Interesting talk. He's got everybody chanting at him and not listening to him. There don't seem to be any touchpoints, no soundbites. He's authentically different in that he sounds like a reformer but right now he's very outsiderish. I don't listen to announcement speeches (I mean how many are there?) so it's hard for me to say, but he sounds like he gets two degrees of separation from the details.
- On the biggest question he's against the Iraq War. He wants to kill the commitment by a hard date of March 2008.
- Reclaiming the value of citizenship. That's a strong message and it's the one I'd carry.
This is the longest time I've listened to Obama, a 17 minute speech bracketed by music. He strikes an interesting chord, in a major key but oddly dissonant. He understands the quixotic nature of his ambition to bring the country around to his generation's priorities. But his list of usual suspects seems to triangulate him into stereotypical waters, although not quite.
For example, he talks about lobbyists who take over after elections and politics that returns to business as usual after candidates gain office. How does he change that? He says specifically that he will get braodband into inner cities and rural towns. If the government isn't going to build it, what else are they going to do but hand out tax abatements to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint and the industry that nobody calls 'big communications'? I don't think there's anyway or at lease Obama hasn't shown me a way that hes' going to change the way that the Federal government gets things done in America. I believe that there is no fundamental reform in that regard at all from either party. What there can be and very likely will be is a new set of negotiations with different politicians and the same corporations and a new spin department on the state of those negotiations.
Disclosure of all that is very burdensome, and I'd like to see it work differently, but we have to ask ourselves how it's disclosed today. I don't know. Let me give one good example and then break.
I got into a very interesting conversation with a Democrat in PA's Dept of Health last night. Early on in the conversation before we had any good reasons to respect each other's intellect, she rather dismissively told me that of course Bush and Cheney were all about big oil and of course they used their influence to get more money to big oil. So I asked her to name the bill signed by Congress or the Executive Order given by Bush which enabled their record profits. She couldn't, nor could she tell me the price of a barrel of oil, nor would she admit that consumer demand had anything to do with it, or OPECs decision-making process, and she's a policy wonk. Now I understand she was being partisan, but she could do better as could we all. But part and parcel of that means recognizing that government policy can and should only work around the margins of big established markets like those for gasoline. The real difference it can play is with emerging markets.
Imagine if President Obama in his universal health care plan was able to work some miracle out that forced 'big insurance' to pay for everyone. If we were to discover that he talked to lobbyists for the insurance industry would that be good or bad? What if his plan failed? If he talked to lobbyists would that be good or bad? What if he made that deal, it worked, and in 2010 insurance companies suddenly showed record profits? Good or bad? Think about it. Unless Obama has a cousin on the board of directors of every insurance company, his staff or any politicians staff is going to have to deal with the attorneys, accountants and consultants who know that industry best. They are going to negotiate over something and the companies will be about trying to cover costs and make money on the new scheme. If they can't do it, if they can't hire new people and expand operations and do all the things that businesses like to do, then they will continue business as usual and say that the other side is being unrealistic. If Obama doesn't like what the insurance companies are doing, what's he going to do, issue orders as the Commander in Chief?
Sooner or later as I listen to all of the candidates I'm going to be paying attention to whether or not they are 'open to negotiations' or if they are aiming to fight a unliateral pre-emptive war on a particular part of American society.
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