There’s been a meme going around for a while that Obama is all hope and sunshine and no substance. Clinton and McCain have both used this argument in the last few days. And witness this political cartoon today:
The thing is, it’s not true. Obama has plenty of substance. Just look at the Issues section of his website, which is filled with links to specific proposals on various subjects. He doesn’t talk about it much, but there is in fact a there there.
Carpetbagger does a good job of unpacking the meme.
(By the way, I love the word “meme.” Such a part of the Internet age. Remember when “memes” were just called “ideas”?)
Hmm. Perhaps a comparison is in order. The Yankees are a baseball team. A bunch of (overpaid) players at the top of their game. Their use of performance enhancing drugs notwithstanding, they’re just a bunch of people, who I could take or leave, it matters little to me.
Yankee fans on the other hand, are rabid, obnoxious and sing how their team can’t be beat after every win, and after every loss criticize every little choice made from management down to each of those players that they exalt when the team is doing well.
Obama is a VERY smart man with astute and nuanced positions on almost everything. He’ll bring an intellectual might to the White house that I certainly haven’t seen in my lifetime, and would love to see.
Obama supporters, however, are largely made up of the morons that tend to largely make up most groups worth making generalizations about. To them, all they hear is “Change! Change! New!” and get all caught up in the euphoria.
Obama supporters are like Yankee fans. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to find an ounce of substance, a smidgen of policy here:
http://dipdive.com
Then think of how many people will vote for Obama based on it.
Yeah, that video kinda creeps me out.
Do we know when “meme” started becoming standard? Richard Dawkins coined the term back in 1976 in The Selfish Gene — but it seems like only recently, within the past five years or so, that I’ve encountered it as a commonplace word. Which is, incidentally, about the same time that Dawkins broke out as an international ideological superstar…