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Obama's
image crisis
He needs to be more like FDR, or
LBJ, or Clinton
or anybody besides the
dishrag image he has today
More than a half-century ago, the
Democrats had a candidate who in some ways was sort of a white Barack
Obama.
His name was Adlai Stevenson. He was a brilliant speechmaker, also from
Illinois, smart, sane and witty.
Once, an adoring woman told him that all the thinking people in the
country were behind him.
"That's not enough, madam. I need a majority," he said. They ran him
for president twice, but both times he faced
a war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and never had a chance. Today, while
Adlai has a bunch of schools named after him,
he's mostly been forgotten by everyone under retirement age. Part of
his problem was that he came across as an elitist.
He mostly refused to wrestle around in the mud with the clowns, and won
the lasting respect and admiration of college
faculty everywhere. Unfortunately, he also lost two elections by
enormous landslides. What's going on now with Obama
seems heartbreakingly similar...
He should have been doing what his fellow elitist Franklin D. Roosevelt
did with such great political success and effect
- class warfare. That's what the bleating, bought zombies on Fox
would call it, at any rate. Obama wants to avoid
anything that could be called class warfare. I say let's embrace it.
For eight years we had an administration that did
everything it could for the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the
population at the expense of the rest of us. There was a
vast transfer of wealth to those people earning more than a million
dollars a year. So it's time to reverse that flow.
Reverse that flow, and shout from the housetops that you are doing it.
So I'm getting tired of urging Obama to wake up and join the fight.
If we lose the House and the Senate - would he come to
work?