[FoRK] How Barack lost my vote forever

[Jeff Bone]

On Apr 23, 2008, at 3:23 AM, Stephen Williams wrote:

> Oh. Come. On. I know you are not that closed minded. No politician  
> is going to pitch socialism in the US. Or try to kill the stock  
> market.

Well, clearly, I disagree.

Generally speaking the man's a cipher --- by design, I assume.  He  
speaks of "change" and "hope" and other vagueness, and people simply  
project their wishes on him.  That's been the key to his popularity to  
date;  it's like the well-known effect in software circa 10 years or  
so ago that the highest valuation a company reached pre-revenue was  
immediately before the release of their first beta.  I feel like by  
dropping this particular little morsel, he gave us the key to  
decrypting the real Barack Obama.

The problem here is that the man's got socialism on his mind; that's a  
safe and frankly IMHO uncontroversial conclusion from his statements  
about tax policy as means of ensuring social equality.  Whether or not  
that implies that he'd be successful at passing any particular piece  
of tax-related or other economic legislation, that's a bias that's  
going to inform his governance.  And at this point in time the  
increasingly-populist US doesn't need a socialist in the bully pulpit  
to season the meme stew.

$0.02,

jb