There is a provocative, well-written article by Joe Klein in this week's TIME magazine. I highly recommend everyone read it. Excerpt follows:
"Reagan's vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings--it was 'Morning in America.' The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street. . . at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed, "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of myth of an America that existed before we had all these PROBLEMS. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest reiteration of that myth."
[the article continues]
"Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what use to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America--an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly.. . ."
This is really the essence of Klein's point, and it is stunning:
"Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character; far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on Ebay than know that she imposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a PORKAHOLIC as a mayor of Wasilla. So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov 4. He has no personal annecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born--a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity."
MY COMMENTS FOLLOW -
Large segments of America, much of it rural, blue collar and in the South, want to believe in the myth here, and not in the reality that Palin's message is that myth that Klein writes about.
There is no reason on earth that Obama's message should be threatened by the likes of McCain and Palin, other than the fact that many Americans are rejecting a black man with a message of change, a frightening unknown for these people.
They will, in summary, cling to the myths of Palin and McCain, rather than face the unvarnished reality that Obama renders to them. It's just too hard for them to accept.
Scrape away all the anger and lies of the Republican Party and you have a demand that change NOT happen, that the status quo of the past eight years be perpetuated because the change proposed by an educated black man is too daunting, or uncertain to contemplate.
"Tell me a bedtime story, Sarah Palin. Make everything good for us. Confirm the feeling in our hearts that Obama, the black man, has no clue about our needs, wants, desires."
And Palin is complicit in feeding that hunger, feeding nonsensical garbage to people who will take the lies over simply dealing with the reality of change. In that, Palin is acting in an exceptionally cynical manner.
rh
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