Call me crazy, but this David Broder guy seems to write some pretty good columns.
« The Broadband Gap | Main | Plugging In »
Choking on my Coffee
23 Jul 2007 07:44 am
Comments (11)
Even when he's ostensibly on our side, he makes my head hurt. HUD was just fine, until Al Gore politicized it?
Monkeys type Shakespeare - film at 11!
Well, maybe he used to write stuff that made sense, and that's how he built up a good reputation. And maybe his knee-jerk "pox on both their houses" schtick even made some sense sometimes, forty years ago, or whenever it was formed.
You seem to have awoken from a 30 year nap...that would also explain the beard...
"Obama, whose first job after Harvard Law School was as a community organizer in low-income South Side Chicago, spoke from experience about the 'overwhelming' impact of concentrated urban poverty."
Wasn't Obama's community organizing in the period after he went to Columbia, and before he went to Harvard? I thought he, you know, practiced law for a while after law school. I might be wrong about this.
Yeah, I was right about that. From Obama's website:
"...he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.
Remembering the values of empathy and service that his mother taught him, Barack put law school and corporate life on hold after college and moved to Chicago in 1985, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment....
Barack had come to realize that in order to truly improve the lives of people in that community and other communities, it would take not just a change at the local level, but a change in our laws and in our politics....
He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law."
What in tarnation are you talking about?
The idea that HUD corruption originated in the Clinton White House is pretty laughable. You might be too young to remember Reagan's housing secretary, Sam Pierce, but Broder isn't.
The real issue is Broder's point is thatthe changing primary lineup makes this debate possible. Broder is a man who has gloried in the New Hampshire and Iowa caucuses unique role in American politics. You can talk to "real voters" etc etc. Of course, that's a unique role that kept urban issues off the table while we all hung on every candidate's word about ethanol. This strikes me as a column devoted to either Broder flipping and flopping without talking straight about it, or to Broder basically saying its ok that Iowa, NH still have priviledged status because see, the Democratic candidates are talking about urban issues anyway and so I don't have to feel guilty about my stand.
Either way, I don't buy it. Luckily for the Democrats, this particular focus on urban issues is at least in some part because of who John Edwards has become and its because of who Barack Obama still is. Hillary Clinton was always going to have something to say about these issues but the presence of the other two punches it up. THe people running matter here.
I also think we can have this discussion because, thank god, there's been a change in the overall nature of the discourse of the Democratic party that isn't driven by the specific institutional dynamic of the ordering of the primaries. The war in particular matters here as does the overall Bush record. It takes away incentives for candidates to try to get to the right of eachother on national security and foreign policy. The Bush record matters here too because it takes away incentives for candidates to try to get to the right of eachorther on pro business policies. etc. Experimentation with markets, per se, isn't really a rhetorical trope worth deploying. Had there actually been some compassionate conservatism, instead of a decision that "hey, that two Americas thing sounds like a good goal" this wouldn't be an issue getting any play -- except to say the Dems who raise it are pandering to the urban minority communities, and you know its pandering because they have nice haircuts blah blah blah (see, things haven't even changed all that much).
And to some extent, all of this is still the story of a hurricane.
"What kind of stupid stuff do I need to write before I get to go on Meet The Press to promote my book?"
Guess you answered your own question, Matt.
Just kidding. Except for the pointless HUD dig, that was actually a very good column. I kept waiting for the punchline where Broder would say that Giuliani's experience as NYC Mayor made him the ideal bipartisan candidate for Urban America, but thankfully this did not happen.
>Call me crazy, but this David Broder guy seems to write some pretty good columns.
You are crazy, but not crazy enough to get a Meet the Press spot.
Surely you jest,
Comments closed August 06, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
I wasn't sure what you meant until I read the column myself -- was it a joke or a snide comment or what? But it's a great description of reading David Broder this morning.
Posted by sheila | July 23, 2007 7:59 AM