Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Even temperment

One thing that has impressed me about Barack Obama lately is his even temperment. Nothing seems to ruffle his feathers or break his stride. He doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t get testy or perturbed. In fact, he seems to have handled all the pressures of the campaign amazingly well.
Glenn Greenwald has a good post about how Obama effectively handled a rightwing attack on his patriotism without getting defensive and agitated.
So far, this is one of the qualities I like best with Obama and it contrasts well right now with the shrill tone that Hillary Clinton has lately adopted as she desperately tries to salvage her presidential prospects.
Clinton’s “outrage” the other day over the content of some Obama campaign fliers was clearly a tactical effort on her part to try and link Obama to someone most Democrats despise - Karl Rove. You know that Clinton did not just pick up one of these flyers the other day and fly into a rage. Rather, there was probably a strategy session where they came up with the idea of trying to link Obama to Rove, followed by a search through the campaign literature for something that they could pretend to get upset about. It all came across as very fake and very staged. But the point was not to reach out to politically astute people, but rather those who don’t pay much attention to these things and would be more likely to be persuaded by such mock outrage.
Needless to say, I’ll be glad when this is all over and the Democrats can all kiss and make up and stop all the sniping and backstabbing.

No comments:

Post a Comment