Obama’s New Platform
by zunguzungu
Like many people, I’ve found it difficult to get past the flowing rhetoric and scintillating oratory of Barrack Hussein Obama, and I’ve struggled to find out what he really stands for. But thanks to Bobby May, I now know exactly what his platform is. And I find that while some of his positions seem a bit extreme, I can, in the spirit of political compromise, take them as a basis for future negotiations.
For example, while I question the nepotisic bent of sending $845 billion specifically to Obama’s relatives in Kenya, I do support using American tax dollars to help ease the vicious economic inequality by which centuries of American economic exploitation of Africa have left that continent totally bereft of the kind of economic development which we today enjoy. Fair is fair, after all.
I’m happy with his emphasis on bilateral negotiations in foreign affairs (his support for teaching Americans Spanish and Arabic, for example), for example, and in that vein I’m pleased to see that he’s continued to agree (with Maliki) on a timetable for withdrawal. I’m not sure extending statehood to Kenya or Cuba is really feasible, but I’ll take his gesture in that direction as an indication that he will try to relax and de-politicize this country’s implicitly racist immigration quotas (and the statehood option for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia is simply long overdue). Gearing our health care policies towards prevention and increased government funding seems smart, as does his desire to undo the privatization of education, retirement, and public lands.
The positions on which I’d gently demur seem more like Obama’s attempt to pander to this country’s massive and influential black voting bloc. It’s just part of politics these days, so you can’t really blame him for it–I mean, when is the last time a president has been elected without pandering to black people?–so I’m glad to see that his gestures in that direction are not merely symbolic (painting the white house black, for example) they are also geared towards the structuring inequities of American society. Why, after all, are the same gun control policies applied to rural hunters and urban black youth? The situations are simply not comparable: deer and bears don’t really ever fire back, whereas the odds of being shot and killed by the police for the crime of being black is substantial enough that the second amendment should really be modified to account for it. But in the long term, the “raise taxes to pay for free drugs for Obama’s inner-city political base” plan will both ease the problem of high prices for prescription drugs and, by calling off the war on drugs, help defuse the economic and crime enforcement crisis that currently plagues our cities.
I can’t say I agree with his decision to keep America dependent on foreign oil–up until now, I’ve liked better what he’s said about developing alternate sources of energy and conservation practices like the tire gauge thing–but I’m going to take this as both a pragmatic short-term realization that the American economy cannot decouple itself from the global economy, and an attempt to bring oil-republicans on board so as to move the country–together–towards a more sustainable energy policy.
I like the energy policy, except that I don’t have a cell phone or iPod, so I guess I’d have to skip out on those solar panels. I already walk everywhere, but since my taxes would be negatively raised (a.k.a. lowered) under the Obama plan, I might have enough money for a bike then. Sweet.
Ha!!!!!!! What did the grandfather call this tactic in Invisible Man —- “yessing them to death until they bust wide open”? I appreciate your take on this.
Yes, sounds basically good to me. Just one addition:
Homeland Security: Jail the Crackers.
I commend sen obama’s reirsatnt when it seemed as if Sen McCain was trying bully him with various statements and aalso trying to qualify himself by stating sen obama just did not understand . Well in Sen Obama’s closing statement or even earlier I was just wished that he would have said the one thing that I do understand is this country cannot go through another 8 years of what we’ve been through. And I believe that a vast majority of America wouldagree with you because it seems as if some are now starting to feel the pinch of recession, the same pinch most Americans have been feeling for the past 2 to 6 years. Something is wrong when you can bail out institutions,banking investment firms, we can even finance a war. But we can’t give ours kids a decent education, we can’t find a way for the elderly to chose between medicine and food and I know why and no one is saying it, there’s no profit in peace, no profit in financing healthcare for young or old no profit. I know that things cost money but you’ll find that you’ll become the biggest arms dealer in the world (President’s real job). Please don’t forget WHO YOU ARE becausethe shoes you about to step into come with many acessories like Masks yes many masks you’ll have to wear. Oops did not mean to sound like Sen McCain but sometimes we as little people really don’t have any say because who’s listening. Those who are in power say that they understand what we are going through. You know in hindsight I’m glad that you don’t understand.
“jail the crackers” is in the unofficial platform. This one’s just the pre-election one with all the controversial stuff taken out. I like the invisible man ref, Sys. And Natalia, consider Karim’s on telegraph; they might just have been stolen bare minutes beforehand, but they *are* cheap (which is also part of the Obama plan, I think).