What’s Sauce for the Gander Is Marinating the Goose [corrected]
Do Hillary and the Hillaryites really not see that they are being set up? A Generation X-er like myself, Barack Obama was a still a kid during the late 6os/early 7os period when the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and other revolutionary radical groups stalked the Earth, gaining far more publicity than adherents and inserting themselves into they not how many future pointless political debates. Yet somehow Obama becomes a a card-carrying Maoist because he sat on a Chicago community board with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, many years later when Ayers was a respected academic. So when ABC and its former Clintonista anchor George Stephanopoulos smuggle a “spider-web chart” type question about Ayers from Sean Hannity on to a national TV debate, Hillary agrees that yes this is a serious issue, working to keep the campaign in the Baby Boomer Reflux mode that she thinks helps her.
Where does she think this sort of campaigning will go from here if she does happen to win the nomination? Having thoroughly alienated the black voters who make up the Democrats’ surest base and have turned off millions of young Obama supporters, does she not realize that she will have put the GOP in position to attack her on the same grounds she now attacks Obama, only with months of new reinforcement for the image of the Democrats as ROTC-bombing Maoist radicals? Does not she not remember that there is actually more substantive material to base such attacks on in her case because she was actually there in the supposed bad old days? While Obama was still in elementary school, she was an adult, living in places like New Haven and Berkeley and involved with various forms of radical politics, such as working at a law firm that defended various Panthers? Clinton’s no radical either, but she was a lot closer than Obama’s board seat.
It is not surprising that Obama was a little less sharp than usual in the ABC debate. As I can attest from any number of department meetings and academic gatherings, it ain’t easy being inside someone else’s psychodrama. He had a quite deft comment, gesture actually, about the debate today.
Barack is not a GenXer. A consensus is growing in the media that Obama is part of Generation Jones–
those born 1954-1965 into the lost generation between the Boomers and Xer. Several top media venues, including
Newsweek, CBS, and The Wall Street Journal, have recently made the case that Obama is a GenJoneser, and I’ve seen
a couple interviews with generations experts just in the last week or so that argued the same. You Xers need to
wait your turn before you get your Prez.
Comment by ElectionWatcher — April 18, 2008 @ 11:00 am
[...] be it from me to be an ungracious host, but I must demur from commenter Election Watcher’s correction of my generational terminology [...]
Pingback by Publick Occurrences » Alias Generations X and Jones — April 18, 2008 @ 3:41 pm