.And then I painfully watched how we strayed from the goal of fighting Al Qaida to build a phony case to go to Iraq, to erode the power of the Legislature, to erode civil liberties in this country (Gaius thinks I’m crazy to make parallels between G.W. policies and Soviet Union, but I stick to my position and I know more about USSR than any of you). That was what divided the country and squandered all the good will toward this country from abroad, not the Democrats… Not that I am particularly proud of their record for the last few years, it kinda stinks. But you can’t blame them for the division in my opinion…
By Mwalimu Daudi, Wednesday, 20 February , 2008 @ 10:52 pm
I guess this is Yuri’s version of Bush=Hitler. Only it’s Bush=Stalin. That will not fly in certain segments of the American Far Left who still revere Old Joe.
One problem with Yuri’s manic depressive theory - Bush will leave office in January 2009. His party got wiped out in November 2006. It was Democrats who tried to steal the Presidency in 2000 and 2004 through Mugabe-like voter fraud. Bush has no political prisoners. Bush has established no death camps. No government control of the news. Heckfire - the only ones being tried in kangaroo courts are Republicans like Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby. If Bush is a dictator, he is the first in history to spend almost all of his time in power getting oppressed by the "oppressed".
Consider also the fact that Democrats are the ones trying to destroy the Bill of Rights through gun control, restricting freedom of speech through regulation of the Internet and the "Fairness Doctrine", intimidation of broadcast networks, redistribution of wealth, fear and hatred of Christianity, suppression of scientific and inquiry by persecuting opponents of "global warming" theory and evolution. Yuri’s wacko theory about Bush does not hold water.
By martian, Thursday, 21 February , 2008 @ 9:55 am
"On 9/12 I was supporting the president. Pretty much everyone in the world, not just this country supported the president."
Yes, and on 9/13 the attacks by the Democrats began. They were small and subtle at first, but they were there. President Bush enjoyed exactly 48 hours in which every single thing he said or did was not criticized by the left.
Strayed from the goal of fighting Al Qaida? You’ve been listening to the very Democrat propaganda I was talking about again. We have never stopped fighting AQ since 2001. We are fighting them in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are fighting them (although less visibly in the media) in the Phillipines, Africa, and many other places around the world.
I’ve hesitated to say this before, Yuri, but maybe you should just go back and live in Russia. I’m sure Vlad Putin would welcome someone with your ideals.