I’m Personally Responsible For This Whiny Blog Post

15Jul08

Below is Jesse Jackson apologizing to Barack Obama. I had meant to write a post last week about campaign surrogates. On Sunday the talking heads decided that Jesse Jackson and Phil Graham’s comments were the biggest stories of the week. I think it’s pretty obvious that the media’s coverage of these sort of episodes is pretty bad. For instance I saw several people discussing Phil Graham’s comments without actually explaining if his opinions were similar to John McCain’s positions or other conservatives. What I particularly didn’t like was the failure to link these two stories, since really both Jesse Jackson and Phil Graham were discussing the same issue.

Graham and Jackson’s comments are both very representative of their ideologies. In line with Jackson’s comments many liberals don’t like it when politicians stress personal responsibility without stressing what the government is going to do to help people. Regarding Phil Graham’s comments conservatism is pretty firmly linked to the idea that people that ask for help during economic downturns are “whiners”. In fact stressing “personal responsibility” and calling people whiners are really both just different ways saying, “deal with it, it’s your problem”.

I think the issue is that as a black liberal Barack Obama feels it necessary to emphasize personal responsibility and thus implicitly stress the limitations of his proposals to reform society. In a similar way John McCain doesn’t really have any plans to tackle America’s problems, particularly economic ones, and Phil Graham doesn’t like Republicans need to spend all their time pretending to have plans to solve everything.

I think this a basically the current dynamic of American politics; Democrats spend their time talking about how their plans aren’t going to be enough and Republicans just pretend their plans are actually designed to address problems. I though we getting away from that, but I guess the primaries are over and it’s back Dick Morris triangulation.

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Tags: Barach Obama, Jesse Jackson, John McCain, Phil Graham