Tuesday, February 5, 2008

While Clinton Campaigns, Obama Preaches a Revival


Photo credits: Aftermathnews
Pushing his change mantra in front of big crowds, Barack Obama performs well as a talented motivational speaker. Scripted with the soaring rhetoric of his 26-year-old speechwriter, Jon Favreau, Obama reads his lines from a teleprompter in cadences mimicking MLK, Jr., easily rousing the crowd’s emotions to fever pitch.

In today’s Washington Post, E. J. Dionne picks up on the effects of Obama’s evangelical preaching style. Under the headline, Salvation Show, Dionne compares Obama’s rhetorical skills in manipulating the emotions of his audience to Hillary Clinton’s more thoughtful appeals to reason. Dionne concludes with this worrisome comment:

"One of the politicians who spoke before Obama at the{Wilmington} rally, Delaware state Treasurer Jack Markell, cited the New Testament letter to the Hebrews in which Saint Paul spoke of "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It was a revealing moment: While Clinton wages a campaign, Obama is preaching a revival."

Obama, the self-proclaimed harbinger of change, is preaching a revival, and it appears he may well be convincing a majority of Democrats to once again vote with their “guts” instead of their brains as they’ve done in the last two presidential elections that gave us George W. Bush.

An antidote to Dionne’s reflections may be found in David Ignatius’ brief essay titled Addiction to Change, first published earlier this week in the Washington Post. Ignatius is responding to the Post Global’s current discussion: '"With the U.S. presidential primary season in full swing, there's a lot of talk here about "change" vs. "competence" in leadership. Which does your country have more of? Is that a good thing?"'

The Ignatius piece follows in its entirety:

“Here in the land of the fifteen-second attention span, we tend to be suckers for any political pitch that mentions change. Kennedy, Carter, Clinton -- they all promised change. For that matter, so did the brooding, volcanic Nixon and even the grandfatherly Reagan.

“And it's not just in politics that we see this American addiction. In business, every chief executive promises to be a "change agent." Billions of dollars have been destroyed in these vain efforts at transformation--just look at the AOL-Time Warner merger for an example of smart people doing dumb things in the name of change.

“’I'm told that a gathering of U.S. intelligence officials several years ago was given a "Transformation Manifesto" with bromides like, "Instead of a chief innovation officer, our organizations may need a chief destruction officer" and, "Transformation is not a destination. It is a journey." Yikes! No wonder the U.S. intelligence community is such a mess.

“Certainly America needs change, politically. After seven years, the Bush administration is a spent force. But even more, it needs competence. The truly egregious mistakes of the Bush administration were its management failures -- the ruinous mismanagement of post-war Iraq by the CPA, the stunningly botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

“I'd be happy if Obama (or Hillary, or McCain, for that matter) said: I will bring change. And the essence of that change will be that the U.S. government will function effectively again, and that its leaders will make good decisions.

“We don't need a change agent. We need a president.”

It should be obvious by now from both the remarks of E. J. Dionne and David Ignatius that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best qualified to restore the U.S. government to effective functioning and make good decisions.

Let’s take a pass this time around on getting carried away with our emotions by confusing a revival meeting with the obligations of the democratic process to elect a competent president rather than anoint another self-righteous, egotistical leader convinced he can unite the country and change the world solely by virtue of his likeable personality and ability to stir up a crowd.

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