Adweek’s critic Barbara Lippert was “moved” by the 30-minute “O-mercial” that 33.5 million Americans voluntarily watched on Wednesday night.
As a narrator, he has an amazingly mellifluous voice, and his prodigious ability to read a script or speak off the cuff all blended into one continuous, very personal message. He used the stories of four Americans having hard times, and they hit home.
I didn’t see it, but I did see Cal Thomas’s editorial in the newspaper this morning. He calls Obama a socialist. He bases his assertion on a 2001 interview Obama did on Chicago Public Radio.
Personally, I find such claims absurd. If it was Vermont’s Bernie Sanders on the White House doorstep, then maybe these rightwingnuts would have an argument, but it’s not Sanders. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is a pro-business Democrat with enough common sense to understand that you can’t take care of the corporations without also extending a helping hand to the people who work in them.
They don’t actually believe Obama is a socialist.
“Socialist” is the right-wing’s code for “not a Bible-banging, reactionary Caucasian.”
On right-wing blogs like Red State, they’re also calling McCain a Socialist, along with the entire centrist wing of the GOP.
So, even though Sarah Palin wholeheartedly supports redistributing of oil profits in her state of Alaska, and pals around with terrorists in the Alaska Independent Party, she’s not a “Socialist” because she is a Bible-banging, reactionary Caucasian.
Yeah, Cal’s comment is really misleading and I think it was done that way on purpose. That’s the wa propaganda works. Democrats and Republicans alike do it, unfortunately.
However, you didn’t do anything to rebut a more general point about Obama representing certain destructive socialist policies as it concerns the redistributing of wealth via coercion on behalf of the government.
“you can’t take care of the corporations without also extending a helping hand to the people who work in them.”
I really have no idea what that means. That’s very moralistic and vague. I’d be interested to know what kind of a helping hand you’re talking about and what ‘taking care’ of corporations means. A corporation is just a whole bunch of individuals who have voluntary decided to participate in an endeavor that will maximize output and, in the end, profit for each individual.
I hope that once Obama is elected we can all try to have more civil discussions on these issues instead of moralizing on a general level without ever really getting into the nuts and bolts of what policies mean.
A good start is this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Freedom
Oh yeah, Mark Trueblood, I’m really not sure why you feel the need to put these things into racial terms. Bible-banging conservatives generally don’t, just so you know, think about people as red, green or white. They think about people as christian or not christian. Perhaps you should read this article to get more in touch: https://adpulp.wpengine.com/archives/2008/11/ad_people_like.php
@MarcM – Thanks for the comment and for the book recommendation.
My moralistic point that confuses is just a way of saying you can be pro-business and pro-worker at the same time.