Talk Talk: Obama’s Entanglements Or So What If He Is A Socialist?
By Nancy Hanks | Related entries in NewsIf you’re not familiar with Talk Talk, a weekly news analysis by independent strategists Fred Newman and Jackie Salit, I highly recommend you check it out. Here’s last week’s from Sunday, September 6, 2009
Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, September 6, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
Salit: I already have a working title for this week’s Talk/Talk.
Newman: Which is?
Salit: “Obama’s Entanglements.” No doubt it’s something of a redundancy, because being President of the United States is all about entanglements. But the two in particular that we’ll talk about today are Afghanistan and the fight over health care.
Newman: I have an alternative title.
Salit: What is it?
Newman: My title is “So What If He Is a Socialist?”
Read Talk Talk in its entirety here.
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September 12th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
You can tell what a person is by the company and council he, or she, keeps.
September 12th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
We need to take a stand.
September 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Paul and Nancy – Not knowing what either of your posts indicate as far as what stand or what company you are talking about my guess is that everyone would agree. :-)
September 14th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
theWord — point well taken. In retrospect, I think I was hoping for some more substantive comments on the issue of whether Obama is “really” a socialist, or what that has to do with the dialogue right now, and where independent voters are at, and where our country is headed…
But a non-sequitur deserves at least another non-non-sequitur, don’t you think?? … Not knowing what any of us are talking about, what do you think about the current political climate?
Right now I am working toward a social/political culture of non-partisanship and I think we (the US) are going in a very interesting direction: uncertainty!
Let me know what YOU think!
NH
September 15th, 2009 at 12:21 am
By any sane definition of Socialist Obama is not Socialist. He wants to raise taxes a bit, and his health care plan is quite a bit left of anything anyone seriously proposed lately. But if that makes him Socialist the entire industrialized world is run by Socialists — they all tax their rich more than Obama wants to, and have health systems far left of Obama’s proposals.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Nick — I hear you and I think that’s the market price of socialism these days.
Something that Newman was raising in this particular piece as I understand it is that FDR couldn’t get everything he wanted, and at that particular moment there was a viable socialist movement in the country, born and bred in the radicalism of the 1930s, the labor movement, the influx of European socialists, many of who were Jews, and American pragmatism, such as it is.
The question here is what difference does it make if Obama IS a socialist?
Eager to hear more from you. Thanks for your comment!!
Nancy
September 16th, 2009 at 2:03 am
In practical terms he’s right. Whether Obama is a Progressive, Green, Socialist, Social Democrat, even just Center-left doesn’t really matter much. Obama’s a pragmatist, and to get anything done in the Senate he needs Center-right folks like Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe.
September 18th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Nick, I couldn’t agree with you more and and thanks so much for your comment!
Here’s my thinking about this: Even IF Barack Obama is a socialist, what’s the difference to the American people (never mind the international community)? Have we moved forward? I think we have, but will we continue to move forward?
I have dedicated my entire adult life to the proposition that we can move forward, we can be a better people. And I recognize that that’s a tough proposition.
Suggest you check out independentvoting.org at http://www.independentvoting.org
We gotta get outa this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do….
See you at the finish-line?
Hanks