When a democracy offers "one choice": Obama's haunted celebration | xpostfactoid
by Andrew Sprung
One of the enduring themes in Obama's rhetoric is to embrace the messiness of democracy: to remind listeners that 'the other side may sometimes have a point,' to urge the necessity of compromise, to affirm that people on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum share some core values.
It was all the more striking, then, that in his convention speechlast night he placed Donald Trump outside the pale of this consensus allegedly underpinning all our battles over policy. In his 2008 convention speech, Obama praised John McCain's service to country and personal decency effusively while lambasting his polices; in fact the whole convention was structured to kill McCain with kindness. With Romney he wasmore caustic, suggesting in his 2012 convention speech that to vote Republican was to choose oligarchy. But oligarchy is on the democratic spectrum. The U.S. has always been an oligarchy to greater or less extent.
In this his valedictory paean to democracy, in contrast,, Obama asserted that there was only one choice. He ultimately placed the Republican nominee in the company of the destroyers of democracy, the nation's worst enemies: fascists, communists, jihadists. And the context in which he made that shocking but wholly appropriate charge is fascinating.
He began by evoking the "real America" as portrayed by Trump's precursor, Sarah Palin: the small town Bible belt heartland -- where ironically he, in a very real sense, came from. He then carried that "heartland" through space and time, to Hawaii and working class black Chicago and to the present -- and then to the entire world from which the U.S. draws its immigrants....
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