In the article, entitled "Unstoppable Obama", Ehrenreich attempts to analyze and explain the difficulty faced by Senator Clinton as she tries to formulate a coherent and positive reason to elect her over Barack Obama:
We believe that Obama's promise of change has become a life-boat for many of us who are just so sick and tired of the same-old, same-old that we are desperately seeking a way out of the fiscal, environmental and political miasma that envelops America today."Consider our present situation. Thanks to Iraq and water-boarding, Abu Ghraib and the "rendering" of terror suspects, we've achieved the moral status of a pariah nation. The seas are rising. The dollar is sinking. A growing proportion of Americans have no access to health care; an estimated 18,000 die every year for lack of health insurance. Now, as the economy staggers into recession, the financial analysts are wondering only whether the rest of the world is sufficiently "de-coupled" from the US economy to survive our demise.
Clinton can put forth all the policy proposals she likes - and many of them are admirable ones - but anyone can see that she's of the same generation and even one of the same families that got us into this checkmate situation in the first place. True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe they just miss the internet bubble he happened to preside over. But even more people find dynastic successions distasteful, especially when it's a dynasty that produced so little by way of concrete improvements in our lives. Whatever she does, the semiotics of her campaign boils down to two words - "same old."
Positive change will only happen when a majority of Americans -- acting together and for a common purpose -- choose to take positive action that will result in positive change.
And America is in dire need of serious change -- not the timid or partisan incremental kind of change that happens in a Congress where every vote is filtered through a "what's in it for me?" lens.
In order to achieve a monumental kind of change, a President must have a mandate from the American people. And we do not mean the phony mandate claimed by Bush after squeezing out a microscopic victory in the 2004 election, but rather the kind of mandate handed to FDR during the Great Depression.
Like FDR, Obama has captured the imagination of the American people and his message inspires us to believe that something good can happen again.
Really, we have never seen anything like it in our 50+ years of living.
We understand now that change can happen only when the collective "we" -- not just Obama -- decide that we can and we must do something. And once a majority of citizens decide we want things to change in Washington, all of those stale and bickering politicians -- Democrats and Republicans -- will need to get on board or get out of the way .
Hillary and Bill have adopted a new "words are cheap" message to try to thwart Barack. But his message is more than words. Obama's call for "change" provides us with that longed for "courage of conviction" which has been so lacking in the Democratic Party since the mid-1990's.
It seems that the the Democratic Party lost their majority and their spine as soon as Newt Gingrich made his "Contract with America." And with no opposition party to counter the Republican machine, the country has suffered greatly.
Yesterday, the Democrats in the House of Representatives stood up to Bush for the first time ever when they refused to adopt the Senate version of the FISA bill that would extend the President's warrantless spying power and grant immunity to the telecommunication companies.
Even in the face of the usual (and empty) threats from the President and his Republican minions, Nancy Pelosi found strength and courage. Why now? Where did her fearlessness come from?
We do not know if the Dems will stay strong and fierce or if they will ultimately cave in to Bush's demands (as usual).
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