New School Politics

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Here was a good article that I found in today’s Op-Ed section of the NYT.

“I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.”

“My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

To read the rest of this article please follow the link to the NYT page.

Another take on the Obama controversy comes from Peter Wehne. It takes a slightly different take than the one written by Bill Kristol but provides an equally important analysis.

Senator Barack Obama finds himself in the midst of a controversy in the aftermath of comments that he made at a private fundraiser in San Francisco on April 6, during which he explained his difficulty appealing to working-class voters in Pennsylvania. He said, “It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. . . .”

Senator Obama’s words are significant because they were said off-the-record, meaning they provided a more authentic glimpse into the attitudes of Obama than a carefully scripted event. Nonetheless, his words were not merely careless; his comments were based on a carefully constructed, if deeply condescending, explanation.

To read the rest of the article please follow the link to the National Review Online.

Last 5 posts by Eftychis

• Russian oil slump fuels supply worries - April 15th, 2008
• The Global Food Crisis - April 15th, 2008
• Putin's inability to alter the international system - April 6th, 2008
• McCain's first general election ad - March 28th, 2008
• Hillary and Obama: Tearing the party apart - March 26th, 2008

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The “Off-the-Record Obama” by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.