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Obama's victory speech

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Thu, 11/08/2012 - 11:05pm

It's pretty good.

I mean, it's bullshit, of course, but it really does speak to the lived experience of many of his supporters. That's the problem. You can't beat something with nothing!

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letsgetitdone's picture
Submitted by letsgetitdone on

But as you imply, who's stupid enough to believe him? Also, notice he didn't promise justice and fairness or Fiat Justitia, Ruat Caelum! When he does that, I'll be impressed, not before!

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

.. my young nieces and nephews, and my older technical cohort, are buying this stuff lock, stock, and barrel.

ObamaCare might have been calculated with machine-like precision to benefit then immediately, and not people like me (outside the system).

Submitted by YesMaybe on

Young people have as an excuse that they haven't been around that long.

As for older folks: partisanship is a drug, competition is a drug, victory is a drug. You can't expect them to reason or spot bullshit while intoxicated.

Submitted by MontanaMaven on

Last night my liberal friends who don't drink came into our watering hole. My friend walked over to the only person she knew she could celebrate with knowing I would not be celebrating. No, I was drinking. She was high and so was high. Competition, victory, tribalism all a most dangerous mix. They say it is because of the ACA, but so many will be left behind that I cannot celebrate. I cannot celebrate the impending disaster capitalist attack on Social Security. I cannot celebrate more wars.

Since staying permanently inebriated is not an option, I must find some kind of action.

MsExPat's picture
Submitted by MsExPat on

Not to mention that I find stuff like this ominous:

And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do.

"Reducing our deficit" is number one on his list. Not "reducing our vast inequality of wealth" or "ending poverty" or "guaranteeing work at a living wage to everyone"

Really, it's not a good speech at all. It's just more smoke and mirrors. There's no there there.

wuming's picture
Submitted by wuming on

Obama is riding the wave of something very important. That is, the shift in the American identity from "white makes right" to something more pluralistic. All politics is about identity, and who is in, and who is out. We (and I mean the loose network of folks here at Corrente and NC who are MMT supporters) can only implement our policies within the boundaries of a nation state when there is a common national identity.

zot23's picture
Submitted by zot23 on

There are two states of being for a politician speaking to those that elected him/her: telling you what you want to hear and not doing it, or not bothering to tell you what you want to hear and not doing it. It's that old joke, what is a foolproof method to tell when a campaigner is lying to you? His mouth is moving.

It is always, always, always up to the people to make our officials do what we want regardless of what they run on. That being said, it is easier to make that happen if they felt the need to tell you what you wanted to hear during the campaign. Obama's tacking to the left is an excellent sign, it gives us a foot in the door so that if we push hard enough, we might get inside. Compare that to GWB, where you are starting with sitting in the cold looking at a closed (and dead bolted) door.

Certainly, the first challenge will be the Grand Bargain and doing our damnedest to keep it from happening or at least being most favorable to our desires. Obama spoke openly and often about his desire to see it happen, he really wants it - warty Republican obstructionism and all.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

... they will see plenty of people stupid (or hopeful, or trusting) enough to believe this.

Let me frame the question this way: How do I reach my nieces and nephews on this?

And how do I reach the forty-something technical people I know, happy Obama supporters to a person?

I honestly don't know. It's a big problem.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

from here. Assuming you have a twitter account, log into it. Then click on the twitter bird below the post and you will have a tweet box with a short URL to this post, and the title of the post as the content of the tweet. Adjust needed and submit and the tweet box will be submitted to your twitter stream.

I would avoid using FB as the primary, archival source for anything for (a) archival reasons (try finding somethiing old), (b) ownership (here is Creative Commons, not Faceborg), (c) superiority of content creation at a real site (formatting, art), (d) difficulty of linking from outside FB into FB from e.g. here or Naked Capitalism, and (e) FaceBook's evil, Amway-like data mining business model, which is a superset of the privacy concerns. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln....

That said, there are plenty of FB users out there, so suggest create here, repost there. This is very easy to do. Copy the Corrente URL, paste to FB status. An icon an a link to the page should appear.

wuming's picture
Submitted by wuming on

Destroy their hope in Obama. In my experience, a long bout of unemployment and some ugly work place experiences will do that quickly.

Also, political education is key. Case studies of elite failure in other countries play an important role in showing people the way.

Submitted by Hugh on

Most people won't change their minds until reality hits them over the head like a two by four. If the last 4 years didn't do it, that's what it will take. If running interference for the banksters on Wall Street, BP in the Gulf, torturers from the Bush Administration, and Big insurance and Big Pharma on healthcare didn't do, then they won't begin to wake up until we are up to our necks in the next depression. Unfortunately for us and the country, everything about our politics and economy is so twisted up that only the heavy stroke of reality will cut through the oceans of BS so many are lost in. This speech was just another contribution to those oceans.

Submitted by YesMaybe on

And what Joe Bageant thought:

To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have. Even given the unemployment numbers, foreclosures and bankruptcies, most Americans are still not feeling enough pain yet to demand change. Not that they will. Demand change, I mean. We haven't the slightest idea of any other options, outside those provided by the corporate managed state. So in a chorus well-schooled by the media the public demands "reform," of the present system, the systemic pathogenic system based on exploitation of the many by the few, the one presently eating our society from the inside out. How do you reform that?

We are clueless, and the state sees to it that we stay that way. Take the price of gas, about which Americans are obsessive. In one way or another, petroleum is the subject of much news coverage, nearly as much as pissing matches between egomaniacs in Hollywood or o Capitol Hill. So one might think that by now Americans would have a realistic grasp of the petroleum business and things like oil and gasoline prices.

Hah, think again! This is America, this is Strawberry Fields, where nothing is real and the skies are not cloudy all day. We're stewed in a consumer hallucination called the American Dream and riding a digital virtual money economy nobody can even prove exists.

Between general cluelessness, brainwashing, and partisanship, I don't hold out much hope.