One Historic Night, Two Americas
my2hands
Posts: 17,117
One Historic Night, Two Americas
Sunday 08 June 2008
Frank Rich, The New York Times
When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards's two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.
On one side stands Mr. Obama's resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington resume; and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain's promise of a wise warrior's vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity - as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.
Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton 'dream ticket,' despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century's old guard.
All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington's faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.
Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama's epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.
Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama's insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death.' Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama's clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of 'change' 33 times in his speech.
Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. 'No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,' he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and '70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking 'to the 1960s and '70s for answers.'
Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it's not your boomer parents' liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right's cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.
He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in 'The Audacity of Hope,' where he described himself as aloof from 'the psychodrama of the baby boom generation' with its 'old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.' His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.
The selling point of Mr. Obama's vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington's gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what's-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country's rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.
Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naivete do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama's political killer instincts.
The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.
You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign's cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking 'McCain Golf Gear.' (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes 'I' as he boasts of his humility.
Mr. Obama's deep-rooted worldliness - in philosophy as well as itinerant background - is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.
Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran's president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they 'don't deserve' another election 'that's governed by fear.' Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.
Mr. Obama isn't flawless. But it's hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband's still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that's out-of-touch about his American vision.
Mr. McCain's speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn't yet ready for prime-time radio.
But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today's America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.
Equally curious was Mr. McCain's decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he'd last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana's governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.
Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush's Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush's Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.
Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night's McCain pratfall - three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News - should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain's invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!
Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain's directive that he visit Iraq - as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain's truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.'s 'Ich bin ein Berliner' visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/opinion/08rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Sunday 08 June 2008
Frank Rich, The New York Times
When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards's two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.
On one side stands Mr. Obama's resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington resume; and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain's promise of a wise warrior's vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity - as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.
Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton 'dream ticket,' despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century's old guard.
All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington's faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.
Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama's epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.
Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama's insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death.' Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama's clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of 'change' 33 times in his speech.
Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. 'No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,' he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and '70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking 'to the 1960s and '70s for answers.'
Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it's not your boomer parents' liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right's cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.
He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in 'The Audacity of Hope,' where he described himself as aloof from 'the psychodrama of the baby boom generation' with its 'old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.' His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.
The selling point of Mr. Obama's vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington's gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what's-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country's rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.
Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naivete do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama's political killer instincts.
The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.
You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign's cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking 'McCain Golf Gear.' (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes 'I' as he boasts of his humility.
Mr. Obama's deep-rooted worldliness - in philosophy as well as itinerant background - is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.
Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran's president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they 'don't deserve' another election 'that's governed by fear.' Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.
Mr. Obama isn't flawless. But it's hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband's still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that's out-of-touch about his American vision.
Mr. McCain's speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn't yet ready for prime-time radio.
But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today's America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.
Equally curious was Mr. McCain's decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he'd last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana's governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.
Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush's Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush's Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.
Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night's McCain pratfall - three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News - should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain's invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!
Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain's directive that he visit Iraq - as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain's truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.'s 'Ich bin ein Berliner' visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/opinion/08rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Even as the wealthy and powerful continue to contrive and put into action more ways to seperate themselves from the rest of us. To find more ways to create a huge economic and financial chasm between the wealthy the middle class and poor. By literally eliminating the middle class. All inititives, agendas and policies Obama will work hard to support, enforce and ensure success.
Yes, quite the uniter.
Doesn't take much to get some people to drop their panties and give it up.
Just a few smooth words.
That's all Obama supporters can do - hope for the best. Because the reality of his platform and more importantly senate record is screaming lacky.
I plan on voting for someone who I don't have to worry about being a lacky because he has already proven himself...what a concept!
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
To take a quote from an instant gratification seeking society.
"If it feels good ...do it"
buy now, pay later...cross your fingers and hope for low interest rates.
wheee....
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
Stop being so unpatriotic...
close your eyes and ears, and vote like the rest of the status quo tells you to!
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
Oops...I forgot for a moment there. I must always vote for what the Dems think is the best solution because that party has proven itself so effectual,progressive and has stood their ground against special interests and corruption for years now....
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
any basis at all to that statement good friend?
lets take 1 actual policy and look at it for a second
Social Security... he is dead set against privatizing Social Security and his plan for long term survival of Social Security is a no brainer, raise the Social Security Tax cap from the current $96,500 (which 99% of america has no clue they are paying virtually the same into social security every year as Bill Gates). Hillary wouldnt do it, McCain sure as hell wouldnt do it... it is the obvious answer, and he has clearly stated that is what he intends to do. i dont see that as some elitist plot to destroy the middle class :rolleyes:
not to mention he has also clearly stated he wants to reduce the middle class tax burden and raise taxes on the wealthy to start going back to a progressive tax system
anyone thinking there is some elite conspiracy to destory the middle class are naive... the middle class is the reason and backbone for Americas position as an economic superpower over the last 60 years. the wealthy and elite do not want the economy to collapse
tell me good friend... what does the "wealthy and powerful" stand to gain from "eliminating the middle class and "seperating themselves from the rest of us, creating a huge economic and financial chasm between the wealthy the middle class and poor"... what do they stand to gain? they want to turn the USA into a third world bankrupt country? i don't think so... business has been going just fine since the industrial revolution my friend and their is no plan to rock their own boat
What we are watching is amazing, and we have front row seats to the show.
My basis, my friend is in the real world. What's going on on the ground.
Not in the oh so smooth and glorious bullshit PR/Campaign talk of Obama. Hilary or anyone else.
Everyone I talk to from around the country, my friends, family, business associates and people I work with; all I keep hearing is a much different tune than the song you're singing.
Right here in North Carolina, my best friend and his wife just lost their long-standing jobs at Wachovia because they outsourced several thousands of jobs to fuckin' India.
A close friend of mine lost her 20+ year job at Bell South because AT&T bought them up and they outsourced a few thousand jobs ......to India.
Cannon Mills/Pillowtex of Kannapolis (bankruptcy) closed down a few years ago and thousands lost their jobs.
Phillip Morris announced they are phasing out and closing down their Concord plant, by 2010.
And this is just in my area.
Look at what's been going on in Michigan......all over. Everyone I talk to from around the country has the same thing to report. Same stories, same crap.
College graduates can't find jobs in their chosen field (beacause there aren't any jobs to be had), so they are forced to take jobs making significantly less salaries, for several years; while they wait for something to come up (if ever). Meanwhile they have their college loans to pay off. They have bills to pay.
Corporations are outsourcing as much as they can to other countries. Outsourcing jobs they could very well keep in the USA. But god forbid they only make 70 million in profits, when they could outsource to India and make 90 million in profits.
Gas companies, pharmaceutical companies and Insurance companies are choking off the middle class and poor. And have been doing so for decades.
It was our government (Bush, Clinton, Reagan) who set the stage and cleared the highway for HMOs and catered the laws to the profiteering.
While insurance companies make medical/health decisions that doctors should be making. All with a focus on profit, not health. Pharmaceutical companies push their pills down everyone's throats at a ridculously HUGE cost and rake in the cash. Ritalin, anyone? :rolleyes: yet they go unchecked and unregulated.
Americans are losing their homes, their property...their life savings...their lives! Health care/medical care is a fuckin' trainwreck! A disaster! An embarrassment!
After collecting their unemployment, so many Americans are being forced to take jobs in the retail or food service industry for $8.00/$9.00 an hour, while they search for a new job opportunity.
They have families...kids.....bills. Yet, there's nothing out there. Jobs are leaving, not created. Companies are permitted to screw their employees in every imaginable manner; with barely no recourse avaibale for the american worker. Who set the satge for this crap?
Are you fuckin' kidding me? This country is a fuckin' mess and you're feeding me Obama's Social Security Tax cap?!?!?!?
These Corporations are feeding off the withered and decaying blood of America's blue collar middle class and poor. Opportunities are drying up........they've all evaporated to India....Mexico...and several other countries.
This is progress?
Oh, Obama promises to relieve the tax burden of the middle class. Oh really? Exactly how will he do that? What, another 300.00 rebate? :rolleyes:
I've been fortunate that my occupation seems to have transcended the difficulties of these last several years (at least fore now, knock on wood...tap...tap). Things have been a little tighter, but I also have two kids, now. I'v been very fortunate.
But many americans have not been so fortunate.
Yes, things in this country are starting to look like a Third World establishment and environment. The signs have been there for quite some time.
Obama's not addressing the most important and significant issues. Corporations run-amuck with hardly any restrictions or hardly a regulations; which is the catalyst for all of the pronblems I have mentioned.
You go ahead and give it all up to Obama. Yeah, you swallow it down.
We'll see what Obama's big talk accomplishes, if he gets in.
Talk is cheap. Let's see if Obama has the stones to stand up to the Corporations who are controlling our government.
You can look at it a couple different ways. You don't have to worry about him being a "lacky" because he stands less than a snowball's chance of winning, or, one could say, three consecutive runs with less to show each time, in fact, make him one enormous "lacky".
historic victory
THERE ARE LOTS OF FACTORS THAT CAN HAPPEN FROM HERE TILL NOVEMBER THAT CAN ERASE THAT THOUGHT
being the first african american to get nominated for the presidency IS historic, even if he were to lose in november. winning in november, or not, in no way, shape or form, diminishes his 'historic win' tuesday. that IS a fact. just as hillary's run IS historic, as being the first female to run, ever. winning the nomination, or losing as it turns out, again....has no effect on the history-making of her run, period.
Let's just breathe...
I am myself like you somehow
1) The very fact people, in 2008, still have to point out that there's a first black man and woman in the final runnings; is a clear indication how backward-ass and primative the people of this country are.
2) A large portion of the people of this country are emotionally, spirtually and intellectually retarded.
3) You know what's extremely and disgustingly primative? Profit taking priority over human life, a healthy and safe environment ( air, water, soil..... resources) and quality of life.
It's wonderful there's a black man and female in the finals, for all the wrong reasons.
Or immediately after the goal of obtaining power is achieved. Kinda like how Bush was talking like all peaceful like Ron Paul re: US foreign policy, then started bombing Iraq two weeks after taking office...months before 9/11.
But you know...
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
yeah, i am well aware of whats going on... but you didnt adfress my main point.. you said Obama plans on continuing some elite agenda to destroy the middle class? have anything to back that up?
and i also asked what do "they" have to gain from a conspiracy to destory the middle class and destroy the american economy? feel free to enlighten me why the elite want to destory their cash cow? take your time...
i disagree
just because people do not think like you doesnt mean they are "retarded"
or the capital gains tax he wants to raise...
or the windfall profits tax he wants to create and enforce...
and the middle class tax cuts that will affect 95% of the country (the bottom 95%)