By Anne Laurie November 3rd, 2012
Thanks to faithful Obot and BJ commentor Lamh35.
Tom Scocca at Slate, on the same topic, “parsing the narrow tribal appeal of the Republican nominee“:
... There is a real, airtight bubble in this election, but it’s not Obama’s. As a middle-aged white man, in fact, I’m breaching it. White people—white men in particular—are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense, in defiance of normal Americans. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney’s candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him….
What is it with these white men? What are they seeing that ordinary people don’t see? What accounts for this … secession of theirs, from the rest of America? John Sununu, Romney’s campaign co-chair, responded to Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama by saying, “I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States—I applaud Colin for standing with him.”
Sununu was trying to be snide. But there he is, standing with Mitt Romney. Just like Donald Trump and Clint Eastwood and Buzz Bissinger and Meat Loaf—one aging white man after another. It’s a study in identity politics…
For your further amusement, Paul Constant addresses the good people of Saskatchewan:
... It’s easy to fall prey to the belief that all Americans are racists who’ll hang Obama in effigy on their lawns, or monstrous shambles of men who claim with alarming sangfroid that rape isn’t really that bad, or gun-worshipping ghouls who believe that God is a little bearded man who perches on their shoulders and whispers homophobic, anti-science rants into their ears. And you probably believe we Americans all vote against our own financial interests — affordable health care, higher taxes on the wealthy, laws to protect us from corporate greed — because we harbor the illusion that we’re just one lottery ticket away from becoming spiteful billionaire slave-drivers ourselves. But that’s not true. Only about half of us are like this.
The impulse to blame is strong, and culprits are everywhere. Our news media are easily the dumbest and laziest in the First World. Because we loathe taxes down to our DNA, our schools are fomenting armies of vacuous boobs who believe critical thought means posting a one-star review on Yelp. Then 9/11 happened, blowing out the circuit boards of a whole generation of our wishy-washiest liberals, transforming them into paranoid, frightened babies who throw their tantrums at the ballot box, electing only the shrillest and most offensive candidates. Bill Clinton pushed liberals to the political middle, and then George W. Bush pushed conservatives to the primate side of the evolutionary scale. You could throw around enough accusatory fingers to blind a good-sized metropolitan area….
What else is on the agenda this evening?
Source:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/11/03/saturday-evening-open-thread-6/