[ a fully caused & embodied blog ] [ Good Sense Without God ]
It is in the prosecution of some single object, and in striving to reach its accomplishment by the combined application of his moral and physical energies, that the true happiness of man, in his full vigour and development, consists. Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with repose; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm our eyes. If we consider the position of man in the universe,—if we remember the constant tendency of his energies towards some definite activity, and recognize the influence of surrounding nature, which is ever provoking him to exertion, we shall be ready to acknowledge that repose and possession do not indeed exist but in imagination. - Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government (The Limits of State Action) (1854 ed.)

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Why the working class might not be ecstatic for Obama

 
Paul Street writes:
Whatever his motives, if Obama loses to the arch-reactionary McCain-Palin ticket, it won't be only because of racism. Among other things, it will also be because he and his campaign were unwilling or unable to make an aggressively populist case for voting Democratic to the American working class.
. . .
This was the deeper elitism that "mainstream" (corporate) media coverage deleted when Obama helped provoked charges of class and cultural snobbery with some revealing comments to an elite gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Democratic primary - won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class voters - in Pennsylvania. "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replace them...And it's not surprising," Obama told his wine-sipping West Coast listeners, "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion [14].

No comments: