"The loftiest poetry will not solve these issues."

[Tactical Progressive]

That's from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby Kennedy's eldest daughter and ex Lt. Governor of Maryland, swept out of the Governorship by post-9/11 Publicans. She's talking about Barack.

Obama is little more than poetry and pretension. The last thing this country needs right now is poetry from someone who hasn't had a lick of experience solving problems in Washington DC.

Besides the lack of experience, though, Barack has the wrong attitude as well. "Obama's appeal is that we can all get along.", Kennedy notes, while reminding us that, by contrast, "My father challenged people."


This is representative of why John Edwards' attitudes were never that close to Obama's. John wanted to fight - that was his conception of 'change'. Obama's theme of change is the exact opposite - he wants to just get along. It's as if he doesn't have so much as a clue about what's been going on in Washington for the last sixteen years, including eight years where Bill Clinton did about as well as anyone could possibly do in compromising with the right. As a consequence of not understanding the Washington reality, after nearly a decade and a half of unrelenting animosity from hard-right Republicans with power, Barack wants to answer with compromise, just as Democrats are poised to finally regain control of the machinery of Washington, in a nation reeling from Publican-instituted pain.

As Kathleen Kennedy remembers her father quoting the ancient graffiti on the slave-built pyramids: "No one got angry enough."

Which sounds alot more like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards than it does Barack Obama.


The real poetry of this political campaign is Hillary Clinton, fusing brilliance and toughness into the most historic candidate ever in American politics - the first woman to run for office of the Presidency with a real chance for winning. Next to that, the men, including Obama, look like stale poetry read off a teleprompter. The same old talk of change, in lofty words, read with conviction.

Now with compromise and comity thrown in, just at the wrong time.

America isn't afraid of the smartest girl in the class any more. That's poetry on a national scale. America is ready for, and needs, the smarts, toughness and experience on the left to start dealing with serious problems in a nation that has spun itself halfway over the right-wing side of a cliff.

That is Hillary Clinton in every way. She is the fight that underlies the real poetry. That's what Kathleen Kennedy is talking about.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/inside_the_divided_kennedys.html

[FrenchieCat]

1. I disagree with Ms. Kathleen....and evidently so did the voters of Maryland!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=4231523

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHA_ZTvOgUM

Also, her Mom says otherwise.

[godai]

4. She lost to a Republican in a heavily Democratic state.

She has not done the Kennedy name proud.

[Clarkansas]

2. Spineless, centrist triangulation won't solve them either. eom

[Tactical Progressive]

17. "Present" and 'not present'

are even lower on the integrity scale than triangulation.

Obama does all three quite regularly.

[Radical Activist]

3. You can't get much done with 50.1% of the vote and no ability to inspire people.

The Clintons know how to barely get elected by dividing people and targeting specific groups of voters. But just barely getting elected doesn't provide a mandate for real change, and boring policy speeches doesn't get people to call their Congressman when you need to get a bill through Congress.

[aquart]

5. Accusing others of standard Obama practices? Tsk tsk.

I notice that now that SC is over, we're getting articles about his white appeal.

[keep_it_real]

9. But inspiring people to get up off their buff does

And that's the edge that Obama has.

[Tactical Progressive]

14. Yeah, they're going to go out and .... and ..... and ......

Cheer for Obama? Vote for Obama so they can cheer for him?

[Azathoth]

6. Yeah, the best way to solve problems is eight years of partisan trench warfare

[saltpoint]

7. Her Uncle John might have begged to differ:

"When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

--John F. Kennedy

http://arts.endow.gov/about/Kennedy/html

[Tactical Progressive]

8. That's the kind of poetry that Obama doesn't come close to

His is more like "Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can!"


Nice quote though, Crusoe. Thanks.

[keep_it_real]

11. Beautiful Indeed; nice catch

[KennedyGuy]

10. My kinda Kennedy....

we need a leader..not a poetic speechmaker...

[godai]

12. See post #7 RE: JFK and poetry n/t

[Tactical Progressive]

16. And notice how even Obama's poetry is locker-room

compared to JFK's prose.

"Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can!"

[godai]

18. I find Obama's speeches inspiring.

He's trying to bring the US together, not pick blue states vs red states etc. There's real meaning in that for me.

[Tactical Progressive]

19. "I don't want to be the President of red America

and I don't want to be the President of blue America,
I want to be the President of the United STATES of America!!"

Yes, that's so inspiring. Obama want to be President.

And he's going to bring people together because he says so.
It's like Obama and his supporters have never met a Publican in their entire lives.

[godai]

24. It's called leadership and Sen. Obama definitely is a fine leader.

Hillary is the policy wonk, no doubt about that.

[saltpoint]

20. Parsing the Obama keynote address in 04 in Boston, I come away with

the sense that there was elevation in the convention hall owing to the delegates' common purpose, but I was in a group of people who reminded me that some U.S. citizens were not listening to the coverage of either our convention or the Pukes' convention, and that they were so totally removed from the process, or even the awareness of the process, as to have extinguished their own citizenship.

And that was a very despairing revelation.

We're at our best when Dr. King is brandishing age-old rhetorical devices to lift hearts on the Washington mall or when JFK is standing on a cold January day asking us to do better as citizens.

Whoever winds up in the Oval Office next, I want him or her to assemble the best team possible, and not to skimp on the speech-writers.

[Tactical Progressive]

22. GW has had really good speech-writers, and he delivers speeches well

He actually reads a teleprompter far better than Obama does.

So what? If GW has shown us anything it is how little reading teleprompter speeches really means.



And just for the record, Obama traded his IWR vote for the chance to speak at that convention.
Of all the reasons to accept yes on the IWR vote, Obama's has been the most cravenly self-serving.
How inspiring is that?

[saltpoint]

23. For me, it's the words spoken against the context given.

Kennedy came to us almost inexplicably, and yet there he was, the highly-educated Eastern liberal. I don't say that "the Kennedys" are perfect, but they are landmark personalities in part because we haven't produced anything to match them to date and because they rose from the drab horror of Eisenhower's blah America.

I'm not a Camelot licker. But I respond to someone reaching for a high goal. I admire the vigor and dynamic contour of language in the mouths of presidents. Language in and of itself doesn't make history, but without it, no history is recorded, and the more sure-footed and concise and charged the language, the greater the impact of that history.

Either Clinton or Obama have an opportunity to make history and I would personally like to see them assemble that team of speech-writers to write the caption.

[BooScout]

13. It's so nice to see some Kennedy's still have a brain....

Kathleen Kennedy nailed it in a nutshell.

Obama has the flowery speeches and Clinton has the real substance. Hillary's the real deal. Barack Obama is not much more than Hollywood Glitz and plastic.....curtesy of Oprah and Sorenson.

[saltpoint]

15. After Bush was elected -- or rather after he stole the 2000 election --

I posted on DU that among the many things I disliked and distrusted in him was the utter absence of a sense of poetry, that there was no poetry to the man, none at all.

One poster took objection to that point and another nodded yes, so it died a neutral death on these boards.

The question of speech-writing for politicians is always a very pertinent one, IMO. Language matters. It's a gauge of self-direction and personal insight, and we can't do without it in the public arena, period.

Other nations have Ministers of Culture to promote the arts as a critical, crucial element in their governments. We could use the same, and JFK's administration might not be a bad model to use to get started.

Mario Cuomo is a Democrat whose time for the Oval Office would appear to have passed, but we are the less for its passing. He had the muscle and the mindfulness and the command of words that might have lifted more hearts and elevated more public discourse.

I admire any degree of same in any candidate, and find it more in some than others.

[Tactical Progressive]

21. In the list of attributes I want our next Dem President to have

poetry is good, but it's nowhere near the top of the list.

Fight, conviction, political skill, progressive ideology, toughness, for example, all rate much higher.


Note though, that poetry in a speech doesn't necessarily reflect poetry in one's soul.
And poetry on a teleprompter isn't necessarily anything about the person reading it.