05-30-2009, 05:53 PM
Quote:Judging by your effusive superlatives, it is clear what you heard.When one is judging height, the guy with the largest distance from the soles of his feet to the tip of his head is the "tallest", not because you really like him, but because he is empirically the most in terms of height.
Referring to a politician who has blown away every previous record for fundraising, crowd size, volunteer base, small-scale donations (and so forth) as being superlative at these things is hardly unreasonable. He won the election by as large a margin as anyone since Reagan, and has maintained 60%+ approval ratings, despite having to tackle some gigantic problems. Is it fair to say he has "appeal"? Yes, obviously. He drew crowds in the tens-to-hundreds of thousands (occasionally over a million) on a regular basis, pretty much everywhere he went, including abroad. Those are *very* large crowds, I don't think "colossal" is overly effusive. No politician in recent memory has been able to do that, in a democracy; is that not "stunning"? He pulled in 2.5 times as much money as anyone, ever. Does that not maybe deserve mention as a superlative?
These are just factual descriptions. I'm not spinning mediocre numbers into fantasies. If the words I'm using are superlatives, but that's because, by the metrics I'm using, Obama is superlative: nobody has ever come close to his numbers. I'm not out to worship Obama, I think he's a centrist technocrat whose caution outweighs his leadership. But I can see with my own eyes that the movement behind him was something remarkable, something *popular*, as in "of the people". When the people want something enough, they push for it, with their money, their time, their votes, and their enthusiasm. Established interests can try to ride along, but they aren't in the driver's seat.
Quote:What I believe is that someday, some politicians are going to have to do things that are unpopular when the ponzi scheme we call our national budget comes crashing down. I believe that day is rapidly approaching.We'll see what happens when the Ron-Paul-calypse comes. I'm not holding my breath.
-Jester