PASSIONS: Why is this election so different?

Great Debates
21

I don’t think so, really, assuming you’re of the more “liberal” sort. But any social issue you care to name (abortion, gay marriage, birth control, creationism in schools, whatever) is a dead cause and are effectively removed from the purview of national politics except as a circus act. Vote for 50 Republicans in a row, I don’t care what anyone says, the zeitgeist on most of these issues passed long ago (the gay issue has been evolving over the previous 15 years or so).

Re: Single payer health care (or whatever you like) as a social issue, this is something to consider. And it was rejected by the establishment decades ago. Perhaps the time has come where major industires want it because it’s just plain good business and someday we’ll be more like Canada or something, but again, it won’t matter who you vote for.

Sure. If one is constantly shocked at some fact of the world it’s because one’s model doesn’t explain the fact. There’s an incongruity. So the model has to change.

I’m looking around and I don’t see much evidence that, thanks to Obama, a whole bunch of people are organizing or doing any sort of actual grass roots work to effect change outside the normal (and woefully inadequate) means. Unless you mean like, campaigning for Obama or something. That’s sorta what I was talking about.

Incidentally, most of the people organizing lately have been clubbed and arrested for failing to show due deference to authority. Expect a lot more of this, again, no matter who’s elected.

22

This called an opinion.

Perhaps you have a model that generates a testable hypothesis of why this is so, despite the fact that millions of people evidently disagree.

You seem to be shocked that so many people are being taken in by Obama. Perhaps you will consider adjusting your model.

23

There are so many “answers” as to why this election is different with regards to the level of passion.

There’s race, the promise of making history, being so completely fed up with the past 8 years, change, hope, wanting to win, completing the task at hand, etc…(and those reasons go for both sides).

I can only definitively speak of my own reasons why I’m more involved in this campaign than any other campaign previously.

My story starts with Hurricane Katrina. Here, you had a city that’s uniquely American that got hit with a force of nature that turned it into a third-world country overnight. I wondered what the difference would be if Detroit were hit by the same storm, and the answer I came up was “not a damned thing”. The government didn’t respond to the situation, which left an impression. I wanted to go down and help. I didn’t. I had a 9-5 job working for a pizzeria, and we all know that 9-5 jobs like that pay enough to keep you there, but not enough to take a leave and go do something. I didn’t go.

That’s my life’s biggest regret.

Fast forward to the present (ish) day. I was doing an internship for technical support for tax software in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The internship ended and they didn’t retain me because they had enough people. So I became unemployed, until one day.

I remember this day pretty clearly.

I woke up pretty late, around 12 or so. My girlfriend was already at work, so I roll out of bed and head over to the computer. The Democratic primaries were going on, and I knew about Senators Clinton, Kucinich, and Edwards, but outside of the speech in 2004, I didn’t know much about Senator Obama, who was the front runner at the time. So I sat down and did some research. I saw that Senator Obama famously has “hope” and “change” as a couple of his big messages, but the message that doesn’t get as much play is “personal responsibility”. Kennedy famously said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and Senator Obama was asking us to do the same thing. The relationship we have with the government isn’t unlike any of our other relationships where if something goes sour, you don’t just quibble and point your finger at the other party and tell them that they’re the blame. You first have to point the finger at yourself and ask where you haven’t held up your end of the bargain. After that, then you can engage the other party. At this point, I loved what I was reading and realized it was 1:30 and I hadn’t even taken a shower, let alone looked for a job. So I hop over to Monster.com and put in my zip code. The first result that popped up was an application to work in the “Obama Fellowship” where people volunteered in 26 battleground states for 6 weeks to lay the ground work for the campaign staff.

I sat there, looking at the monitor for a second, sensing that this was an opportunity to not let another regret get in my life. If I could actively go out there and do everything in my limited power to help others not have the same regret and get involved. So I applied and soon got a call to get in and start helping before the program even started. Eventually the campaign asked if I wanted to stay as paid staff, which I happily accepted. I work 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and I love every second of it.

There’s another part, though.

When I was little, my dad would say “My generation stopped a war, what has yours done?” I’d say “Dad, I’m 12. What do you want me to do? There isn’t blood in the streets or anything.” I realize what he was saying. He was saying the same thing that Kennedy said and the same thing that Barack said. He wanted me to see what I had done in the Big Picture. This became evident when we had our march in Hart Plaza a week back. My dad was in those original civil rights marches, and here I was, continuing what he was doing back in the day. I’m working my ass off to make a difference and promote change, but most importantly, to bring other people into the mix.

It’s not about a candidate, it’s about a message. It’s also about people that aren’t engaged with the process to get in and get engaged and see what they can do to make themselves the solution to the problems. It’s all summed up in “Be the Change”, one of the campaign slogans.

24

I concur. Heck, I left during the 2004 election because I didn’t have a long enough snorkel to wade through all the bulldookey around here.

Sadly true. Every political leader is The Worst Ever until the next one.

Probably also true, although given Bush’s voter bribes, er, I mean tax cuts in the face of vastly increased government spending, raising taxes may well be a necessity for the next president of either political ilk. Seriously, who are these people who think that wars come free?

Despite all my agreement with the above, however, I disagree with the implication (intended or otherwise) that this board is inherently liberal. There’s a pretty even amount of the aforementioned bulldookey coming from both sides; it’s just that the extreme right side of the board are much better at complaining about bias. (See also: “the liberal media”).

And I happen to believe that, Obama or McCain, America will get the government it deserves. God help it.

25

Ok, point them out. As I said, I haven’t heard them. Doesn’t mean I won’t acknowledge them if they’re there.

26

Look at FactCheck.org. There are a few.

The one that I know off the top of my head is that McCain didn’t take $2 million from Big Oil in campaign contributions. It was $1.3 million.

27

Thanks, Oy!. I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t seen this site before. Great stuff, I’ll be digging.

28

There. That’s what I’m talking about. You “get” it. :slight_smile: We can’t all participate in exactly the same way or to the same degree, but we can all do something. That’s the message: Do something.

29

“Hope” and “change” are very important as well. By far, the most important part of what Senator Obama wants to impress upon the American people is that they have to be the change they want. Government becomes a reflection of the people that allow it to exist and government changes when the people change.

30

Yes, because now I have to get all Heinleinian on your asses. As the late great pointed out, you can take perfectly good apples and flour, and turn them into absolute junk, worth nothing, by the wrong application of your labor. That’s just doing something. Or, you can turn them into a magnificent apple pie, worth more than the original flour and apples. That’s doing the right thing.

ETA: I should say, that’s doing A right thing. There are a number of right things that can be done. Apple crisp, for example. Apple cobbler. Hmm. Apple fritters. etc.
ETAA: The point being, there is no single correct solution. There is a set of good solutions. Each will be better for some and less good for others. What voting is all about is choosing which of these is the one we want to go with.

31

Charismatic candadates. We know Obama has charisma; I’m told that Palin does as well (I myself think she isn’t well enough known to say).

Charisma inspires people to be more passionate, even if the issues are the same.

32

I was passionate about any election with the incompetent George Bush involved. I had the idea he would allow theft on a grand scale and put us into endless wars. I did not like it. Some apparently are fine with that.

33

Anyway, the premise of the thread. OK, so some people share anecdotes where they say people in their personal lives are behaving a little more assholish than a couple years ago. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. In my personal life I don’t see it. But let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Is the president deporting anti-war demonstrators, arresting former presidential candidates, severely restricting free speech, and so on? Are labor organizers literally being gunned down in the streets by the hundreds? No. Is the country coming apart at the seams? Are there riots on a regular basis? Was a coup in its infancy discovered and stopped and its purported planners left free because doing anything else would be considered a problem? No. Are presidents, presidential candidates, and grass roots leaders being assassinated? Are people fleeing the country to escape the draft? Battling police in the streets? Are people seriously entertaining the thought there could be a race war? No.

All that happened before. What’s going on nowadays is Sunday school stuff. A couple protesters will get clubbed in the head. Maybe some will die from a nice electric shock but most are just arrested and released later. And you guys wanna talk about tension…

Of course, you know, two parties. Both of them will “take in” a lot of people. But the character of Obama’s support – if not reflected in raw statistics – is qualitatively different than that of Gore or Kerry, yes.

But I am not surprised. Nor should anyone. People look around and plainly see that Things Aren’t Right ™. So some smooth, charismatic guy saying that he’s going to restore former glory will be pretty popular. It’s also a fairly standard ploy of pretending to be some dude who just materialized into being a presidential candidate. “Hello! I’m a Washington outsider. All the bad stuff is due to the insiders. Vote for me and things can’t be the same, can they?” Why yes they can and we have plenty of examples to point to. But that’s not change we can believe in, or whatever other infantile slogan passed the public relation marketing department.

34

Things that happen in society aren’t hooked up to a light switch. They tend to be degrade over time. No, labor unions aren’t being gunned down in the streets anymore. At a time, yes, but that didn’t happen overnight.

As a whole, people are tired of being sick and tired. Personally, I refuse to live in fear and watch liberties taken away and to see a country that touts itself as the best place in the world to start acting like a good neighbor.

35

Your kind of cynicism, marshmallow, I believe is one of the reasons things don’t get done. It’s very easy to just dismiss all politics as saying “They’re all the same. Fuck 'em.” and walk away, plus you get to look worldly wise and sophisticated while you’re doing it. It doesn’t help anyone, but it’s easy and it scores you “cool” points. Hope you enjoy them.

36

He’s absolutely right. Bush can’t be impeached for being a blockhead, or for pursuing unpopular policies, or even for the war per se. The war may be wrong but I am not sure how it is illegal in any competent jurisdiction. In short, you can’t impeach a President for actions or decisions made in good faith.

On the other hand, if evidence can be brought to bear that Bush and Gonzalez colluded to fix the Justice Department, or that federal assistant DAs were fired for political reasons, then that would be impeachable.

37

I am fairly passionate about this election but the intensity of feeling pales in comparison with how I felt in 2004.

Ditching George W. Bush in 2004 was of paramount importance. It absolutely had to happen. As appallingly bad as he’d been in his first term, the United States had a chance to say, to ourselves and to the world “We don’t cotton with that behavior, you’re fired”. Admittedly it would have been nice if the opposition candidate had had more lustre than John Kerry but I would have been fine with Joe Lieberman, Orrin Hatch, Cynthia MacKinnon, David Duke, or the corpse of Richard Nixon, ANYBODY who was not George W. Bush. I felt that if he were re-elected, the country would suffer for a generation or more. I volunteered to do cold-calling for MoveOn.org and I detest telephones, telemarketers, and cold-calling sons of bitches and would sooner clean out the interiors of garbage trucks. But I did it.

McCain would be a bad idea and a bad choice. But not GWB type bad, I’m sure.

38

In other words, you simply don’t find the message of change credible and have produced an unabashedly backfilled narrative of how we got here. The former is fine: plenty of people aren’t convinced by Obama’s message of change.

The latter is illogical and utterly self-serving in the way that all ex post facto narratives are. The fact that you dress your opinion up with pseudo-scientific terms like “models” or adopt reflexive and self-serving skeptical postures (“no one should be surprised…”) does not actually lend your opinion any more weight. It is purely sophomoric rhetoric, or, as a public relations department might say, “infantile”. Your position would be far more honest and credible if you simply asserted that the likelihood of Obama driving change is low. You can spare us the freshman poli sci posturing.

39

I think you can probably demonstrate that Cheney brought pressure on both the CIA and his own “intelligence” organization to cook the data to find a connection between Iraq both with nuclear weapons and 9/11.

Justice, I’m not sure who besides Karl Rove that goes to. Probably not Bush. He personally doesn’t seem to have done much, and is probably not directly culpable for anything. That being said, he is morally culpable for everything. This was his job.

40

I’m not old enough to remember but I’ve studied the history. At times in the 1968 and 1972 election seasons and, indeed, many times before and between them, it really did look like the country was on the verge of civil war. It wasn’t, it just appeared that way, but there were actual riots, there was mob violence by left-wingers and (an underappreciated fact) even more and worse by right-wingers, there were racial divisions and generational divisions and cultural divisions and political divisions all coming to a head in the same period, and both radicals and reactionaries considered actual political revolution a real possibility. It’s nothing like that today – though the same divisions of that time linger on and are represented in the present candidates and the movements backing them.