A Few Thoughts from the New Yorker

[quote]
From the editors of the New Yorker.

The Choice
October 13, 2008
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching-that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has-at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity-undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party-which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time-has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure…
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama-a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America-would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

-The Editors [/quote]

Could this be the real October surprise? Facing the reality and finally doing what needs to be done to move forward? Let’s hope so.

poor arguments to support Obama

he and the dem-controlled congress will turn the US into a socialist state, this is reason enough to vote against him

A: get out of here, you make me laugh too much. a Socialist state! wowee. this fear is for real, right? i don’t see it happening. any shift away from the Bush push and the claxon wails “socialism”. i think there would be a few more steps to go before you get to the level of, say, Venezuela. but perhaps America needs some SOCIALLY BENEFICIAL policies, not BENEFIT THE STRONGEST policies. not that these necessarily need to be called Socialism, waving that bogeyman flag around over your scared head as you do so.

B: well, suck it up bucko. that’s democracy for you. if more people than you want to elect him, he’s in. you’ll have another chance to get rid of it in four years. if you take a step down and look at it from the other side, the majority of people (those who will vote Obama in) had to put up with 8 years of Bush. fair’s fair, now.

How could Obama possibly out Socialist Bush?

HG

brilliant democrats on your housing crisis

So which party just nationalised the US banking system? :laughing:

I’m fairly sure that’s a way bigger socialisation of private equity than anything cooked up by Chavez or Castro, possibly even the Russians or Mao!

Way to go, comrades!

HG

I just read it for the comics anyway

Not just that but which party essentially drew back the curtain so we could all see clearly just how socialist the US, as every other advanced western country, really is. There’s no free market in the Friedman sense, never was, and no reason to fear a future where there won’t be one either. On the other hand, there is every reason to rejoice in the fact that regulation and oversight will become respected words again.

Not just that but which party essentially drew back the curtain so we could all see clearly just how socialist the US, as every other advanced western country, really is. There’s no free market in the Friedman sense, never was, and no reason to fear a future where there won’t be one either. On the other hand, there is every reason to rejoice in the fact that regulation and oversight will become respected words again.[/quote]

Well, that’s always been the great illusion, hasn’t it. The US economy has never been a truly liberal (in the economic sense) market. We’ve had managed oligopoly markets for near 100+ years.

I equate this election and politics in general with WWF. Nothing more than actors flexing their muscles and spewing rhetoric in order to entertain the masses. Nobody really knows or cares what goes on behind the scenes just as long as they feel they are getting their moneys worth. Do you people really think this election is going to change anything? Are you people really that naive? When will people wake up and realize it is not the Dems vs Rep but the elite vs the middle class? God man,wake up you people.

Both of them. :unamused: