--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "feste37" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> The real example of hubris in politics is not Barack, who
> seems to me to have a lot of common sense and "groundedness,"
> but the current occupant of the White House and the neocons
> who surround him.
Maybe you want to give this piece another read.
"Hubris" wasn't the main point at all, nor did
it suggest that Obama didn't have common sense
or "groundedness."
Where it used the term "hubris," it was in the
context that it encouraged "the belief that
gifted politicians can engender a selfless
communitarian solidarity."
I don't recall that being part of GWB's pitch,
do you?
In any case, *my* point had to do with what some
of us perceive to be the emptiness of the "hope
and change" meme that Barry was warbling blissfully
about earlier, as if anyone who isn't enraptured
by it is somehow stuck in the past and considers
"hope" a dirty word.
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote:
> >
> > Excerpts from a much longer piece in The City
> > Journal this past summer. I don't agree with
> > everything he says, but he makes some excellent
> > points in these excerpts about the general
> > flabbiness of Obama's "hope and change" meme:
> >
> > Obama, Shaman
> >
> > by Michael Knox Beran
> >
> > The candidate's post-masculine charisma tempts America in the
> > age of Oprah.
> >
> > In the patois of punditry, "charismatic" has come to mean little
> > more than "like a rock star." But the striking thing about the
> > charismatic leader is the extent to which his followers regard
> > him as a healer of wounds, an alleviator of pain. In this sense,
> > surely, Senator Barack Obama is charismatic...he has entered the
> > American psyche not as a hero but as a healer.
> >
> > The country, or much of it, has longed for such a figure, a
> > man from the once-oppressed race whose rise to power will
> > atone for the sins of slavery and racial stigmatization. But
> > Obama's rhetoric encompasses more than a promise of racial
> > healing. He is not the first politician to argue that politics
> > can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter
> > into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political
> > swindles: the belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a
> > civic happy hour and give a people a sense of community that
> > will make them feel less bad....
> >
> > The danger of Obama's charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies
> > in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians
> > can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a
> > renovation of our national life would require not only a change
> > in constitutional structure--the current system having been
> > geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash
> > of private interests helps preserve liberty--but also a change
> > in human nature....
> >
> > Obama revives a style of charismatic leadership that fell out
> > of favor in the United States after the death of FDR. Of the
> > three presidents since 1945 most often regarded as possessing
> > charismatic qualities, the first, Kennedy, was a tax cutter
> > who questioned liberal utopianism when he said that "life is
> > not fair," and the second, Reagan, sought to curb the hubris
> > of New Deal étatisme. The third, Clinton, said that he could
> > feel our pain but retreated from his pledge to heal it when he
> > scrapped a plan to nationalize medicine. Obama, by contrast,
> > is faithful to the old-style charismatics, whose slogans
> > ("social solidarity," for example) he has taken out of cold
> > storage.
> >
> > Of course, he would not have gotten far had he simply defrosted
> > the ideas of Henry Wallace and George McGovern. Obama's
> > charisma is tuned to the mood of the moment. The charisma of
> > American political leaders has typically rested on images of
> > unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt
> > in the North Dakota Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose
> > sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his Secret Service code
> > name ("Lancer"); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret
> > Service called "Rawhide." Obama's charisma, by contrast, is
> > closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with
> > today's television talk-show culture, [which] is occupied with
> > the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under
> > the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good....
> >
> > Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to
> > bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans
> > to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist
> > gifts....Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier
> > charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing
> > accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy
> > rather than authority, confessional candor rather than
> > muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine
> > testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be
> > uncanny: "Everybody who's dealt with him," columnist David
> > Brooks says, "has a story about a time when they felt Obama
> > profoundly listened to them and understood them." His two books
> > are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most
> > prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political
> > healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-
> > psychology one....
> >
> > Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does
> > it teach us to despise our political system's wise recognition
> > of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it
> > encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it,
> > in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in
> > the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral
> > parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in
> > which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false
> > gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make
> > sense of our condition.
> >
> > Read more:
> > http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_obama.html
> >
>
