DEBATING POINTS

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READER WILLIAM F KLEIN writes that "Obama and his people get the post
modern condition. The EST choices of the Clinton Nineties Me Generation
has been reflected in the rhetoric. Hillary refers to 'I' and Obama
refers to 'We' more often than not. Hillary is the last gasp of formal
self referential modernism in America. And the young get this while
their parents do not. Hillary finally acknowledged this at the end of
last night's debate to great relief, given the response. Everything else
is just sampling.

[Interesting point. I have long argued that Bill Clinton was America's
first postmodern president. In my 1994 book Shadows of Hope I wrote,
"Clinton is part of a generation which grew up as many of the communal
support systems of society were disintegrating. Family, church, and
neighborhood were all on the ropes. Politics was also breaking down: not
only had the machines faded, but the parties were faltering and Congress
splintering. . .

"Clinton's convention documentary was meant to suggest roots yet,
carefully crafted as it was, there was something missing. Clinton was
there and people were there, but they seemed around him, not with him.
He reaches out of the crowd at Boy's Nation to touch Jack Kennedy's
hand, just as during the last campaign tens of thousands reached out to
touch his. A touch. A moment. A moment gone.

"It is the normal work of the politician, but with Clinton there seems
too much. Too many hands, too many friends, too many words, too many
churches, too many hours before he goes to sleep, too many hours on
C-SPAN solving the nation's problems with too many industrialists and
economists -- and, in the end, too little else. It's as though he's
afraid that if he went to the bathroom some voter might forget him. It's
not surprising that Clinton says he wants to run his administration like
a campaign. His whole life has been one."

And I described political postmodernism this way:

"In the postmodern society -- one that rises above the false teachings
of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the
opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. Thus we may
really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the
ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to
authoritarianism. Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might
produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist
is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound
gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants."

There have been plenty of echoes of this in Obama. But Clinton's wife
may not have been fully on board. From one of her speechs at the time:

"We need a new politics of meaning. Now, will it be easy to do that? Of
course not. Because we are breaking new ground. . It's not going to be
easy to redefine who we are as human beings in this post-modern age . .
.But part of the great challenge of living is defining yourself in your
moment."

My reaction:

"Trite indeed, a fast-track lawyer's yearning out of sync with the 94%
of Americans who say they believe in God. Another example of the current
trend towards intellectual cross-dressing in which ministers mess in
politics and politicians pretend they are theologians. Yet in the speech
was a cry for something to grab, something solid in the moment-driven,
symbol-pumped postmodernism of the life she and her husband have known."
- Sam]

ON TO A LESS FUZZY MATTER: Once again Obama and Clinton got to discuss
health care without a single reporter raising the issue of single-payer.
In fact, what Obama and Clinton agree upon is that, to different
degrees, the public should be forced by law to subsidize the private
health insurance companies. And that's pretty sick.

LEAD OF THE DAY: Somewhere in the dark wilderness of Texas, a car door
is being opened and the lifeless body of whoever wrote Hillary Clinton's
attack lines is being dumped in a ditch. . . - Richard Adams, Guardian,
UK

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