It’s funny, I was thinking more or less this, sorta subconsciously when I heard that great speech. It was under the surface, but it was there:
am I now the only person left on the planet who finds Barack Obama a little bit dull? Every time I listen to him, I start off thinking I’m about to wet my pants, but a minute-and-a-half later find my mind wandering, asking itself things like: ‘What does “the challenge of hope” mean?’
Yet I turn and look around and everyone is shouting and screaming. Obama chants: ‘Something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it’ and there’s a collective swoon from grown pundits and hardened reporters, all of them tearing off their shirts and pleading for Obama to sign their chests with indelible marker pen.
[read more from the Guardian …]
He might be inspiring, but he doesn’t really say anything, does he? He just says it really well. More from Armando Iannucci:
It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse.’
Which I guess is Hillary Clinton’s point about him.
[heh funny, one has to be careful writing about Obama & Clinton. First black man; first woman running for pres … tricky].
So glad you posted that Hugh! I find myself wanting desperately to believe in Obama the way I believed Robert Kennedy might have changed America, but after all this exposure, I still have no idea where he stands on issues and what his presidency would man to the world. My reasons for preferring him over Hillary is primarily optics: what would it look like to the rest of the world when this once great country preaching the virtues of openness and democracy ends up with father and son presidents, followed by a husband and wife! We wouldn’t believe it possible in any other country.
yeah that side of things is pretty bad. and my god, is hillary clinton HATED in parts of the US. so a Clinton presidency will revitalize the right in a really worrying way.
as for obama, i like him cause of this podcast:
http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/
I was talking to Mira just yesterday about this. He’s inspiring but it’s unclear what the inspiration is about other than good feelings. Obama would make a great leader of some kind of niche movement (Like say Greenpeace, Civil Rights, PETA or any kind of religion), but I can’t help feeling like he might be kind of stupid if he got elected. What will he do when bad thigns happen, read the reports, or make charming speaches on TV that keep everyone’s spirits high as 4,8,100 more years of war and destitution face the U.S.
For all his cheezy looks and Smilerness, I’m hoping Edwards comes out on top. His message is really clear and I agree completely “corporations are running our economy and they are running are government. That sucks ass and I’m mad as hell, lets do something about those assholes!”. The Dem ticket should have been reversed in 2004.