If the Obama campaign resembles anything right now, it’s the David Dinkins mayoral campaign in New York against Giuliani in 1989. The idea was simply by voting for Dinkins you would create a “gorgeous mosaic” of peace, love and understanding that would bring the city to new heights after the decaying final four years of the Koch administration. Plus it made guilty white liberals feel good about themselves by electing an African-American mayor for the first time. But what they ended up with had a weak leader beholden to his party’s special interest groups who not only could do nothing to stop the slide, but did nothing to members of those groups when even greater problems occurred under his administration. And even then, most of the guilty white liberals in New York still voted for Dinkins in 1993, arguing that there was nothing on Gaia’s green Earth that could turn New York around from its downward spiral.
Obama is more charismatic than Dinkins, but with the aid of the big media outlets, any Democratic nominee can attain that status through fawning press. They managed to make Jimmy Carter into the magnetic “Face of the New (Liberal Democratic) South” in the run-up to the 1976 election, and we know how that turned out — Carter gave his “malaise” speech three years later, and the not-feeling-as-guilty white liberals still supported Jimmy in 1980 after Teddy’s flame-out, arguing that there was nothing on Gaia’s green Earth that could turn the United States around from its downward spiral.
Barak’s record is such a blank he may fare better than either Carter or Dinkins by not being as beholden to his party as Dave nor as anal-retentive about his governing style as Jimmy, but I doubt it, and the current supporters an Obama Administration would appoint to key government roles really do believe the Kos/MoveOn/netroots rhetoric, and for both foreign and domestic policy, that is a scary future to contemplate.
