Some Interesting Pieces...

First, some thoughts on a topic we discussed in class today. After watching the ThinkProgress video on how much of the mainstream media are insisting that America is a center-right country, I’ve become a bit confused about how America views President-elect Obama. Karl Rove seems to suggest that the American public was willing to vote for Obama because of his “center-right” platform and yet it was ultra-conservatives like Rove who attacked Obama the entire election for secretly harboring extremist, socialist views. I can’t get these two portrayals of Obama to add up. It’s as if conservatives are now re-painting Obama as a centrist candidate, something they probably would have been reluctant to say during his actual campaign. So if the public voted for Obama because he was a center-right candidate, then what should one make out of the former portrayals of Obama as a dangerous radical? Did they simply not work? Or what if the public really did think of Obama as an ultra-liberal, socialist, “spread the wealth around” candidate? Why the need to re-posit him? I guess the question is: Why did America vote for Obama, anyway?

Norm Solomon has an article on CommonDreams this week called “A Mandate for Spreading the Wealth.” Since I had the opportunity to have dinner with Norm Soloman (with a number of other Park students) when I was a freshman, I’ve been kinda-sorta-sometimes following his writing. In his piece, he claims that Barack Obama does, indeed, have a responsibility to redistribute the incredibly unbalanced location of wealth in this country and also seems to think that this is the reason America voted for him.

Solomon writes:

This fall, the candidates and their surrogates endlessly repeated such arguments. As much as anything else, the presidential campaign turned into a dispute over the wisdom of "spreading the wealth." Most voters were comfortable enough with the concept to send its leading advocate to the Oval Office.

And later:

Obama and his activist base won a mandate for strong government action on behalf of economic fairness. But since election night, countless pundits and politicians have somberly warned the president-elect to govern from "the center." Presumably, such governance would preclude doing much to spread the wealth. Before that sort of conventional wisdom further hardens like political cement, national discussions should highlight options for moving toward a more egalitarian society.

For the most part, I’d say I have to agree. Perhaps McCain’s attack ads just weren’t scary enough for America. I hope we’re at a point where re-distributing the wealth is no longer a smear, but a reason to vote for a candidate.

Another writer I semi-regularly follow and who semi-regularly writes has a piece that I found interesting. Katha Pollitt has “Sayonara, Sarah” in The Nation this week. Pollitt begins in her typical sarcastic voice but moves to a semi-serious question: What did Palin do for women? I’m not sure I agree with all her points, nor am I confident in my understanding of where Pollitt crosses the line between sarcasm and seriousness, but I really liked parts of her last paragraph, namely:

It is hard even to remember now how iconoclastic Hillary was--how hard it was for her to negotiate femininity and ambition, to be warm but not weak, smart but not cold, attractive but not sexy, dynamic but not threatening. Only a year ago, it was a real question whether men would vote for a woman or, for that matter, whether women would. Palin may have been unfit for high office, but just by running she showed there was more than one mode for a female politician.

This, however, I’m not sure I agree with:

After almost two years of the whole country watching two very different women in the White House race, it finally seems normal.