Friday, February 8, 2008
Obama as a Rorschach blot: "It's a truism that a presidential candidate acts as a vessel for the dreams and beliefs of his followers. We've seen this for years with Madame Hillary, and more recently with Mike Huckabee. But nowhere has it been more evident than in the case of Barack Obama. With Obama it appears at least in part to be a matter of strategy. His campaign persona is so vague, and slogans such as "the audacity of hope" and "the politics of unity" so generic that they could mean anything, which is exactly what they've been taken to mean. Commentators, pundits, and voters look at Obama and see what they want see -- a "healer", an "agent of change", the "new JFK" -- a new persona each week. It follows directly that everyone also believes that Obama's ideas on policy and the issues are the same as that of the beholder, that the issue dearest to the candidate's heart happens to be the one that's most important to the individual voter. No matter what the constituency or what their concern, no doubt exists that Obama will get straight to work on their particular issue as soon as his shoes hit the oval office carpet."
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