Be careful what you wish for

[KW4MW]

Those of you that have followed my posts in the past know two things about me:

(1) I don’t like Hillary Clinton – yes I’ve done my share of poking fun at her looks and style of rhetoric but it is not for those reasons that I don’t care for her. It is simply the fact that she represents the same old rat pack of political cronies.

(2) I have advised the Democrats on this forum that if they ever ran a decent candidate I would vote for him/her. You can check the archives if you don't believe me.

It looks like the junior senator from NY is slipping in the polls and it is possible that she may not get the nod at the DNC. Yay! Yay!

McCain is nothing more than CurrentAdmin Ver. 3.01

That leaves Obama. Listening to him – then kid sounds good – he is saying all of the warm fuzzy things this country wants to hear.

His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. "We are the ones we've been waiting for," he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.
.
.
So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama's astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama's intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease's symptoms -- all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality.
.
.
Those are some kind of campaign promises. The kind no mortal could possibly keep, but never mind. Obi-Wan Obama is about hope -- and hope, he'll tell you, knows no limits.

It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He's a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.

But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics. It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent -- hence thousands of years of religion -- but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.
.
.
Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

The Ecstacy of Barack (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/KathleenParker/2008/02/22/the_ecstacy_of_barack?page=2)

So - if I vote for Obama am I voting for a viable presidential candidate, a messiah or simple someone with rock start billing?

[ad4mg]

At this point in time, and especially after the most recent debate, I think he's starting to actually become a viable presidential candidate.

Of course, I had to recover from the initial fainting spell I suffered reading your post before I could respond ... :D

I haven't decided yet. I'm trying to get my head wrapped around where McCain is coming from, and I'm still not in a comfort zone with Obama regarding his plans for fiscal responsibility. For McCain, it's the war thing that bothers me. I get the uneasy feeling he would not hesitate to escalate the ongoing conflicts.

[kc2orw]

So - if I vote for Obama am I voting for a viable presidential candidate, a messiah or simple someone with rock start billing?
A Senator From Illinois name Barack Hussein Obama against the fraudulently started war in Iraq, moderately Liberal leaning.

[W3MIV]

So - if I vote for Obama am I voting for a viable presidential candidate, a messiah or simple someone with rock start billing?

Obama is clearly a viable presidential candidate. Were he not, he would not now be leading Ms Clinton, who has a formidable machine behind her.

Judging from the attitudes of some of the audiences he has attracted, and the youth of the enthusiasts he inspires, you might well consider him the political equivalent of a "rock star." In that sense, he is reminiscent of JFK, and that is something I do not point out lightly.

As to the "Messiah" equivalency, if you strip the term of its religiosity and equate Obama with a lower-cased messiah -- that is, as one who is "anointed" to deliver a people from the grip of political inertia, if not the imprisonment of "sin and pining" -- then one must aver that there is an acceptable propriety to the term, as well.

Therefore, to satisfy your question, in effect you would be voting for all three of your hopes for president.

I would not, however, so readily dismiss McCain as simply some sort of Bush analogue. But for his espousal of an energetic pursuit of some closure before arbitrarily pulling out of Iraq, there is very little in the way of similarity between him and Bush. I do not support McCain, but I think you sell him quite short, and unfairly so.

[N9XR]

To tell you the truth, I had never really known who Obama was until he won the primary in 2004 for the US Senate. I actually voted for an opponent in the primary. He was seeking to fill the US Senate seat left vacant by Peter Fitzgerald or Gerald Fitzpeter or some such name like that. So it was a Republican held seat. Then the Republican who won the race was Jack Ryan. He was totally bound and gagged by the scandal where we found out that his ex wife claimed that he wanted to go to someplace in Paris or someplace European to a club where they could exhibition or some such Republican nonsense.

Well Ryan dropped out of the race and the Republican party realizing that there was no way that they could win, tapped Alan Keys to run against this behemoth. From there, Obama could be whatever the state wanted him to be. The Republicans had complained of Hillary becoming a carpetbagger to run in NY, and now the same party was carpetbagging a candidate into Illinois to run against a Democrat. The hypocrisy was overwhelming and Obama was a massive recipient of the Republican Party idiocy. The state only needed to know one thing. Obama was better than Keyes, and the election went for Obama essentially as if he was unopposed.

I really don't know if he is rock star billing or not. His campaigned gave him free reign to be anything he wanted to be and this situation worked well for him. He is by nature multicultural which is appealing to the multicultural nation that we have.

[W3MIV]

...Peter Fitzgerald or Gerald Fitzpeter...

Are you sure that's not a politically incorrect joke?

:rolleyes:

[KW4MW]

I haven't decided yet. I'm trying to get my head wrapped around where McCain is coming from, and I'm still not in a comfort zone with Obama regarding his plans for fiscal responsibility. For McCain, it's the war thing that bothers me. I get the uneasy feeling he would not hesitate to escalate the ongoing conflicts.

Me too - that's why I made the Ver. 3.01 analogy - McCain wants to put more boots on the ground - not less.

[N9XR]

Are you sure that's not a politically incorrect joke?

:rolleyes:

Albert!!! You're sick. I just couldn't remember the guy's name. :o

[K8ERV]

I would vote for me, but I don't want the job.

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

[kc2orw]

Me too - that's why I made the Ver. 3.01 analogy - McCain wants to put more boots on the ground - not less.
You have to select based upon the criteria that suits you best but at the least you indicate you are applying reason.
Here's to the Fall may the best candidate win and serve all of us well :)

[N9MOQ]

I have advised the Democrats on this forum that if they ever ran a decent candidate I would vote for him/her.

Let's say there is a corporation called the Democrat Corporation. They want to market a new product to the consumer. They do some market research, and discover something very interesting about all the previously purchased such products in the past. In every single purchase, 100% of the time, the consumer bought the product that was in the blue plastic packaging, and never bought it if it was in either the green plastic packaging, or if it was in the blue cardboard packaging.

Studying their competitors, the Republican Corporation, they find that they too, have never sold any of their products in the green plastic or blue cardboard packaging, only those that were in the blue plastic packaging.

As far back as this product has ever been sold, it has only been purchased if it was in the blue plastic packaging, no matter which corporation made the actual product.

The Republican Corporation decided to stick with what worked in the past, but the Democrat Corporation had just hired a bright new marketing director that had some new ideas. This new marketing director decided they were going to sell the new product in only the green plastic or blue cardboard packaging.

When the Republican Corporation found out about this, they were so happy, they gave all their employees a day off with pay to celebrate. When they went back to work, they decided they didn't need to worry about the quality of their product as much, and just put out the same old model as the year before, but figured in the traditional blue plastic packaging, the consumer would still prefer it to a newer model in packaging that has never sold that type of product before as far back as the product existed.

Which product did the consumers decide to buy?

So - if I vote for Obama am I voting for a viable presidential candidate, a messiah or simple someone with rock start billing?

The "messiah" mention is interesting, since the cover on a popular German magazine, Der Spiegel, has a picture of Obama on the cover with the title:

Der Messias-Faktor .. Barack Obama und die Sehnsucht nach einem neuen Amerika

[n2nh]

So - if I vote for Obama am I voting for a viable presidential candidate, a messiah or simple someone with rock start billing?

You're probably voting for NH to have a coronary.
:D

Seriously, I think the more you look at Obama, the more he seems to be the real deal. IMHO. I applaud your looking at the Candidate and not the party.