Politics of Dopes: Barack Obama, Empty Suit by Ted Rall

[jackson_dem]

I was at the Edwards forum and found two great articles on Obama.

Barack Obama's supporters compare him to John Kennedy, another great orator whose youth and short political resume opened him to complaints that he didn't have enough experience to be president. But there's no comparison. JFK served two terms in the House and won two terms in the Senate before asking us not to ask what he could do for us. If Obama wins, he will only have had four years in Congress, next to Kennedy's fourteen. (Hillary Clinton, running as a grizzled veteran, would have eight.)

Ted Kennedy is a better analogy. At the start of his 1980 Democratic primary challenge to incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Kennedy was riding high in the polls. But when Roger Mudd of CBS News asked him why he wanted to be president, he fumbled. "Kennedy's problem," Paul Waldman wrote in The American Prospect in July 2007, "was not that he didn't have a good reason to run--he had plenty of them." His problem was the way he thought about that run. He thought about issues, he thought about the weaknesses of the president he was trying to supplant, he thought about the programs he wanted to institute. What he didn't construct was a story that explained his candidacy to voters and offered a narrative structure for journalists to use when reporting on him."

Successful presidential contenders, Waldman argues persuasively, answer Mudd's classic question with a three-part story. First, the candidate "describes the state of the country and its government, clearly defining what is wrong." Next comes "the place the candidate wants to take us, the better day being promised." Then he tells us why he's the person who can get us there.

Waldman is having a good week. Barack Obama, he predicted a full six months ago, had the best three-part campaign narrative of the major contenders. America's biggest problem, Obama says, is "partisan bickering," which he traces to the lingering ideological rifts of the 1960s protest era. His biracial heritage gives white voters a chance to prove they're not racist. As a Gen Xer, he says he's the guy to move us past the Boomers' battles.

more at the link: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12155

[robbedvoter]

1. "ending partisanship" - I can't believe self-proclaimed progressives go for this

Daschle/Gephardt ideal!