Hail To The Chief

(I'm just kidding...kind of)

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Hope's For Dopes

one of the more revealing articles about where, once all the rhetoric is through and the governing begins, we might find ourselves, as predicted through the experiences of Emerson through Barack's potential "wrang wrang" Deval Patrick (via Slate) by Fred Siegel, who is not the fashion guy

Yes, We Can’t

From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Deval Patrick, the politics of hope have been a bust.

Aging baby boomers see in Barack Obama’s down-the-line liberal voting record the promise of a left-wing revival. The college students and twentysomethings of the Millennial Generation see in him a way of pushing the quarrelsome, narcissistic baby boomers off the stage. Someone is bound to be disappointed by this extraordinary performance artist. But what both the boomers and the Millennials share is a desire to be part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 1840s, called “the politics of hope.” Emerson wrote during a time of numerous experiments in utopian living. Obama—whose candidacy rests upon a standard utopian dichotomy between the earthly evils of poverty, injustice, war, and partisanship, and the promise of the world to come if we allow him to rescue us—appeals to the same Elysian strain in American and Western political life, largely in remission since 1980, when the 1960s truly ended.

America’s founding fathers were a famously hard-headed lot; they understood that government had to be structured to remedy the “defects of better motives.” Since self-serving interest groups—or factions, as Federalist 10 calls them—were an unavoidable element of liberty, interest could only be checked by competing interest. But while this insight is the main stem of our political tradition, there is another, albeit punctuated, branch—a utopianism that derives from the millenarianism of the sects that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and eventually populated America. “Utopian . . . ideas,” notes Daniel Flynn in his new history of the American Left, are as “American as Plymouth Rock.” This is why, as Sixties activist Bo Burlingham put it, “the Left bobs up and down in American history, a battered and leaky craft which often disappears beneath the tide, but somehow never sinks.”

In the wake of bloody utopian experiments in 1930s Europe, a slew of erudite authors launched compelling attacks on them. Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, Raymond Aaron, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hannah Arendt laid waste to the historical, philosophical, sociological, and literary assumptions that supported communism and fascism. But their arguments didn’t endure, despite their power. By the mid-1960s, utopianism had again taken hold, and its lure was such that even Arendt, once a vocal opponent, found herself drawn to the religion of politics. Propelled by her disdain for America in general and the Vietnam War in particular, as well as the promise, as she saw it, of worker-control experiments in Europe, she effectively reversed much of her earlier writings.

She wasn’t alone. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger had published The Vital Center, the canonical statement of disillusioned, empirical, and anti-utopian post–World War II liberalism. Schlesinger praised “the empirical temper” and a realistic sense of man’s limitations that recognized that “freedom means conflict.” Tracing the shared assumptions behind Brook Farm—the famous American utopian experiment of the 1840s—and the Soviet Union, he distanced liberalism from an optimism born of eighteenth-century rationalism and a nineteenth-century romanticism about progress, which left “too many unprepared for the mid-twentieth century.” Democracy, he wrote, “brooks no worship” of great leaders because “it knows that no man is that good.” And Schlesinger rebuked the leftists who, admiring the USSR, couldn’t believe that “ugly facts underlie fair words.” It was an intellectual tour de force.

But a little more than a decade later, Schlesinger—romanced by John F. Kennedy—walked away from these arguments. His admiration for the liberalism of a “moderate pessimism about man” was replaced by hero-worship and a sense of the dashing, aristocratic, articulate Kennedy as someone who could transcend standard political categories. Kennedy’s untimely death canonized the hard-nosed Massachusetts pol—with a mixed record at best as our first celebrity president—as JFK, a Lincoln-like martyr to civil rights, the King of Camelot who, if he had lived, would have made all right with the world. This Kennedy passed into Democratic Party legend and still inspires some today: remember Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign ads, featuring a picture of the young Clinton visiting the White House with a group of young student leaders and shaking hands with Kennedy. Kennedy, the ads implied, was passing the torch.

Obama, the celebrity-like candidate drawing on his generational appeal and noble bearing, fits better into Kennedy’s robes than Clinton did. Unlike Kennedy, who didn’t think of himself in messianic terms, Obama seems short on irony. Still, for lovelorn boomers and for youngsters who’ve known only the failures of the Bush years, Obama promises a Camelot-like reenchantment with politics. “I’ve been following politics since I was about five,” says TV host Chris Mathews. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers, he’s the New Testament.” In this view, just as Kennedy’s victory in 1960 brought the country out of its Eisenhower-era stupor and put the Catholic question to bed for good, so an Obama victory will reenergize our politics and bring an end to poverty and racial division.

Hillary Clinton has searched in vain for a way to combat Obama’s appeal. In the recent Austin debate, she criticized Obama for borrowing generously from the speeches of his good friend and coeval Deval Patrick, the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches,” she challenged in the debate’s one charged moment, “is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.” Clinton’s arrow here was not aimed so much at plagiarism—all candidates borrow heavily from each other and from past campaigns—as at Obama’s claim to authenticity. But with the press, on both left and right, all but openly rooting for Obama, little came of her attack; more important, the press missed the true importance of the Patrick comparison.

Bay State journalist Rick Holmes describes Obama and Patrick, fellow Harvard Law School graduates, as “peas in a pod.” Patrick is the Obama campaign’s national cochair. Obama’s presidential campaign has modeled itself on Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign. Patrick’s 2006 campaign slogan was “Together we can,” while Obama’s is “Yes we can.” The brilliant Chicago political operative David Axelrod has managed both men’s campaigns. Both candidates have made persistent appeals to “the politics of hope.”

So Clinton’s criticism seems an opportune moment to ask how Patrick’s inspirational rhetoric has translated into governing a state where Democrats control both houses of the legislature—the likely scenario for Obama, too, should he take office. Patrick’s governorship is the closest thing we have to a preview of the “politics of hope”—and that governorship has been a failure to date. As Joan Vennochi observes in the Boston Globe, “Democrats who control the Legislature ignored virtually every major budget and policy initiative presented by a fellow Democrat.” Patrick’s record in office, Vennochi concludes, “shows that it can be hard to get beyond being the face of change, to actually changing politics.” His stock has sunk so markedly that Hillary Clinton carried the state handily against Obama in the Democratic primary despite, or perhaps because of, Patrick’s support for his political doppelgänger.

In one area, however, Patrick has achieved some of his goals. In thrall to the state’s teachers’ unions, he has partly rolled back the most successful educational reforms in the country. Most states gamed the federal testing requirements that were part of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. But Massachusetts, thanks to Republican governors William Weld and Mitt Romney, created the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability to ensure that the state’s testing methods conformed closely to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—federal tests that are the gold standard for measuring educational outcomes. In 2007, Massachusetts became the first state to achieve top marks in all four categories of student achievement. One of Patrick’s first efforts as governor was to eliminate the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.

Patrick hasn’t delivered reform, much less the transformation that both he and Obama promise. This should come as no surprise. Obama’s utopian vision of transcending the interests that make up the fabric of our democracy is unlikely to fare any better than the “politics of hope” did in Emerson’s time. The key question at hand is whether Obama’s Edenic bubble bursts before or after the election.

and from the Boston Globe an article about Turning Hope Into Action that looks at Deval's time in office so far, and I can see the Obama administration doing the same thing

Cynics get things done if for no other reason than they don't have their heads in the clouds and so know what it looks like on the ground

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When Barack is President...

tomorrow will come today!

Everybody's here with me
We got no camera to see
Don't think I matter in this world
The camera won't let me roll
The verdict doesn't love our soul
The digital won't let me go

Yeah yeah yeah
I'll pay (yeah yeah yeah)
When Tomorrow
Tomorrow comes today

Stereo I want it all
It's taken me far too long
Don't think I'm all in this world
I don't think I'll be here too long
I don't think I'll be here too long
I don't think I'll be here too long

Yeah yeah yeah
I'll pay
When Tomorrow
Tomorrow comes today

Gorillaz- Tomorrow Comes Today [download]
I can't hardly wait!

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Of Tomorrow

It’s only a day away
Here are Tex Avery’s “Of Tomorrow” cartoon series from sometime in the 1950s
TV of Tomorrow


Car of Tomorrow


Farm of Tomorrow


House of Tomorrow


Wow the future was soo retro
I can't wait for Barack to be president so the Future will finally arrive...
(interest sparked by)

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Michelle Obama Is The New Hillary Clinton

or at least she will be when she comes from into focus, and what I mean by that is all those conservatives and republicans who felt threatened by an outspoken first lady and sort of viewed Hillary as a menacing spectre will soon feel the same way about Michelle who I think will make the Hillary of the 90s look like Laura Bush. And I think the first shot in that war was of course fired in response to Michelle's now infamous "for the first time I'm proud of my country" remarks.
But other than the whole narrative of another liberal blaming America and hating it first is the notion that I'm holding that while "white America" seems incredibly comfortable about Barack that may have to do with the fact that he does not implicate them by the fact that he is not the descendant of a slave and so, to some he can be thought of as the person to "move us forward" from slavery and shame without the painful self examination that this country shrinks from, whereas Michelle in her more..."blunt" style seems willing to point the finger and lay blame and be pessimisitic being someone who's ancestors were slave.
And so it's a very interesting dynamic, Michelle the "Implicator" and Barack "the Absolver" of our racial and class sins.
Plus America still isn't ready for a blunt and forthright woman. It's true.
What got me thinking about all of that was this piece in the L.A. Times about Michelle finding herself in the spotlight's glare

...unlike her husband, she tends to dwell on the negative. America, in her telling, is a place where "regular folks," meaning the working class, can't get ahead because, as she said at Ohio State University, "folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar -- sometimes you surpass the bar -- and then they move the bar!"

Americans, she says, have become "cynical" and "mean" and have "broken souls." For regular folks, life is bad and getting worse.

People can't raise a family on one salary anymore, she says. They can't afford to get sick even if they have insurance because of deductibles, premiums and the high cost of medication. They can't confidently send their kids to neighborhood public schools because so many of them are so bad. Young people can't afford to attend college to become teachers or nurses or journalists because those jobs don't pay enough to repay college loans.

"We don't need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers," she told a crowd in a Baptist church in Cheraw, S.C., last month. "But see, that's the only way you can pay back your educational debt!

"The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn't matter who was in the White House. . . . So if you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!"

Her rhetoric is jarring given that the Obamas themselves are a stunning embodiment of the American dream. Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, the men's basketball coach at Brown University, attended Princeton University. Barack and Michelle Obama both earned law degrees from Harvard, another of the nation's most prestigious schools, and are facing the possibility of raising their two daughters in the White House.

The couple's combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return. In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties. The family lives in a $1.6-million home in Chicago.

Despite their Ivy League pedigrees and good salaries, Michelle Obama often says the fact that she and her husband are out of debt is due to sheer luck, because they could not have predicted that his two books would become bestsellers. "It was like, 'Let's put all our money on red!' " she told a crowd at Ohio State University on Friday. "It wasn't a financial plan! We were lucky! And it shouldn't have been based on luck, because we worked hard."

When challenged during an interview about how her rather bleak view of America is at odds with her own life, she said she is not talking about herself. "I start the stump speech talking about regular folks, and I define them using the story of my father -- a regular working-class guy [who] didn't have a college education. . . . The folks in that room that I was talking to have had it hard for a long time."

Chicago real estate developer Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the Obamas and a senior advisor to the campaign, said she thinks Michelle Obama is simply stating a reality. "I think her point is that when she grew up, with a blue-collar job and the right principles, you could provide for your children," said Jarrett, who once hired Michelle Obama to be her assistant when she was deputy chief of staff to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. "That's not possible anymore."

No, it's not and everything she seems to be railing against, y'know about how we're the first generation who may not leave this country in better shape for our children and all that, umm was John's campaign. But once again the elitism and class markers of Barack's initial base come out, those highly educated upper middle class who are worried about paying down college loans and not losing their jobs. That being said even though I hate her and think she's a bit of a twat I'm glad to see someone at least gesturing about inequality in that campaign. plus it's good to know that at least one person in that family has some bollocks since Barack's tendency to be slow to refute attacks shows that he may not yet be "wise to the Freak Show"

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When Barack is President...

life will be like one long trip On the Good Ship Lollipop

Yay! I can't hardly wait!

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Hillary is the new John Kerry

from Top of the Ticket

In an amazing coincidence just days before another crucial Democratic primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton, campaigning in Wisconsin -- where thousands build their annual vacations around deer-hunting season -- has let it slip that she went hunting once.

"I know you don't believe it," she told an enthusiastic audience at Kenosha's Brat Stop over the weekend, "but it's actually true. My father taught me to shoot 100 years ago."

According to The Times' Nicholas Riccardi, who was there, she then launched into an explanation of how school shootings can be stopped without infringing on gun owners' rights. She declined to elaborate on her hunting career later except to say that she had nailed a duck.

But anyway here's a photo of another Clinton holding a dead duck like the one his wife recalls shooting down.

But then today, on the eve of voting in the Badger State, the New York senator remembered more details about hunting once in Arkansas with male colleagues and standing in chilly water early one morning.

"They said, 'We won't shoot. You shoot,' " Clinton told reporters. "They wanted to embarrass me. So, OK, the pressure was on. So I shot, and I shot a banded duck. And I was as surprised as they were."

and of course that story reminded me of John Kerry's infamous hunting trip in Ohio of 2004, though I do believe Hillary's was more genuine- I mean she did live in Arkansas, a state where, if Mike Huckabee is to be believed, fried squirrel is good eating.


But i wasn't interested in all that originally- the only reason I actually cared about the article was the title:
"Hillary Shot a Duck Once"
brilliant.
Welcome to the Presidency, Mr. Obama.

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When Barack is President...

Obama, Japan will be very very happy


"People in the little town of Obama are preparing headbands, badges and T-shirts with Obama's portrait and the logo "We Love Obama" on them to campaign for the Democrat hopeful."
and since they're Japanese they'll probably make too cute dolls.OR evil Obama robots that will enslave us all.
MacArthur wouldn't approve

(via Wonkette)

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What can Brown do for you?

I think that may be my new nickname for Barack- sure it may sound a little racist, or whatevs but it's inspired by that UPS ad campaign and the fact that Barack can and will do anything and everything to help everyone. He's dreaaamy.
And you can see what Barack (or Brown) with this, which may be my new favorite website. I've always wanted a new bicycle Here- try it
here is a small selection of favorites (aka some I’ve seen- I don’t know how far this rabbit hole goes)

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When Barack is President...

Every day there will be hands across America ! =)

I can't hardly wait!!!

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