The Audacity of Nope
By THOMAS FRANK
Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2008
It sounds very nice to say, as Barack Obama has done perhaps too much, that the upcoming election is about "hope" and "change." But those anodyne words conceal what I think is the public's true desire: Negation.
Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama's task is to help them heave it overboard.
It seems hard to believe after all the happy Republican talk a few years ago about a "permanent majority," but the public is now more unified in its antipathy toward the GOP than it has been in a long time -- maybe since Watergate, maybe since the Hoover administration.
From where I sit, the change in public opinion is striking. For the past week I've been on a tour promoting my new book, an account of the sometimes ingenious ways in which conservatives have wrecked government.
This is the second time I have written and promoted a book criticizing the conservative movement -- the other one having been published in 2004. Back then, as I recall, when I would talk on the radio and take calls from listeners, about half of the folks who phoned in just wanted to inform me that I was full of it.
(Continued here.)
Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2008
It sounds very nice to say, as Barack Obama has done perhaps too much, that the upcoming election is about "hope" and "change." But those anodyne words conceal what I think is the public's true desire: Negation.
Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama's task is to help them heave it overboard.
It seems hard to believe after all the happy Republican talk a few years ago about a "permanent majority," but the public is now more unified in its antipathy toward the GOP than it has been in a long time -- maybe since Watergate, maybe since the Hoover administration.
From where I sit, the change in public opinion is striking. For the past week I've been on a tour promoting my new book, an account of the sometimes ingenious ways in which conservatives have wrecked government.
This is the second time I have written and promoted a book criticizing the conservative movement -- the other one having been published in 2004. Back then, as I recall, when I would talk on the radio and take calls from listeners, about half of the folks who phoned in just wanted to inform me that I was full of it.
(Continued here.)
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