Friday, November 07, 2008

On the other hand.....

A great deal of thanks to "hek", who commented on my Olbermann post of last night, and offered excellent insight into Olbermann's reasons for using the term, "What do we do now?"

I share.....

Greetings, Mr. Witham: At the risk of engaging in some kind of non-productive firefight with someone I don't really know, I just want to correct your record about what Mr. Olbermann is speaking of. He is making reference to the 1972 political film, Michael Ritchie's "The Candidate," in which Robert Redford convincingly plays a vibrant young candidate whose ideals are twiated and turned on the punishing road to high office, across bridges built of compromises. Toward the end of the film, on the verge of his U.S. Senate election, and just ahead of a clamoring crowed, he hustles his campaign director into a hotel room and asks, "What do we do now?"The film is more about the absurdities of running for high public office, and how any candidate is a cipher into which the public project their expectations which he/she then cannot possibly meet. At least not for all of them, all of the time. As Olbermann uses the phrase, it is through a sense of facetiousness. It isn't that Obama doesn't know what he must do, but that considering all that confronts the nation at this juncture, what priorities will go to the top. No matter what happens, whether the trends existed before he showed up, Obama is going to get blamed. For everything. The weather, you name it. Such is the pathetic shambling wreck that is the practice of politics.I'm watching Rachel Maddow more these days, anyway. Carry on.

Now I better understand the background behind it. And I THANK this poster for their comment!

I do still find incredible irony in Olbermann's decision to use this question on multiple occasions, as he positioned Obama as the one to answer all of our questions and meet all our needs. It would seem plausible that he should be able to handle multiple issues at once. At this juncture in our nation's history, he's gonna have to.

FDR didn't want to fight a World War on two fronts, but had no choice.

But I can assure you one thing, Obama is not being blamed on this blog for anything happening prior to the night of November 4th, except for what can be tied to his Senate voting.

But.....now that he has a title other than Senator, he now is fair game. For example:

Wall Street always gets jittery when a Democrat is elected. And the Dow went down 900 points combined on Wednesday and Thursday. With the horrible unemployment report this morning, one would think the trend would continue.

The Dow went up about 250 points today. All I've heard in the media the past two days is how the Dow is tanking because of the economy. Sure it is. But there's another thing: The Democrat factor. No one spoke to that.

With the Dow rebounding on the same day as bad economic news arrives, one wonders now exactly how many of those 900 aforementioned points can be attributed to our economy, and how many are attributed to how people view our "economy yet to come" under an Obama Administration.

Now, let's see what he can do.

3 comments:

Bookstore Piet said...

What are you basing your assertion that 'Wall Street gets jittery when a Democrat is elected'? I just looked over the historical record of Dow results for each election year, specifically the week of the election, and fail to see any fluctuations that support that theory. Sounds a bit apochraphyl to me.

Anonymous said...

He'll do nothing.

Anonymous said...

I believe he was also using the phrase as commentary to those who think the pundits and satirists will have nothing to talk about, now that the election is over.