Anytime the aspirations of Andrew Sullivan, George Will and Markos all congeal around the same Ivy league lawyer the rest of us have cause to pay attention. Is a new day truly about to dawn in America?
Let’s hope not.
No candidate reminds me more of the fraternity president now posing for posterity at the end of his shame-filled tenure. Put aside the unhappy circumstances that brought 43 to power and recall only that academic rigor, business acumen and personal courage played no part. Charm, we were told, 43 had in abundance. We all know now how that turned out.
America’s newest uniter is hardly the first man of faith America has sanctified when lost in the desert. With his impressive intellect and limitless charms, the transformational candidate is a vast improvement over 43, towers over the opposition field, and compares very favorably with the professional actor Americans last turned to for a reliable happy ending.
The cyber-cypher and the ‘the great communicator’ share important attributes. For all the talk the jelly-bean President was, for most Americans, an empty page upon which they could inscribe their favorite scenes from Death Valley Days and Father Knows Best. Today a similar sense of despair grips the land and the search is on for a new narrative allowing Americans to star as themselves. The transformational candidate has done the great communicator one better; using a razer-sharp mind and smoky, mellifluous voice to offer Americans the empty canvas while saying even less.
My own personal anti-epiphany occurred while watching the ‘sit-up and beg’ segment of the candidate’s visit to the Comedy Show months back. A regal flick of a digital finger had Jon Stewart licking the proffered hand. It was a frightening and edifying spectacle.
For the rest of the candidates, digital HDTV seems to have arrived unfairly early. Cameras veer in close to examine four-hundred dollar hair-cuts, smear-merchant spear-carriers and other assorted warts. Informed debate is rendered impossible by vapid talking heads and partisan hacks shrieking in concord. Thinking caps happily tossed aside in the cacaphony, the committed remove all cause and occasion to rethink their choices.
If all this puts you off, just remember the election is a mere 11 months away.
Markos is most definitely off the bus.
Influenced by me? I doubt it.
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I’ll be posting very infrequently here and more often at my blog: rattlesnakepoint
Happy New Year!
I hadn’t heard!
I haven’t heard.
Nice blog, kidneystones.
Congrats on the new blog, ‘stones. I went there, was led to the Hitchens essays, and the idea of his getting hot wax poured onto and ripped off his testicles and ass-crack was quite pleasing. He has surely earnly some purgatory time. I’d go be your house troll, but for some reason the Blogger comment pages show up as mostly a bunch of large empty boxes of what ought to be text. So there’s some good news back at you.
You’re way too exercised about Obama, by the way, and too confident about your ability to determine who is and ain’t a new model of the Frat Boy Pres. (He’s Nat King Cole Cool, to be sure, and you don’t get to be President of Harvard Law Review without learning how to charm. But he’s smart and intellectually curious and actually interested in making a better world, even if — like everyone else, including Chrid Dodd, Hillary, and my still-favorite Mr. Edwards — he’s doing what he thinks he has to do to be elected. I see in him the urge not to be a captive of the left — which would be so easy to happen due to his race — more than a Bill Clintonesque glee in quashing and subverting it. We’ll see how he governs. (Or, I think, most likely we still won’t, but it we do it will still be pretty damn good news, even if not the second coming of whoever your political hero is.)
Have fun with your snakes.