Booman wrote a very perceptive post today on Booman Tribune called Obama and the Blogosphere. It wasn’t so much about Obama as about the leftiness blogs in general.
Here are the last sentences of that post:
To see what the candidates really believe, deep down, you have to look past what they say, or even what positions they espouse.
I think the blogosphere has been holding Barack Obama to an impossible standard. But all three of the frontrunners have been victims of a lack of savvy from the purity trolls.
Right on the money.
However…let’s look at this thing from a pragmatically political , “How can he (or any other left-ish pol) win the Big One?” point of view.
My take after the fold.
Being held to an impossible standard?
Without a doubt.
But in point of fact if he is nominated he will have to be careful not to appear too MUCH the darling of the left.
Look…roughly speaking, here is the way the American electorate shapes up.
A little less than 30% is committed to right wing values, or perhaps better are so hypnotized that no matter how badly the right fucks up, they will still vote right wing.
Evidence?
Bush’s approval polls have NEVER dipped below 30%-ish numbers as far as I know, and an administration cannot fuck up much worse.
I would guess that a little less than that percentage are deeply committed to some combination of “left-wing” values, the Dem party itself or anti-right wing positions that are driven by mostly economic. sexual and racial/religious positions.
So many Jews quite correctly smell Hitler coming off of the right, so many minority people smell the KKK, so many women smell barefoot and pregnant memes, so many homosexuals smell the incipient bash, etc.
Say 20%-25%. (That percentage would grow enormously if minority voters turned out in huge numbers and right wing women voted with their hearts and brains instead of with their husbands, by the way. But let’s hold it at around 25% for argument’s sake.)
This means that 45% to 55% of the potential voting population of the U.S. is basically uncommitted. And it is those so-called centrists…more like without a center-ists, really…who will determine the outcome of the election.
Now most of them are scared to death of extremism in any form. It’s been a long, LONG time since a line like Goldwater’s ” Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” line would resonate with tired, hypnomedia-sleepled Americans.
“A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” is more the speed of this vast, somnolent majority.
If Obama is nominated and allows himself to be isolated to the left…and I can hear the Swift Boaters revving their rhetorical rotary engines as I speak…Black, Afro-Muslim name, madrassa educated while still young enough to be turned, peacenik, socialist, crooked Chicago Dems, closet Black Muslim, darling of the leftiness blogs etc. etc. etc…that centerless center will be stampeded to the right and we will end up with Huckabee, Romney or McCain. With a right wing President who is…in the preceding order… either honestly and good-heartedly stupid, dishonestly, robotically stupid or smart as a whip and in bed with the warhawks.
Or worse than any of them, Giuliani, who I would cast as the Anti-Christ in a split second if I were to make a horror film in that general genre.
Nosferatu comes to the White House.
Thus the question might very well become not whether the blogosphere will go full bore for Obama through November, but whether its doing so might actually hurt his chances of being elected.
Provided of course he is not “ARRRGH”-ed out of contention by the pro-centrist media before he even gets in a position to be nominated.
I mean…there’s always Bloomberg…
The war cry of the left should be:
REMEMBER THE DEAN!!!
They did it a scant 4 years ago.
They can do it again.
Just sayin’…
Booman wrote “And what does the blogosphere do when Obama is the nominee, will they go full bore for him through November?”
It ain’t that simple.
Not by a LONG shot.
Later…
AG
