Tiptoeing Around That Big Hyped Hope
Mother Jones’s Obama feature falls flat
By Jane Kim Wed 20 Aug 2008 12:23 PM
The current Mother Jones has a slew of writers, historians and thinkers responding to this question: “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history?”
It’s a disappointing showing: the people MoJo chose to ask are unsurprising, and their answers are predictable. (At PressThink, Jay Rosen questions whether Obama ever made those comparisons in the first place.) According to John Judis, of The New Republic, “Obama has run a brilliant campaign, but not necessarily a ‘great progressive’ one…But that’s not to say his campaign isn’t significant or important.” The other writers sharing space with Judis similarly qualify their responses, taking careful semantic care of the words “progressive” and “movement.” No, they say (almost) in unison, Obamania isn’t a truly progressive movement. In fact, it’s not even really a movement—let me tell you what a movement is. Still, let’s not forget that it’s historic; I definitely didn’t say that it wasn’t historic.
What is the point of congregating thinkers if they ultimately say so little that is new?
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