[From the diaries by susanhu.]
I went into this afternoon’s press conference wanting blood. I, like many here, was like a shark, circling in the shallow water, waiting for my feeder, Fitz, to toss some red (read Republican) meat my way. But I came out of the conference with something unexpected.
I was going to blog about it, but then I read a comment by wg on k/o: politics + culture.
He said it better than I ever could:
BUT, I think I may be experiencing, Linus-like, the deeper meaning of Fitzmas. Watching and listening to Fitz, I rediscovered something I haven’t felt in a long, long time: a kind of simple, optimistic pride in the potential and promise of America. I know that sounds fatuous, but it felt like, after crawling through the desert, I was finally rewarded with a tall, clear glass of ice-cold life-sustaining water. I took such profound and unexpected pleasure in the trust I felt in this guy. And I even found a perverse satisfaction in the way he frustrated my shallow partisan craving for a brutal rhetorical smackdown. When was the last time you had the experience of seeing somebody on tv, in a political context, that you didn’t feel compelled to view through an angry ideological prism? It was such a relief to not be an analyzing and enraged critic, or even a chortling schadenfreudian. I just had a very simple, almost childlike, faith in this guy. He’ll follow the evidence where it leads and no further, but he’s not afraid of anybody, especially these smug thugs. He seemed like a walking, human rebuke to the insane political atmosphere of the last decade. I know this all sounds ridiculous and naive, but perhaps that only suggests how deeply I was craving, without even really being aware of it, somebody to believe in again. I believe in fairness, and justice, and equality, and civility. And I saw that today in Patrick Fitzgerald. And maybe that, Charlie Brown, is the true meaning of Fitzmas.
