The great line of the article is this:
Part of this can be chalked up to a kind of punk-rock-band-gone-MTV disaffection. People who were into Obama when he was an underground, authentic phenomenon aren’t necessarily so into the slickly produced, more pop-friendly version.
Many who have been reading this blog since 2002 are familiar with this feeling. Okay, not many since not many read it in 2002.
I was interviewed by BBC 4 and then BBC Belfast over the weekend and trying to describe the speech was a little hard. I thought it was excellent by most standards of American politicians, but only decent for Obama.
I’m a bit more positive about what Obama is doing now than many of the early adopters, but I also understand the concerns and observations and Chris does one of the better jobs laying out the thought processes I’ve seen. I think there is something else going on in the rhetoric that Chris points out is in tension between unity and progress. I’ll cover that later, but it’s a good article so take a look.
The problem some are having is that they don’t concider being exposed to so much more thinking that obama is evolving. In this article in the Rolling Stone he came to Washington thinking to be really wonky and ended up getting involved in alot of foreign policy stuff and studying it alot. Nose in the books and talking to people who are in the know.
You just have to read the article to see how this guy has evolved and grown and has been in deep thinking the past 2 years.