Laura Flanders: It's not about Obama! (....but it's about his campaign)

[marmar]

from The Nation:


BLOG | Posted 10/01/2007 @ 4:27pm
It's not about Obama!
Laura Flanders


I just may have found a campaign to love. Not a candidate, necessarily, but a campaign. We met one moonlit night in Washington Square Park. Illinois Senator Barack Obama ☼ was there, but what excited me were the other people. Their candidate may not change the world, but sometime down the road, they may.

The September 27 Obama rally in New York wasn't slick. The only band to play was dreadful; the first speaker was a seven or eight-year-old, girl who read a letter that I couldn't hear. Next came Jonathan, 16, from Harlem who said, "Obama is all about change and change is what is needed in this country." And then, after a very long pause, appeared Cuauhtemoc Figueroa, Obama's National Field Director. Figueroa, known as "Temo," proceeded to introduce the enormous crowd of celebrity-hungry New Yorkers to an extensive list of campaign volunteers. Among those was "Jeff," a young lawyer who'd given up his home to the office-less campaign for the week (he slept on his roof), and a tiny blonde who is directing field operations in New Hampshire. I think Figueroa said she had just graduated from high school.

Conventional campaign calculus-crunchers will likely conclude that Obama's fresh-faces will be no match for Clinton's professional cut-throats in the upcoming primary contests. When I saw Clinton address an open air rally in Washington, she was flanked by US Senators, a past Secretary of State and Grammy Award winner Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. When Obama took the stage in New York, he stood beneath the Washington Square Arch, alone. (The most weighty of the rally's politician participants was State Senator Bill Perkins (D-Harlem.))

Then again, conventional campaign correspondents don't actually cover campaigns; they cover candidates. It's the problem with what we've come to call "horserace" coverage. It's all about the horses, never about the people in the stands. Barack Obama may not be the most interesting thing about the Obama campaign. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=238867

[Bitwit1234]

1. Gee she hasn't read the bashing Obama's supporters

give Hillary Clinton on the journals....no fresh faces there. But I don't see any Hillary supporters bashing the other candidates.