What was in that other field, the one that got neglected and deprived of water?
Just about everything else: Education, Inner Cities, Highway maintenance and construction, Infrastructure, huge realms of Scientific and Medical Research like Stem Cell Research, etc. You name it: our American Economy is in terrible shape, and with the way our international respect has deteriorated, squarely because of Bush and Cheney, it might get a lot worse....the signs are everywhere; they are well known and they are easily recognized: endemic mortage failures, high gas prices, a deflated stock market, high unemployment, failed schools especially in the Inner City, store closings, et. alia.
Much of this election hinges on our ability to change all of that, to put America back on a sane and internationally effective tack, and that is at a minimum, just to ensure our survival as a nation.
That is why I want to see Dr. Dean be the Obama Cabinet Secretary for Health or as FDA Commissioner, and that is why I want to see NM Governor Bill Richardson as the next Secretary of State. I think also that Jerry Brown of California would make a great consumer protection-oriented United States Attorney General, one who would also reconstruct all of our civil liberties.
Such speculations are of course something else entirely, but I am certain that Obama should discuss such things seriously and frequently, ignoring the advice of some who say that that would be ridiculed by the right wing as "presumptuous" or as "arrogant," so that the American people can gain some glimmer of an insight into what he really would like to achieve as President, in terms of names, both possible and real and well known names.
Will Obama win?
To get to that victory, I work day and night as a member of 328 Obama groups, coordinating correspondence, and urging people to not just "preach to the choir," as that is how Democrats usually lose elections, but to get out there and go door to door to tell folks how much is really at stake in this election, plus my special focus: Letters to the Editor, Opinion/Editorials, and so on, all over the United States, wherever they could be published.
Surprising how few people comprehend this in only a few states, and in not many of the so-called BATTLEGROUND STATES, for Obama and for US Senate candidates, as described in my blog about a week ago in the letter from Senator Charles Schumer.
I am going to take a break from all of this furious emailing, so you won't hear from me for a while.
I will conclude with a few paragraphs written today, not by me, but an astute observer and friend of mine,who wishes to remain anonymous, about 50 years old, a realtor, former actress, and thinker:
Recently, I was on a flight to Texas and sat next to a very personable and fairly astute guy. We began talking politics and went back and forth about the issues. He was really impressed by my research and said so.
Then he leaned over to me and whispered conspiratorially, "I concede all the points but Obama is a Muslim, you know."
And when I calmly explained that that particular lie fed on our basest fears, he held up Reverend Wright as proof. This scene has been repeated numerous times with different characters but the underlying emotional message is clear and powerful. Their winning on a gut level. They are afraid and the facts don't matter.
Obama is perceived as "the other."
The Republicans have clearly defined him emotionally and he must wrest these irrational pictures away from them and supplant them with powerful and soothing reassurance.
Obama may loose this election if he does not connect on a visceral level soon. He must capture the emotional narrative and stop trying to be only reasonable. People do not reason their way into the voting booth. They move from the gut.
