Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Thursday, November 06, 2008


The question now is, "What's next?" Over the coming weeks, months and years, I'll be watching to see whether Obama pursues a truly 21st century presidency--that is, a presidency that prizes transparency, practices bipartisanship, privileges innovation over ideology, avoids the politics of demonization and calls on Americans to sacrifice for the greater good.

Over the last 21 months, the campaign has sent out mixed messages on this front. Early on, Obama refused to accept lobbyist donations and proposed numerous measures to increase government transparency--including a searchable online database of lobbying reports, congressional ethics records and campaign-finance filings. But Obama's secretive, corporate campaign obsessively controlled the media's access to friends, family and documents, often for no discernible reason, and declined (unlike McCain) to release the names of donors who contributed less than $200 to his cause.

In his speech last night, Obama revived a line first deployed at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "We have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States." But while he's crossed party lines on a few consensus issues in Senate--ethics reform, loose nukes, etc.--the president-elect has no real record of bipartisanship on thorny problems like immigration, campaign finance, global warming or earmarks (again, unlike McCain). On the stump, Obama floated above the fray, but he was perfectly content to unleash harsh ads under the MSM radar--including some thinly-veiled swipes at McCain's septuagenarian status. Despite making moderate noises on education and affirmative action, Obama has rarely voted against Democratic orthodoxy. At the debates, he was unwilling to ask Americans to give up anything greater than energy-inefficient light bulbs.


ZEITGEIST?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

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