Salon’s Walter Shapiro writes,
“So here is a working theory, subject to many modifications as the campaign unfolds: Barack Obama is simultaneously both aware of the power of cheap rhetoric and easy emotion — and intellectually contemptuous of it. He is a candidate in quiet rebellion against the banalities that too often govern political discourse.”
Shapiro makes his assessment from his close observation of the campaign. But it is only when he hears a remark by the candidate on health care that he finally puts it all together. It’s when Obama goes out of his way to declare, “I’m not somebody who will run down the insurance companies and the drug companies just for the sake of it” that Shapiro really discovers Obama.
Drug companies and insurance companies have long been a favored target of Democratic presidential candidates, Shapiro writes, and “neither Edwards nor Hillary Clinton is apt to miss many opportunities to go after the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. But there was Obama, speaking to a largely Democratic audience in an old pulp-and-paper town, promising not to take any cheap shots at these corporate villains.”
Some will interpret Obama’s remarks as a sell out. I think they are refreshingly, well . . . original. No matter where you sit, all of us are both the problem, and the solution to the health care mess that confronts us. Obama may be the first to really demonstrate that fundamental understanding.
