http://bostonist.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_co.php All comments for Barack Obama Comes to the Bay State--Long Lines Ensue en-us 2009 rickbang Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:29:29 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss rick@bostonist.com rick@bostonist.com 60 http://bostonist.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_co.php#comment-1287115 http://bostonist.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_co.php#comment-1287115 Comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:31:25 -0500 <p>I am reading this on February 7th, with hindsight. But you should have possessed a great deal of hindsight even by the 5th. This was your New Hampshire all over again, with the romanticization of long lines of people standing for long hours in freezing cold. This, mind you, happened with Eugene McCarthy in 1968, this happened with McGovern in 1972; to a lesser extent it happened with Mondale toward the end of his disastrous general election campaign in 1984. May this serve as a warning (intellectually speaking) to you and other excessively impressionable observers. I suspect Obama himself was carried away with unfounded optimism (note the text of his "victory" speech in Chicago on election night, which must have been written with the expectation of a Second Coming and remained unmodified). That's the nature of the intoxication politicians often suffer as a result of rubbing elbows with adoring crowds. Richard Nixon, an expert on masses if nothing else, understood the dissonance perfectly back in 1970 when he started addressing himself to a "silent majority", that which remains invisible and inaudible. How right he was became apparent in 1972 when he scooped 49 states of the union (good Massachusetts excepted) and 60% or so of the votes. The intoxicating power of masses crowded in a city square or in a sport palace may help carry out revolutions, violent or otherwise, by skipping the ballot box. But whenever the ballot box is the medium, public opinions tend to be far more conservative, _far far_ more conservative. Few historians would disagree with the notion that the French Revolution would have been defeated in a referendum in 1789, the excited crowed in the Bastille notwithstanding. And that is good. It's good that the great masses view revolutionaries with skepticism. That is the most important check on the impulses of world redeemers, right or left. But I don't really belong here, no Bostonian and no Bostonist. Thank you for indulging my ruminations.</p> http://bostonist.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_co.php#comment-1285030 http://bostonist.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_co.php#comment-1285030 Comments Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:33:03 -0500 <p>Thank God for C-SPAN YES WE CAN!</p>