Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Where is the substance?

It just looked and sounded so wonderful: Obama at the rostrum delivering another powerful speech, 20,000 in the stands, 15,000 outside, the red, white, and blue, screaming women, happy babies, chants of change, talk of unity...yes, I too was, for a brief moment, was wooed by his charisma and overtaken by his vision. Then I thought to myself, ...must...think...of...Jeremiah Wright. It always works, I snapped out of it just in time. 

Back to reality I settled at a time when millions of viewers were presumably still sucked into the rhetorical quicksand that has become the Obama campaign. I escaped in time to flip to Fox News and hear from my less than favorite person, Karl Rove, make some valid points that I and many others have been thinking about Obama all along: as the expression goes, he talks the talk but can't walk the walk. 
Examples: Obama said that he is going to hire a new army of teachers and give them better pay, and that we will make oil companies "invest their record profits in a clean energy future." Since when does the federal government hire teachers? Since when does the federal government decide how companies invest their profits?
Obama goes on to say last night would be seen as the moment "we began to provide care for sick and give good jobs to the jobless," and so on. I guess he is he expecting us to believe that before "this moment" no jobs were given to the jobless and no care was given to sick people.
Yes these ideas sound good, but half of them can't be done by the federal government and the other half are essentially moot. Where is the real substance? I find Barack Obama to be equivalent to a good song with terrible lyrics. It's nice to listen to, only if you don't actually listen. 

2 comments:

Marc V said...

I was pretty ticked in general at everybody last night. It appears that yet again this election will be about soundbites and speeches rather than real issues. Great post, welcome to the team.

Anonymous said...

It's sad people don't look at substance and policy. Everyone is more interested in the happy smiles or feel good speeches instead of the potential implications his or her vote will have, i.e. socialized medicine.