Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Clinton: Intentionally Trying To Piss Me Off?

I mean, WTF is going on??? I'm basically a Hillary Clinton kind of guy. She's in the ballpark in my book so far as most major policies go, I like policy wonks, I like centrists, I kinda trust DLC types because I figure that my intuitions about business and the economy are untrustworthy, I'd love to have a female president, I have an almost automatic (though rather modest) defend the Clintons response (that it took about six years of vicious, irrational, immoral conservative attacks for me to develop), and my gut feeling about her is that she's probably a decent person. Now, I do have several specific policy disagreements with her, and several specific criticisms. HOWEVER...she's the kind of person for whom I should be fairly happy to vote.

So how is it that the Clinton campaign has managed to alienate me?

I mean, there are several things pushing me more in Obama's direction, but I should be perfectly happy to have HRC as a back-up. And yet I'm finding myself less and less sympathetic toward her.

It's rather hard for me to tell what's going on. Much of it is the nastiness that's coming out of her campaign. Much of what attracts me to Obama is his understanding that tone matters--that, among other things, you can't expect to work well with someone who you were calling incompetent just a few months earlier. Also, HRC is starting to come across as rather a triangulator, and as someone who seems willing to risk blowing the general election in order to win.

Part of it, though, is probably the fact that Obama holds out the hope that we might have the first great president of my lifetime. I mean, maybe yes, maybe no, it's far too early to tell, and so forth... But the mere possibility is invigorating. After the last seven disastrous years, and after coming to believe that mediocrity might be the best we can hope for, it's hard not to be rather excited about the possibility of something more.

There's nothing wrong with criticism, of course--we have an obligation to criticize if we think it's called for. But when the criticism is low and nasty and unfair, then the criticizer seems low and nasty and unfair.
Somewhere Richard Rorty--with whom I disagree about almost all things philosophical--says that we tend to recoil from a certain type of philosopher "because they seem cynical about our deepest hopes." And I suppose that's the way many of the the hard-core anti-Obama folks seem to me. Witness HRC's mocking "the clouds will open up" speech. It's not rational criticism to which I object, but, rather, this derision toward the very idea that, e.g., hope is something important, rather than something irrational or airy or stupid or foolish.

14 Comments:

Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Much of what attracts me to Obama is his understanding that tone matters...

Actually, what you prove time and time again is that tone doesn't matter.

Despite your tone, I love you anyway, man.

Eventually, what a person believes is what it's about, what they say and not how they say it. It's not all about the rhetorical arts.

And even though Sen. Obama's tone is mellow towards people like me--- far more than yours and HRC's--- human beings have this uncanny ability to sort each other out beyond measuring decibel levels.

[Altho you often make the exercise more difficult than it need be.]

1:45 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yeah, I can't believe that I sometimes react angrily to relentlessly nagging, usually highly partisan criticisms. So weird.

7:53 AM  
Blogger Random Michelle K said...

It is the tone, and it *does* make a difference.

I heard part of Obama's comments from last night about McCain, and he pretty much said that although McCain was a good man and a good senator and worth of respect, voting for him would be a continuation of the misguided policies of the current administration.

To me that nails it right there. It was polite, but managed to point out that McCain sides strongly with what many of us strongly disagree with.

No mocking involved. Not that he hasn't mocked when the occasional called for it, but I MUCH prefer respectful disagreement, where you point out actions and beliefs rather than mocking or making comments about the person.

11:53 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I couldn't agree more, MK. Obama's treatment of McCain also strikes me as exactly right: he's eminently worthy of respect, but he's just too wedded to the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. A good man with a bad theory.

This is the kind of thing that must be said--it is, after all, both true and important--but there's nothing here gratuitously angrifying, nothing that should create resentment or hard feelings in McCain or his supporters.

Some anger and resentment in these matters is simply inevitable. In a way, Obama's point is that we shouldn't create more of those things than we have to. It's not merely that they are unpleasant, it's that they are deadly to the body politic. A poison that keeps on doing harm long after the fact, and which tends to produce more such poison, and so on.

Ridiculing the other side may be cathartic, but for small moments of guilty pleasure we pay the great price of alienating our fellow citizens.

Contrary to McCain and HRC's distortions, Obama isn't saying that a change in tone is sufficient for everything to be lovely; rather, he's saying that our public discourse will be better and less distorted if we cut out the avoidable nastiness.

This is a point I've long been attracted to. There is absolutely no doubt that he's right about it.

None of this is to say that sometimes ridicule and energetic opposition aren't called for. The Bush administration, e.g., probably deserves about as much public disapprobation as we can heap on it. But such things are called for far less often than some seem to think.

Or so I'd say.

1:20 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Well, I favored Obama at first just for that reason. But at some point, there's got to be a there there. I think HRC has more "there."

And a pick through your posts, WS, shows you getting angry at a lot of things well before I ever pipe up.

1:20 PM  
Blogger lovable liberal said...

Hey, TVD, it seems pretty clear to me that, when our esteemed host says, relentlessly nagging, usually highly partisan criticisms, he's showing his evenhandedness by putting Hillary's criticisms of Obama into the same category as your hectoring.

Evidently too deftly...

1:56 PM  
Blogger Tracie said...

Speaking of tone, I found a curiously applicable article yesterday that compared the candidates to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185720/

Basically jives with everything that's been said here.

2:45 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

At the risk of being drawn into a fruitless discussion with Tom again, let me note:

One problem with advocating an improvement in the tone of our national discourse is that if you ever slip off the wagon yourself, this is held up as some kind of indictment of your view. Which is absurd.

3:27 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I walk the walk every day here, my friend.

Now, it may be true that I nag, especially when my key point is glossed over in favor of the semantics game, but I often try to disengage and return only to answer the ad homs thrown at me.

I might be given credit instead for grace under fire and not running away.

It'll be interesting to see how Sen. Obama maintains his dulcet tone now that his cakewalk with the media is over.

So far, not so good...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/03/AR2008030302769_pf.html


[Note the masterful segue back to actual topic.]

3:47 PM  
Blogger lovable liberal said...

Easy to get off topic, TVD, when you don't understand what has been said to you. It's hard to go forward without steering you.

But of course you're unsteerable, and forward is not the direction you're looking for.

4:58 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Anything intelligent to say on the topic, LL?

No, I didn't think so. Your purpose is to fan the flames of bad feeling wherever you find them. Hardly one to lecture on tone or anything else.


Tracie, I see the majority of Democrats went for Daffy Tuesday night. I can testify that being cool like Bugs and as temperate as Obama doesn't get me any slack either. Some people just want to fight.

5:20 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Notice how I'm just ignoring the bullshit?

I think I'm growing as a person...

6:17 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

But you didn't ignore it. You called it bullshit, therefore abandoning civility and reasonable argument.

You haven't grown an inch. Sorry.

6:46 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Tom can still type longer than anyone else. He wins!

7:27 AM  

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