The Obama Fad

As the painfully long primaries finally wind down, the Democrats are finally coalescing around Barack Obama to be their nominee for president of the United States. My own state of Oregon has backed Obama and he is huge on campus here at Oregon State. There are a couple of big thoughts that have passed through my mind repeatedly as I watch all of this unfold. The first is an honest bewilderment at why Obama is so popular in the first place, a question I think I have answered but am looking for alternative points of view on. The other is a fear; the fear of someone that is little known, inexperienced, and highly radical. I will deal with these two questions in order.

 

As a political scientist, I look at first glance at Barack Obama and wonder how in the world he became so popular so quickly. He was a little known first term senator from Illinois just over a year ago but now he is a household name throughout the developed world. Europeans are coming out in numbers in their own countries to follow the new phenom in American politics. He is popular among African Americans (no surprise since he is one also), upper-class whites, and students. There are various reasons that could be delved into as to how he rose to prominence so quickly, but I am not going there in this discussion. I want to focus on students.

 

Obama is pretty popular with students nationwide. Based on his policies alone it is difficult to know why he is so wildly popular with students compared with Hilary Clinton. Their overall stated objectives and platforms are very similar. They hold the same common beliefs. Personally, I think people like Obama because it is trendy to do so. He is young, his background relatively unknown, and his policies flowery and hopeful, yet so vague. He is a master orator, I mean no disrespect to him. He definitely knows how to give a speech and rally his base. He talks about "changing Washington" and making "new politics rather than politics as usual". But he says nothing substantive, which brings me to my next thought.

 

When taken over time, the Senator's words seem so vague and empty. He talks about hope, crossing party lines, bringing real change that will last instead of short-term DC political change. He talks about what he will do and it all sounds great. But what are his plans to actually do any of that? How is he going to change things? Even if he wins and has a democratic majority beneath him, that sweeping of change is highly unlikely. And what is this change anyway? You watch any single show on TV and you will see multiple ads by all kinds of politicians and you might wonder if there isn't some federal law stating that all political ads must mention the word "change" at least once in the course of their message. Obama's slogan is "Change We Can Believe In" but what exactly is the change he proposes?

 

I wish that my fellow students were better educated voters. I truly think that he is the next cool thing out there and so people are riding the trend like they do with just about any other fad. I feel this is dangerous because they know little of what his policies actually are (because he keeps everything so vague anyway) and no one knows his background. Every year a non-partisan group ranks all senators and congresspeople on how liberal or conservative they are. The rankings are based solely on quantitative data: how that person votes in their respective house of Congress. Low and behold the rankings this year have Barack Obama as number 1 liberal. That's right, Obama is the most liberal man in congress. If many people see Hilary Clinton and John Kerry as radicals, watch out, here comes Obama.

 

This ranking I believe goes back to his votes even in the Illinois state legislature. His entire political career has been spent working to push the agenda of the most radically liberal people in this country. I think that is a dangerous person to have leading the United States. I think many people who support him now do not realize how far off center he is politically. I would take Hilary Clinton as president long before I would take Obama. And besides the fact that he is extremely liberal, I do not think he is strong enough to lead this country. When he wasn't voting his liberal agenda, on other issues he simply does not take a side. There are few other Senators who simply vote "present" instead of yay or nay as Obama. He shows up, but won't take a side.

 

Working  with Republicans and Democrats? Reshaping politics as usual in Washington? Are you kidding me? If Obama is elected president, you will see polarization of the parties taken to new heights. You cannot take a far-left leader and expect that even moderate conservatives are going to want to work together on everything. Someone more moderate is needed. It will be a sad day for the United States if Barack Obama is ever sworn in as its president.

The New Bad Words

Lately I have been watching the political ads on TV and I have been making some observations. A lot of the things said in these ads play on the emotions or internal feelings of people and, I might add, the ignorance of many. Using the media and strong words, campaigns are distorting the true meanings of words and making them into bad words to make things sound negative. Or they make negative things sound positive in a sort of Orwellian double-speak effort.

 

The first one that has really gotten me lately in the media is a couple of Democratic candidates (it is irrelevant where they are from or what they are running for) who have been running ads about lobbyists. They are talking about how bad lobbyists are and how we need to stop listening to the special interests of the lobbyists. After studying this fairly extensively, I have something to say about it.

 

Lobbyist groups I would dare to say are the reason we as regular citizens still have some direct influence over our politicians. Lobbyist groups do have lots of money, yes. Lobbyist groups are powerful groups that have the ear of the lawmakers. But did you know that you, yes you yourself personally, are represented by at least one lobbyist group all the time? It pretty much does not matter how old or young, rich or poor, or what your occupation, there is a lobbyist group representing your interests and fighting for YOU in Washington, in the state capital, wherever.

 

Even students are represented by lobbyists groups. OSU has a couple taskforces: one for federal and one for state affairs. There are many others too, but the point is these are lobbyists. Maybe they are not as powerful as some, so I will give you a more well known one: the American Association of Retired People. That's right, AARP is a special interest group, a lobbyist group that was meant to fight for the rights and interests of elderly people in the United States. The organization AAA is the same thing. These are lobbyists, these are special interests, and yet they have done many good things. No one would dispute this. Lobbyist groups keep democracy in full swing and keep the government accountable. In a system dominated by only two parties (unlike almost any other democracy in the world) interests groups make sure the minorities do not get shoved out of the system.

 

There is another ad out there that just galls me personally and I believe it is based on another gross misunderstanding of past events. The ad starts out: "Some votes weren't counted, and we got a mess" and the images on screen refer to the 2000 presidential elections. Apparently people still will not let go of a decision made almost 8 years ago. The Supreme Court decision in the case of Bush v. Gore still seems to just eat at some liberal naysayers. Does anyone really remember anymore why that case even started? Sure we know the outcome; recounting of votes in Florida stopped and Bush was declared the winner of the election.

 

People are still up in arms over what they feel was George W. Bush's political wrangling and that he used the Supreme Court to further his own political goals. But does anyone know why it became a court case in the first place? Al Gore got it put before the Supreme Court, not George Bush. And the decision was about as close to unanimous as a controversial decision can get: 7-2. The court was far less conservative than it is now and still a strong majority sided that the recount should stop. Why is this even an issue anymore? The problem was not that votes were not counted, the controversy was over a RE-count of votes that had already been recorded. Liberals, get over it. It is 8 years in the past, time to move on. You talk about change and moving on from the past, practice what you preach.

 

The last one I am going to touch on is a personal issue that bothers me more than any other political issue. This one is something that, again, is in a couple of democratic candidates' ads. This one has to do with "protecting a woman's right to choose". When you put it in those terms, it does not sound bad at all does it? But what exactly is being protected? What is being protected is a woman's "right" to choose to kill an unborn child. They are "protecting a woman's right to choose" by taking away an unborn child's right to life. It all sounds different though, does it not, when they sanitize it in the media and in political ads?