idiotropic

i ain’t no wellesley élitist.

May 6, 2008 at 6:36 pm (american politics) (american politics, barack obama, gas tax holiday, hillary clinton, wellesley)

I know, I know — a tired subject and late in the game to begin my own narrative. But i think there are a few things about the Democratic primaries that still haven’t been said enough, if at all, so I’ll record them here as the folks in Indiana and North Carolina decide how they feel about all this.

I’ll just start with what has been the most salient thought for me in this protracted campaign: Barack Obama continues to display a degree of open thoughtfulness that I’ve rarely seen before in my nascent political awareness. Stepping back from the details of this race, I think what can be seen as Obama’s greatest asset — and may eventually prove to be his greatest liability — is the complexity of thought he brings to the American public and asks for in return. The pluralism of his background expresses itself in the pluralism of his views; in his words I can see he has a judicious ability to understand the multiple perspectives that exist simultaneously in any one issue. I believe that a willingness to try to get Americans to look at the world this way is the basis for his claims that he can bring people together; this attempt is the major gesture and challenge of his campaign and it is the heart of what separates him from George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.

As this race goes on, the disgraceful junior senator from New York repeatedly exemplifies her reluctance to break away from the binary mode of thinking that is pathologically characteristic of the American public sphere, is responsible for the election of George W. Bush, and allowed him to declare a war on ‘evil-doers’ that brought us to Iraq. As Jon Stewart pointed out yesterday:

It’s interesting to see the classic Clinton strategy — steal Republican positions and re-brand them Democrat — applied in a time when Republican positions have been so ridiculously unsuccessful. It’s embarrassing to see Republican values that venerate folksy ignorance and hawkish hostility to opposition repackaged as Democratic values in order to pander to fear.

Obama is right to push the gas-tax debate. Hillary’s rhetoric on this issue is by far the most sickening of the campaign. The gas-tax controversy is a fascinating development because the situation is so transparent that it in fact makes this election more like an experiment. This race is not a test of Clinton vs. Obama; it is truly a test of the American electorate and the American political system. If Hillary can win, it and we are broken.