Isn’t it clear that this was a not so subtle dig at the thug attempt to characterize Obama this way??? Mean spirited.

I was flipping around my XM radio because I can’t stand Bill Press (he means well, but he is sort of like my 72-year old dad who plays Sting’s “Fields of Gold” for me because Sting was in the Police and I had Police albums while I was a teenager, but I digress), and I caught some of the local morning shows and a bunch of callers while saying the speech was boring, still said that the Democrats will “raise your taxes” and that we can therefore trust McCain and the GOP. With a lot of people running credit cards and home equity lines that are larger than what their houses are worth, etc., people don’t really seem to care or understand for that matter that we are running huge deficits. Those same deficits that are actually causing a lot of the inflation that is causing the pain. People cannot or will not make that connection.

Dick Cheney, sadly enough, is actually correct in stating that “deficits don’t matter” for the American public. Deficits absolutely should matter, but they really don’t.

In this country, people really believe the myth of rugged individualism and “personal responsibility” as long as it doesn’t apply to themselves. They believe that they will some day reach that $250,000 tax bracket or the multi-million dollar estate tax bracket without understanding the issues of probability.

I am therefore fearful of what is actually going on outside the informed atmosphere that we here in the blogosphere inhabit. We all jokingly watched the speech yesterday, and laughed along with Ian. [and got pretty drunk on that “my friends” drinking game….]

At the same time, a lot of people who watched it, who don’t bother to inform themselves, got the major network spin that it was such a wonderful, moving speech (I got 2 minutes of Anne Curry last night, for example, grrrrr)

The question that I have is: “how can we gap that bridge from the informed to the uninformed?” There is a very insipid message behind the “Community Organizer” smear, while McCain talks about “trust.” It is that he is saying that you should trust him and not said “community organizer,” who might be telling you that McCain talks a good game, but actually is full of shit.

One thing that I think Obama does very well which a lot of Democrats fail on is give a message of hope and not a message of “our country is really F’d up, because the GOP stinks.” I surf around a lot of the blogs, and while we do a good job of informing people about how screwed up the country and how really, really screwed up the GOP and the government they run is, we don’t do enough in stating in what about government or any other progressive cause, such as unions (as an aside this blog is the exception that proves the rule, I feel) are good things and things that are right about this country. Finally, that things in toto are much better now than they were in the 50s, that mythical period when Ozzie and Harriet had it great, but every single minority did not……

[stepping off soapbox]

Sorry, went a little long there…