Electoral Politics

Bumped from the wiki, with a minor edit (I added a link). I'm betting there will be disagreement about the Obama stuff. Let's have at it. --Mike

It’s kind of sad to see people who are afraid to embrace something new, mainly because they are too scared to let go of everything they ever knew. They’re afraid of losing power, so they resist all new opportunities to grow that come along.

Enter Stuart Rothenberg. Rothenberg is a political pundit – editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report – who is one of the foremost inside-the-beltway reporters in the country. He’s a junkie just like me and several other amateur political hounds. The difference? Rothenberg totally resists technology and the effect it has on the modern political campaign. Rothenberg wants to pretend that it’s still the twentieth century, when Americans were told what to pay attention to in the political world and how that affects them by pundits, and understandably so. Now that technology has given us the ability to bypass these know-it-all blowhards, we do – we go to blogs for the latest in the political realm, because bloggers seem to be the only ones courageous and dedicated enough to make sure our government is held accountable. The last few scandals broken have been done so thanks to the bloggers at Firedoglake and Talking Points Memo. Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot? We would have never heard about that if it wasn’t for community websites like Daily Kos.

There seems to be a new divide forming in American politics today. Not left versus right. Not north versus south, or east versus west, or coasts versus heartland. Instead, it’s old versus young. The old, by-the-book approach pitted against a new, exciting way of doing things. We see this battle in the competition between Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton, a Boomer born in the 40s, is calculatingly ideological -- she gets fired up by all the wrong things. She is one of a group of inside-the-beltway Boomers who would rather fight the latest battle under the topic of abortion than try to fix the massive healthcare crisis in this country. She would rather have a "conversation" than commence an effort to repair the country's problems. Many times this conversation doesn't dare approach the frightening topics of healthcare and poverty. Clinton would rather get caught up in the culture war issues of abortion and gay marriage. She and her team of inside-the-beltway advisors can manage these topics of discussion. They're afraid of taking any action, so these issues that have been rehashed time and time again are the perfect solution to her inability to muster any political courage to deal with the nation's largest problems. Hillary plays it safe, and to do so, she needs to rely on conventional pundits who seem to have taken their laziness into the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, Obama, the Gen Xer born in '61, is progressively pragmatic. In the end, Obama wants to make progress. Ideology is thrown out the window; Obama's goal is to make things better. If he needs to work with people from across the aisle to do so, he'll do it. The emphasis is on the common good -- what is the best solution for everyone living in this country? This approach then obviously leads to a dialogue that is much more than a "conversation." It's a movement. 10,000 people showing up at an Obama rally in Oakland is a movement. 20,000 people showing up in Austin, Texas ten months before any electoral contest is a freakin' movement. When the common good is used as the inspiration for a campaign, people are drawn to it. Once people start paying attention, the technology that Mr. Rothenberg, Mrs. Clinton, and so many others are afraid of is the device that transforms this initial interest into commitment.

It's no wonder Rothenberg and other Boomer hacks are digging their nails into the old politics. Imagine what will happen when the Obama approach is at full force and everyone is engaged and working on his/her own to solve America's problems -- these sorry bloviators will finally be silenced and *gasp!* -- rendered unimportant and irrelevant. The exciting thing is it's already starting.