Thursday, October 30, 2008 - Posts
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Can I just say I am loving reading Bill Bishop on Slate? Every song is a dance. Today, however, my already acute "Big Sort" confusion grows as he explains that conservatives are more apt to be neat freaks while liberals, who rarely iron, can go weeks without needing to know which stack of papers the cordless phone got lost in. (Dude, where is my corner? Is there such a thing as being un`sortable?) Often, I know, my difficulty with the majority view is plain contrarian; something about hearing that everybody knows X or thinks Y makes my throat scratchy, to the point that agreeing with so many people about Obama is slightly unnerving. (Oh to be you, Rachael!) Only, that wouldn't explain how I swung from conservative slob to silver-polishing liberal, would it? In my 20s, my sister once found my room in the apartment we shared in such disarray that she called 911—and I arrived home to find a police officer standing in my personal space: "Ma'am,'' he informed me, "this place has been ramshackled." No, actually, it was just as I'd left it. So, hasn't recycling made anybody else increasingly fastidious? And I'm curious; how are the rest of you sorting out?
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Like Meghan, I too loved the aesthetic of the infomercial. It had all of the Horatio Alger glory of an NBC Olympic-hopeful hagiography, spliced with the better cinematography of great Hollywood. You know in those movies the good guys always win, and yet I cry every time. Beyond family values, Obama underscored again what's been his hallmark since 2004: unity. That Boston speech never fails to move me. It's about refusing to use the politics of division to win. McCain, to his discredit and to his detriment, has never picked up on the yearning the vast majority of this country has to be more alike than different, more unified in a goal toward betterment. I'm a little sappier these days, but I think that I'm not alone in that sentiment. It's why Obama's appeal in the infomercial to all our immigrant roots works. Bill Richardson mentions it toward the end of the segment—the importance, and uniqueness, of Obama's efforts toward unity: racial, political, economic, historic. The other night on Hardball, a McCain flack pooh-poohed the idea of unity as a "platitude." But I don't think it is. Sure, he hammers on it a lot, but Obama's efforts to sew this country together—and his genuine intellectual curiosity (as opposed to what scares me most about Palin, to go back to Meghan's earlier post: her Bush style lack of curiosity and what appears to be a disinterest in seeing beyond the world she currently lives in), has always made him the most attractive of candidates.
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