Don't be elitist during your own campaign ads!
From Jeralyn:
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/6/19/...
The transcript of Obama's new ad:
(in Obama's impressive voice:)
"I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money..."
Mr. Obama's grandparents did have some money and they spent a lot of it on him. Mr. Obama attended an expensive private school in Hawaii, partly on scholarship, true. But, according to USA Today, his grandmother, who appears in an ad for Mr. Obama, was a trail-blazing bank vice president. You know, bank vice president's salaries are more than 'not much money.'
At least amongst us gun-toting, bitter, religious, small town, lunch bucket Democrats who don't understand ourselves, work hard, and refuse to believe our old jobs are gone forever...
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..not to mention the fact...
that his mom was only single for about three years while Obama was growing up... and she'd dumped him with his grandparents while she was single.
Obama was never raised by a single mother. He was raised by his married grandparents some of the time, and by his married mother (with father and stepfather) the rest of the time.
When I watched the ad, I couldn't help but think about...
How he described his grandmother in the Greatest Speech About Race Evah:
"a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe"
The Bio Stuff Doesn't Bug Me In The Least
What bothers me, and this goes beyond Obama he merely epitomizes it, is that Democrats now show they are proud Americans with family values because they hate welfare and love tax cuts. It was one thing to compromise on these issues when the conservative movement was ascendant. It's now crashing and burning. What's more, we don't just hold our noses and vote for such policies, we now include them as proof we have good American values.
Just because this is how Republicans do these ads doesn't mean that's how they have to be done. You can do the entire flag-waving, mid-western upbringing thing without advocating for regressive economic policies.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
exactly--he's a Republican now, i guess-
and people still won't buy it--they didn't before, and won't now.
Tax cuts and cutting welfare are absolutely not things that make you a good American--it simply makes him a good Republican.
To be fair...
Did Bill Clinton position himself very differently from this?
To me, the big difference is that our times are far more ready to pull away from Reaganism, and Obama's needlessly pissed that hard-earned change-readiness away in favor of personally aggrandizing faux-change.
But, still, it's not exactly new for a Dem to be pledging allegiance to those GOP frames. Just disappointing. Again.
Exactly Right, VL
But the times make a huge difference, IMO. I'm generally sympathetic to politicians going against the political winds and making adjustments accordingly. Clinton was trying to win and then governing in a very different environment, one much more hostile to Democrats. I never like pledging allegiance to GOP frames, but I understand it's hard to change those frames in a bad environment.
Obama doesn't have a bad environment. He's supposed to change politics and be a fresh face and he's running in a year when Democrats are ascendant and the GOP is crashing. Yet, except for the biographical details, his add could be for a Republican. I understand mimicking the framing of a party that's winning, but doing it for a party that's losing?
Which is not to say I'm ever happy about it, but I'm not a purist on these things.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt