Reich about to endorse Obama

[winterbadger]

From New York Magazine: longtime Clinton friend and former Labor Sec Robert Reich to endorse Obama.

Why? Says Reich:

"I saw the ads" — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama's bitter/cling comments a week ago — "and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It's the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical."

Comments

[dativesingular.livejournal.com]

This is exactly how I felt after watching the debates the other night.

[winterbadger]

I missed them, and then my friend JRC and Daniel Schorr (who I think I am going to start worshiping as an avatar of Lord Ganesha) described them in more or less the same way, and I was glad I didn't.

I vacillate between hoping that people will have more sense than to fall for the politics of talk show personality and fearing that that is exactly what they want. At my sanest, I remember that nothing is ever so simple as to have a single answer, even though we demand them of life on a regular basis, and that therefore both my hopes and fears are liable to be realised.

[dativesingular.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, the interviews they did of people on the street were similar to my reaction, because they were pulling the same crap on both candidates. Obama more so than Clinton, but it wasn't until 40 minutes into the damn thing that they talked about anything worthwhile.