Obama on the Trail
He's delivering the same message Democrats always rely on. So why does it sound like a clarion call this time around?
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:00 AM
On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.
In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.
And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.
Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" — a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
(Continued here.)
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:00 AM
On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.
In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.
And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.
Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" — a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
(Continued here.)
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