Hello everyone! One week until the election, and I hope you are all registered and ready to vote. In the final analysis, while I support Obama and hope that you will too, I think the act of voting for any candidate (of the several dozen that are running) is much more important than the choice.
However, I have found this election very interesting. The Republicans have really come out of the closet; they are certainly the Satanic party if there was one. Indeed, it's Obama who is imitating Christ here. I'm working on an essay right now that I'll finish tonight or tomorrow talking about why I'm voting for Obama. I'll post it here if you would like. However, I just found a great article by Stanley Fish that you might want to read. It's eye-opening.
On a final note, I read an article several weeks ago about how Obama walked into a church gathering on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant in North Carolina. The crowd was well mannered, save one woman who angrily screamed, "Socialist!" I found this quite odd. I take it she didn't realize that the person she spent all morning worshipping (Jesus, I assume) was perhaps one of the biggest socialists of all time. Alas . . .
Cheers,
Ian
* * *
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/the-power-of-passive-campaigning/?8dpc 
October 26, 2008,
9:30 pm The Power of Passive Campaigning In
the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict
was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to
seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of
negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV
commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the
conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better
campaign.
When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?
The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama
decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and
it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game
is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward
non-campaigning.
We saw it in the 10 days when the activity around the mounting
economic crisis was at its height. Henry Paulson alternated between
scaring members of Congress and scaring the public. Nancy Pelosi
alternated between playing the responsible Congressional statesperson
and playing the partisan attack dog. Media commentators went from one
hysterical prediction to another. John McCain went from saying there’s
nothing to worry about to saying there’s everything to worry about to
saying that he would fix everything by suspending his campaign to
saying that he was not suspending his campaign and that he would debate
after all.
And Barack Obama? He didn’t do much and he said less (O.K., he did
say some reassuring, optimistic things), and his poll numbers went up.
Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense
form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to
charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a
communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity;
he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a
day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign
dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.
In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time,
points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his
relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes
that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W.
Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change.
What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five,
or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or
make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his
opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just
stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire
of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice.
Meanwhile, McCain’s surrogates get red in the face on TV when they
try to explain away the latest jaw-dropping thing Sarah Palin has said,
or proclaim that anything can happen in seven days, or respond to ever
more discouraging poll numbers by saying (how’s this for a weak cliché)
that the only poll that counts is the poll on election day. (I know
things are bad when my wife, a staunch Democrat, feels sorry for them.)
What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place,
John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very
busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus
until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the
arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What
dost thou in this world?”
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama
is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way),
just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ
match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates. What Satan
wants to do is draw Jesus out, provoke him to an unwisely exasperated
response, get him to claim too much for his own powers. What Jesus does
is reply with an equanimity conveyed by the adjectives and adverbs that
preface his words: “unaltered,” “temperately,” “patiently,” “calmly,”
“unmoved,” “sagely,” “in brief.”
In response, Satan gets ever more desperate; he conjures up rain and
wind storms (in the midst of which Jesus sits “unappalled in calm”); he
tempts him with the riches of poetry and philosophy (which Jesus is
careful neither to reject nor deify); and finally, having run out of
schemes and scares and “swollen with rage,” he resorts to physical
violence (McCain has not gone so far, although some of his supporters
clearly want to), picking Jesus up bodily and depositing him on the
spire of the temple in the hope that he will either fall to his death
or turn into Superman and undermine the entire point of his 40-day
trial in the wilderness. He doesn’t do either. He does nothing, and
Satan, “smitten with amazement” — even this hasn’t worked — “fell.”
Toward the end, the poem describes the mighty contest in a metaphor
that captures its odd and negative dynamic. Jesus is “a solid rock”
continually assaulted by “surging waves”; and even though the repeated
assaults result only in the waves being “all to shivers dashed,” they
keep on coming until they exhaust themselves “in froth or bubbles.” The
power Jesus generates is the power of not moving from the still center
of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by
his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and
absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him,
leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale.
And McCain knows it. Last Wednesday, campaigning in New Hampshire,
he spoke sneeringly about Obama’s campaign being “disciplined and
careful.” That’s exactly right, and so far the combination of
discipline and care — care not to get out too far in front of anything
— along with a boatload of money is working just fine. Jesus is usually
the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of
passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.
Mon Oct 27, 2008 1:11 pm
