- : http://www.jazzhouse.org/
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Edwards is providing Obama with much of his best material. Not to detract from Obama, who uses it well. But this goes to the convention, while Edwards keeps Obama supplied with proven material and handles the tougher attacks against Clinton. Then Edwards gives his delagates to Obama and shares the ticket.
This is politics the way it's supposed to be done.
Posted at January 8, 2008 7:32 PM in response to How Could the Polls be so Wrong?
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Is the notion that any team can win the pennant with the right coach? Or could we be in a set of markets where no amount of packaging can sell an inferior product? Personally, I never understood the Hillary haters (of whom there are several among my inlaws). Then I watched the last debate. She is as false as Bush II, as manipulative as Nixon (and with a similar unhinged anger, so different than Edwards' focused righteousness). Her only hope has been that her opponents all either lack substance or lack communications skills (or, like Edwards, are shunned by the press). In American politics, in recent years, that's a reasonable hope. But in this case it's not to be.
Posted at January 6, 2008 6:11 PM in response to Where is Mike Henry?
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I live across the river from New Hampshire. A friend's grandaughter works in the kitchen of a reasonably nice restaurant on the other side. A couple of weeks ago she had an appointment scheduled with Obama, who wanted to hear from her as a working mother. There was no campaign appearance in that town. He was just coming in to privately hear from a few representatively chosen people.
How his advance team sets up these appointments I've no notion. But at a time when you'd think any politician would be busy being sure to be seen by as many as possible, he's scheduling one-on-one conversations with people he doesn't know, who have no particular influence, to listen.
I favor Edwards, but I'm just saying, Obama's listing seriously.
Posted at December 17, 2007 6:26 PM in response to It's Not the Medium, It's the Message
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If you know how to listen, you discover there are very few morons out here. But that has partly to do with how you prompt us to speak. Given the wrong prompt, just about any of us will say something trite and ridiculous. The trick is to bring out the smart side of people. The political effectiveness of that is that mostly we prefer our smarter selves, so if you can prompt that side of us, that's who you'll see in the polls.
Simple, really. But like most simple things, it takes great skill to do it well.
Posted at December 17, 2007 6:03 PM in response to It's Not the Medium, It's the Message
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We learn from the experiment that a group of people will come to consensus. That's basically positive, in a political context, that people can arrive at a common position.
Then we have the fear that the Internet will produce isolated groups with "extreme" ideas. As an aside, your extremity may be my diversity. But the more pertinent point is: Most people on the blogs and so on aren't just members of a single group, but of many overlapping groups, so there ends up being no single consensus - extreme or otherwise - except in the exceptional case of those who visit only a small handful of low-traffic blogs of no diversity, who have no personal lives either.
Even in the academic study you're citing, was there a followup on whether these groups still held their consensus positions after the people involved had been back on their own, in their normal social circles, for a few weeks?
Posted at November 12, 2007 1:47 PM in response to Colorado Springs and the Politics of Conformity
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they aren't intellectuals and don't really give a crap about all that stuff
Just because you hate intellectuals doesn't mean that "most Americans" do. My ancestry goes back as far as any white boy's on the northern latitudes of this continent, I was raised in the style of my people, and that style is fiercely thoughtful and informed. As I've come to know people across this country, I've found well-informed, curious, analytical, deep-thinking people everywhere. Sure, there are always bullies about who try to bluster through without their minds working too hard. But they're no majority in my experience - and I've sampled our culture and populations broadly. To conclude that we all make a fetish of stupidity just because Mr. Bush does is no more accurate than it would have been to conclude we are were all policy wonks in the time of Mr. Clinton.Come to think of it, the whole wonkish blog sphere ... how much does it owe to the example Clinton's crew set? Or Carter's? Or Kennedy's?
Posted at October 3, 2007 4:49 PM in response to Liberal Principles
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Please, Emma, do you honestly claim that there's something unfair or unbalanced about raising the suspicion that old approaches - especially when those approaches have not on the whole succeeded - might be improved or even bettered? Do you really believe that it weakens our habitual approaches to freshly consider them? Can't good approaches be strengthened by giving them new and careful consideration? Isn't the very definition of "conservative" to be opposed to reconsideration of old approaches? So you're upset because he isn't conservative enough?
Posted at September 27, 2007 9:25 AM in response to On Innovation and Inertia
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Matt, very nice response. Two quibbles:
The liberal principles... fairness, equal opportunity, opposition to concentrations of power.... [T]he conservative principles ... less government intervention and individual liberties....
Your ceding the value "individual liberties" to the conservatives really shows how far the conservative reframing has gone. Individual liberty has always been part and parcel of fairness, opposition to concentrations of power, and equal opportunity. The only part of the left standing against individual liberty has been the Marxist sects, which have never been part of the American liberal traditions as exemplified by Jefferson and FDR.apart from all the tactical dicussion about ... framing and ... whatever other miracle cure is in vogue this week
I'd guess if you've read Lakoff you didn't go as far as to read Women, Fire & Dangerous Things, or the work of his colleagues in Cognitive Linguistics, to understand that - if they're right - framing isn't tactical, isn't a gloss or a veneer, but rather is at the very core of what makes us cognitively human. A politics which ignores what we are, including how our cognition works, is necessarily shallow. So if we have new science with fresh insights about us in this area, shouldn't progressives embrace it, rather than pretend, like the conservatives, that scientific understanding should have no role in contributing to the political sphere?Posted at September 27, 2007 9:09 AM in response to On Innovation and Inertia
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Depends on what counts as an idea. We always do better with something fresh - whether that's in food or fashion or politics. Canning ideas is no substitute for producing fresh ones. Yes, you can grow a fresh crop from old seeds. It's not that you necessarily need new seed varieties. But you have to grow the crop again - you can't just keep hauling last year's corn out of the store room.
The point is, original and living perception of the world is generative of fresh descriptions of where we are and what we need. If your narrative is stale (and Lord knows that's true of almost the entire press) that's a true indicator that you aren't paying attention, in any serious way. Instead of seeing the current world, you're blinded by old narratives habitually imposed over your vision.
Posted at September 24, 2007 1:02 PM in response to Welcome to The Argument
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A laundry list of ideas is not the same as a grand, arching narrative. Heck, we don't even have a "Great Society," let alone a "New Deal." Those weren't just slogans; there were entire, coherent programs which they titled.
What you're saying is like, "We already know all the beautiful words. Let's just put them together and make a poem. Surely the poetry journal editors will elect to publish it! If not, they must just be against beauty."
We need not just sensible programs and objectives, but an entire story about a more wonderful and achievable future that we can all pull together to achieve. Instead, too many Democrats are either fighting holding actions in behalf of past gains, or holding out for a candidate who agrees position-by-position with their own largely-arbitrarily-assembled list of the "right" things to do.
We need something flexible, forward-looking, enthusiastic. Instead we've got flexibility expressed only in compromise with the GOP, backward-looking griping, and ... well hey, there's real enthusiasm showing up on the blogs. So what's with that?
Posted at September 24, 2007 12:54 PM in response to Welcome to The Argument
