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People-friendly works, does it?

People-friendly works, does it? If it does, then -- believe it or not -- Obama would have lost to Hillary, for Hillary was the one becoming a movement just before the democratic convention. Obama was seeming passive and distant (as he does now), and even though Hillary rose, he still ably won -- and not by suddenly re-acquiring the people's touch, but really just by remaining the staid-iron same. Things are more complicated than they seem. Obama was, is, always removed -- why they like that in him but not in others, is worth exploring. My guess is that they elected him in for his second act: he'll come out more when liberalism no longer reaches, when its laying, fully-extended, dead flat out on the ground, and not while he's still in a way -- by necessity -- 'filling its mission.

Obama's healthcare reform was DEEMED liberal -- it felt like it was an agenda moved (and it part it was) by a liberal impulse to attend to the vulnerable. The fact that the liberal blood has become so corporate-congested that nothing good passes through without huge sendiments of garbage coming along, doesn't mean that some of Obama's movement wasn't taken as connected to the 60s-on victory by liberals of the cultural war. ALL democrats who were once hippy/communal liberals but are now knee-deep in corporate and consumption, still are kinda still moved by that earlier huge glow of peace, love, and happiness -- and we all feel it. But a lot of democrats are actually ready to let that all go, and find wretched empoweredness in the hot glow in coal. Healthcare, I still believe, will come readily when it is linked to a more rightest movement for a fit nation, to empower the "American-seeming," "hard-working," middle-American, not when the tendency is still to take it as about tender respect and care for those who instinctively feel bullied/marginalized by "American as apple-pie." 60s on, liberalism won the cultural sphere, put rightest, neanderthal thought, fully on the defensive -- as someone like Pat Buchanan will tell you -- and "its" people was hardly the mainstream. This is what this is all about.

Link: David Axelrod and the “zeitgeist” (Joan Walsh, Salon, 21 January 2010)

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