Obama is Not a Movement

Obamanism is the term coined by the media to describe the feverish excitement many Obama supporters are experiencing in this primary elections. Many are calling it a movement to reawaken the dormant electorate. I found this piece written by political scientist Benjamin Barber in his blog, which attempts to diffuse the misrepresentation.

Movements outlast candidates and candidacies. Their leaders generally don’t even run for office — think Martin Luther King, Hugo Chavez, Benjamin Spock, and Betty Friedan; or Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. Candidates may become attached to or embody a cause, but the cause comes first and the candidate is never himself (herself) the cause, any more than working to elect the candidate is the movement. Movements do not start in a candidacy or end in an election.

When Senator Obama calls for your engagement in the political and civic process, do you really think he means only as long as it’s about voting for him? About voting at all? If there is a movement attached to his cause, beyond making him the nominee, it is a movement to call on citizens to reassume the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship. To understand that the quality of our democracy depends less on the quality of leadership than the quality of citizenship

http://blog.civworld.org/

Obama is not a movement. He is only a candidate trying to get elected.

Voters beware: House Republicans on the hunt again

Republicans in the House have officially unleashed their divisive political stunts at the near-sight of Congressional elections. Last Friday, the House voted 256-153 to reject a timetable for the pullout of US troops in Iraq (as if there are no other pressing issues facing our nation like immigration reform, education, state of emergency medical facilities, and high gasoline prices to name a few), fiercely igniting an ongoing debate about the mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the open-ended commitment and resources this Administration is blindly banking on. According to the Associated Press, "the Republican-led House has approved a non-binding resolution that praises US troops, labels the Iraq war part of the larger global fight against terrorism and says an "arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment" of troops is not in the national interest".

The surreptitious move in this strategic political stunt is to rally republican support for the President's failed Iraq policy and to mold it into a cheap political slogan for the coming elections, using it to engage votes in a platform that suggests that if you are not for the support of the troops and the fight against terrorism then you must be unpatriotic and a traitor. Voters beware: Republicans want to make you believe that opposing the war is not on our national interest, but what we are REALLY saying is this: let's have a comprehensive review of policies and consider redeployment. A change in direction is in the best interest of the US and Iraq. Like the USA Today stated on Friday's Our View: the (House) debate is a cynical display of election-year politics that turns troops into political pawns.
I couldn't agree more.