Music Never Lets Me Down

This story strikes me as lazy thinking and as non-news.  It’s an article in Time magazine that says that Obama is ice and McCain is fire; the Dem is dispassionate and clinical and the GOPher is an emotional volcano.

This just seems to be untrue, doesn’t it? Obama seems to very much understand and feel the pain of his fellow citizens, and his manner is of a cool and levelheaded mentor - like a teacher or camp counselor who cared very much about your problem but knew that it wouldn’t help for him to panic too.

And the idea that McCain is totally out of control of his emotions seems to be extremely implausible - you can’t have been in the Senate for more than a quarter century and not be able to keep your thoughts and feelings in check.  I have no doubt that his “irritability” or other cantankerous tendencies serve more as tools to dismiss Obama as a whippersnapper; I just can’t fathom that the man has been in public office this long and wouldn’t know exactly how his actions affect his public image.

This article seems to me to be just another stupid dialectic that some news outlet has decided to run with, because they want to make it a this-vs-that election, and because red-vs-blue is so 2004, they’ve decided on the elemental (and not very subtle) stand-in of fire vs ice.

Let’s check our collective common sense for a moment - does anybody actually believe that if there were some sort of terrorist threat that Obama wouldn’t react with passion and decisiveness? And does anybody actually believe that McCain is so impetuous that he’s going to declare war on Iran simply because somebody sneers at him funny?

I don’t mean to single out Time.  This bit of idiocy is a journalistic device that nearly all the outlets are using. There is a great Obama profile that I feel helps me understand him much better in New York Times Magazine, which shows a nuanced, energetic, interested, concerned, fallible, human candidate.  I’m sure one is out there about McCain (anybody know of one?), but most news organizations aren’t interested in running with that angle.

They’d rather he be a cocked gun, a red-hot poker, about to erupt at any moment and take any sense of subtlety or humanity with him.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.