General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: All you folks so unhappy with President Obama, let me ask you a question... [View all]joshcryer
(62,269 posts)...consumer ad campaign of all time. And I warned people about it. Hell, the funniest part was that I was at Mile High Stadium, waited 5 hours, the entire event was like the Superbowl, the World Series, it was epic. Then I fully realized to the extent he'd taken the consumerization of the politics (I hadn't been active politically since the Dean scream, no I didn't vote in 2004, too disheartened, in a red state, didn't matter). And he'll do it again. And he'll win. No worries on that count. No other candidate could ever begin to take advantage of this campaigning style, hell, some might even be ideologically opposed to it since it involves data mining and branding and copy testing.
That does not mean that you were unable to actually see the contents of the message. The contents of the message were wide open, for everyone to see. It's kinda like, in a way, those ads for various medicines. Show an ad for some heart medicine and then a whole bunch of side effects are listed at the end. The problem is that people were too fixated on getting rid of Bush to care much about the side effects. It's as if all of Obama's supports pressed the mute button just as the "side effects" were announced. Just as Obama said he'd escalate in Afghanistan, just as Obama said he'd go after the Taliban, just as Obama criticized bureaucracy, just as Obama said he'd cut the deficit, just as Obama said he'd drill for oil, and so on and so forth.
To call me an Obama supporter is somewhat of a misnomer (though not entirely untrue), I don't support any politicians to any significant degree. Here in Colorado I fought to keep the state blue because the Republicans were promising to expand the military bases, which had a very strong grassroots movement opposed to it. If I and other Coloradian liberals sat home that likely would've happened. Yeah, we stopped it, and we stopped the US from tripling its military training grounds. Who knows what state they're going to try it in next. We must stop it, we have to.
For me, it is a lesser of two evils, because as a privileged straight white male it doesn't affect me. I don't get WIC, need heating assistance, need Pell Grants, I don't need any of that. I can, if I wanted to, sit home on election day and the outcome, regardless, is going to be beneficial to me. If a Republican gets elected my taxes go down, the police forces go up, and welfare cases go to jail if not murdered in the streets. If a Democrat gets elected my taxes go up, but only marginally, and I get health care and such.
But for others? I've come to fully recognize that it isn't a lesser of two evils for them. I believe you're an expat, which is fine, and I do appreciate expats (particularly voting expats). Surely, you, of all people, know that the outcome won't affect you as much as it will affect a poor black single mother who is getting WIC, heating assistance, food stamps, and whose child is getting educated in public education, right? The Republicans will take it all away from her and send her to despotism.
I'll support Obama, but I won't be ashamed for it, because I never cheered him, and I saw through the campaign rhetoric, and I tried to tell others about how he really was (that he wasn't much better than Hillary, and given that Hillary was his SoC, it is clear that absolutely nothing would have been different had she been chosen, except she would've been a more hard line partisan than he).
Best of luck.