Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The Day After

Pretty much anyone who is not on drugs or delusional is finally figuring it out that its over for Hillary's campaign. True, out of meanness, an ego and sense of entitlement that knows no limits, and a refusal to accept the hand writing on the wall, she will likely persist a while longer, spreading nastiness wherever she goes. But hopefully, the superdelegates will find some balls and tell her point blank that it's over and she needs to hang it up. The American citizenry is suffering from Clinton fatigue and wants both Hillary and Bill to fade away. Change is afoot and they are not the agents of change wanted and needed. Bob Felton at Civil Commotion has a good analysis of this reality, although I do not agree with some of his views on where Obama will lead us. Here are some of Bob's comments I agree with:
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Between Barack Obama’s shellacking of Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, and her razor-thin margin in Indiana, there is now all but universal agreement to the prediction I made months ago: Barack Obama will be the Democrats’ nominee. We don’t know when or how evil-tempered will be Hillary’s withdrawal, but there can no longer be any serious question that she is finished. That’s the good news — but it’s not an unmixed blessing.
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The pathologically nasty politics perfected by James Carville and exemplified by the Clintons’ has been rejected, and rejected decisively. Good. Our public life has been fouled for too long by their cynical, Goebbels-like, shout-loudest dishonesties. Invariably, however, propagandists come to believe their own lies — and that is, just as invariably, the thing which undoes them. They fail to recognize that propaganda does not persuade anybody, that what it does is serve as a lens that focuses already-latent discontents.
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The malcontents exploited by the Clintons, and their doppelgangers on the right, will remain discontented and susceptible — but the meaning of Hillary’s defeat is that the discontents of the majority are now focused on the propagandists and noisemakers themselves. Obama was first to recognize that, and has exploited it with extraordinary skill, with the result that the efforts to slime him according to the now-standard Carville play book have done him no injury while furthering irritation at the Clintons et. al.
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The noisemakers understand clearly that there is something afoot in the public mood, and they understand clearly that the locus of the threat to their cynical manipulations is Barack Obama, and that is why the noisemakers of the left and the noisemakers of the right have so easily joined hands to trash him. Their business — Sharpton, Jackson, Limbaugh, Hannity, on and on — is keeping simpletons unbalanced with rage, and Obama threatens the good times. So they will ramp-up their already-cynical, noisy, and dishonest attacks on Obama and, probably … elect him, because they just can’t ‘get,’ or accept, that disgust with them is Obama’s secret, right-out-in-plain-sight weapon.

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