2008-09-26

Notes on the Debate

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[Disclosure: I live in Chicago, and have finan­cially sup­ported Obama already.]

The first note is about the orga­ni­za­tion that McCain cited at the begin­ning of his speech, Citizens Against Government Waste. The one he was using as his cita­tion for the 900-million-dollar fig­ure he was hang­ing around Obama’s neck. They’ve are a lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion, which has the fol­low­ing accu­sa­tions against it:

  • Astroturfing for Microsoft, against the anti-trust actions in the late 90s.
  • Astroturfing for Phillip-Morris, to label a pub­lic health cam­paign that was show­ing results in reduc­ing smok­ing “gov­ern­ment waste,” and for a tobacco-industry sup­ported anti-tobacco bill.
  • Labelling the YMCA “gov­ern­ment waste” after tak­ing con­tri­bu­tions from pri­vate health clubs.

And per­haps most damning:

  • Laundering money for Jack Abramoff

That’s who McCain was using as his source when he obliquely accused Obama of corruption.

Also worth not­ing was Obama’s descrip­tion of the prac­tice of sup­port­ing friendly dic­ta­tors the prod­uct of “a 20th cen­tury mind­set.” A bril­liant state­ment, in no small part because Obama knows how to get your mind going in the direc­tion he wants it to go. The rest of the debate I had the recur­ring sen­sa­tion that McCain sounded like a throw­back to the late 1980s — great for ironic, trashy, brit­pop. For a U.S. President? Not so much.

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2008-04-12

Elections

Tags: , , , , , , , Posted at 15:10 No Comments

[Disclosure: I dropped a day’s pay on Obama’s cam­paign about a week before the pas­tor thing hap­pened, and hope I never feel com­pelled to write about this elec­tion again.]

Matt Taibbi is (as usual, and in spite of his ridicu­lous hump­ing of Hunter Thompson’s legacy) repeat­edly cor­rect in his assess­ment of American pol­i­tics as a bunch of nin­nies totally inca­pable of see­ing ele­phants in liv­ing rooms. Conversely, Taibbi and myself are instead part of Generation Meta, and tend to be more engrossed by the men­tal gym­nas­tics required to avoid­ing see­ing ele­phants inside liv­ing rooms than the ele­phants themselves.

Proving Taibbi’s point (again), Obama is cur­rently attempt­ing to “limit the dam­age” (changed to “lim­it­ing fall­out”) for para­phras­ing “What's the Matter with Kansas?" to a well-heeled audience in San Francisco.

Choice quote from the Taibbi arti­cle (mainly because it’s still rel­e­vant in this lat­est mountain-out-of-molehill): “It’s also a great exam­ple of how the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion process has become more about enforc­ing the atti­tudes of a cul­tural ortho­doxy than a sys­tem for choos­ing leaders.”

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