Reed on politics
Posted on:: January 24th, 2004
David Reed — you know, the End-to-End guy — goes through the candidates one-by-one. He’s captured a lot of what I think and feel about these guys.
This dance remix of The Scream that’s been going around makes me laugh.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Foul!
New democracy, new politics, join together (as opposed to joining separately?), mobilize, motivate…this all sounds like Internet bubble banter and/or a Tom Peters speech.
The essence of this very biased view is the feeling that our little group has a secret plan, and we’ve selected our special candidate but it’s not obvious to you why he’s special because YOU DON’T GET IT. Plain and simple: Dean underestimated the idiosyncratic nature of the insular Deaniac movement. His campaign fell apart before the scream. You need a candidate that’s past the beta version.
DH
“Frankly, Wes Clark is a hothouse plant, and it shows. His entire life has been cloistered in the priviliged elite called the career military officer corps. I have some familiarity with that group, having lived on the edge of that world for a large part of my life. They are *clueless* about how life is lived outside the Fortress, and don’t understand that the rest of us don’t exist for hierarchy, status, and the organization (well, except for a few remaining IBM lifers in its executive suite). He may be brilliant, and even have great ideas, but what does he know about communities where the people you govern don’t have a protocol that defines who salutes whom first based on how many stripes you are wearing?”
That’s certainly an informed, nuanced view. Great linkage. That really helps inform the debate. Not that you’re responsible for doing any such thing.
Just what “privilege” does this “elite” enjoy? The privilege of getting shot at? Spending long periods of time far from home where the local populace may not welcome your presence? It sure can’t be the phenomenal salaries.
Of course there are _no_ hierarchies in the egalitarian world that David Reed inhabits. Oh, excuse me, it’s _Doctor_ David Reed. A “co-inventor” of something called the “end-to-end argument.” Yeah, he’s just a regular guy who understands how tough it is for a single mother living in a trailer park and dancing at the local strip joint to afford health care.
I am so sick of the artificial distinctions people draw about who is “clueless” and who is susceptible to “spin” and who “really” cares. Yeah, a guy who spends a career serving his country is “clueless” about the things that I guess must matter to Dr. Reed. He probably doesn’t know shit about young wives with small children left behind to fend for themselves while their husbands deploy to places I suspect Dr. Reed couldn’t find on the map without help. Thank God for the Dr. Reeds and Dr. Weinbergers out there who can keep us informed about this “privileged elite.”
As a fellow privileged elitist, I salute you and Dr. Reed with my stiffly raised middle finger.
You guys keep this crap up, and I and a bunch of people like me will wind up voting for Bush just because we want to send a message to you “new politics” people.
Don’t like Clark? Fine. You’re entitled. I don’t like Dean. Well, I’m ambivalent about Dean, I really haven’t made up my mind. But I really, really don’t like the attitudes of the people who support him, and I’m liking them less and less by the moment.
It is increasingly alarming to listen to progressive-minded people talk as if we were selecting our candidate purely (or even mainly!) on ideological grounds. Nit-picking these guys’ personalities and policy statements and making mountains out of the molehill differences we find only indicates how oblivious we are to what is really going on.
To wit, approximately half the country is itching to vote for Bush and if we don’t start paying a little more attention to which of these candidates has demonstrable appeal to moderates in the swing states, we’re going to be crying in our beer for another four years. To my admitedly limited understanding, the candidate which has this appeal is probably Clark or Kerry or Edwards (in approximately that order). Dean is not that candidate. And it hasn’t got one damned thing to do with his Iowa hoot, though I’m glad he did poorly and I’m glad he made himself look foolish because maybe the rest of us willl take a moment to evaluate these other guys running for the nomination.
(Note: I concede that ideology counts for something. That is why I am appropriately horrified at the the Lieberman campaign. He, as others have said before, should really be running in another party. Wouldn’t surprise me if he did at some later date.)
That’s really not as good as the Lileks one, though.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen the Iowa speech from the audience’s POV, do so.
And I buggered that first link, forgetting to put in http:// as needed.
That full “crowd video” of the Iowa speech shows Dean’s speech in its true context, and shows how it was distorted on the news networks. Dean suffered in particular from the fact that the networks had a direct feed off his mike, which filtered out the deafening crowd noise he was trying to talk over.
Meanwhile:
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has committed another media atrocity against Howard Dean, which appears in Sunday’s New York Times.
To read her most recent, and possibly most outrageous column, and to get links to send letters to the Times, please visit:
http://hudson.typepad.com/line/2004/01/open_letters_to.html
Or click my URL. It’s time to take back the media — along with our country.
First off, Reed doesn’t go through all the canidates. How about Edwards or Sharpton?
His argument is illogical. Is a leader supposed to listen to the constituents and follow their lead, or is a leader the one others “follow just to find out what he’s gonna do”?
Dave, I’m another Clark supporter, and what I understand you to say is, it’s difficult and can be deceptive to characterize an individual on the basis of generalizations.
And I guess your characterization of Reed and Weinberger on the basis of their doctorates and their political opinions was meant as a demonstration of that.