Flying on Rhetoric

My friend Jon shared this article from the Economist.com in google reader. Jon finds so many great articles that I find interesting.

This one here is something that I've been thinking for a long time. The delusion of a candidate with no record of change - claiming that he can change... change what? how? on what basis? It seems the masses want to drink the delusion potion. The fact is ... this guy is like every other politician in DC. To dress him up and blow smoke in our faces to fool us into thinking otherwise is politics at work. For those who are infected by spin doctors - wow.

Here's a favorite passage from the article:

The Obama that emerges from its pages is not, Mr Freddoso says, “a bad person. It’s just that he’s like all the rest of them. Not a reformer. Not a Messiah. Just like all the rest of them in Washington.” And the author makes a fairly compelling case that this is so. The best part of the book concentrates on Mr Obama’s record in Chicago, his home town and the place from which he was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, before moving to the United States Senate in 2004. The book lays out in detail how this period began in a way that should shock some of Mr Obama’s supporters: he won the Democratic nomination for his Illinois seat by getting a team of lawyers to throw all the other candidates off the ballot on various technicalities. One of those he threw off was a veteran black politician, a woman who helped him get started in politics in the first place.

My husband and I often talk about how Obama came to rise in the Democratic Party. I always figured Obama was someone that would toe the party line and was someone they could imprint on ... like a dry erase board. Someone who would be easily controlled and dressed up by the lunatic Pelosi's of the world. This article pretty much says what I'd been thinking.