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Eloquent Talk, But Little Else: Huffington’s Hope 2.0

Jan 19th, 2010
by Tom.
1 comment

Re:  Arianna Huffington: “Hope” Has Been a Bust, It’s Time for Hope 2.0, Arianna Huffington, Posted: January 18, 2010 04:43 PM

On the eve of the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, it’s become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us. The 2008 election was all about “Hope.” But Hope is simply not cutting it.

What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned — that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.

…The perfect example of this came in March 1965. In an effort to push for voting rights legislation, King met with President Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was convinced that the votes needed for passage weren’t there. King left the meeting certain that the votes would never be found in Washington until he turned up the heat in the rest of the country. And that’s what he set out to do: produce the votes in Washington by getting the people to demand it. Two days later, the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation in Selma — in which marchers were met with tear gas and truncheons — captured the conscience of the nation. And five months later, on August 6th, LBJ signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, with King and Rosa Parks by his side.

…One year later, wracked with conflict and discord, and battered by petty grievances, false promises, and worn out dogmas, we stand on the verge of passing a giant boon to health insurance companies and calling it “reform.”

The reason we are given? What else: the votes just aren’t there for a real reform bill.

That’s where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren’t there, the people need to create them. Just like King did. They need to build a movement. And to make that happen, we need to adopt another of the great lessons of Dr. King’s life: elevating the role empathy must play in our society.

Dr. King went out and made it happen. He made Washington sit up and listen. Now, Arianna comes along and speaks so eloquently to our hearts that empathy must reign and we must, if our Democracy is to survive, create the votes needed to make change happen.

The only problem with all this is the one little, itty bitty problem that is standing in the way of us taking her advice and hitting the streets with the pitch forks. We did that against the war in Iraq and it barely caused a blip on the radar.

Without the media, namely Arianna Huffington and company, behind such a move – building on it by keeping it in the news cycle 24/7 – then it will fail just as surely as the world-wide Iraq war protest failed in March of 2003.

Arianna wants us to go out and make it  happen, like Dr. King did. But we don’t have Dr. King leading us across that bridge into Selma. We don’t have a figurehead who could grab the headlines with his compassion and fiery oratory, or someone to lay in his bed in the throes of self induced starvation for the sake of peace.

If Arianna thinks Hope 2.0 is the answer, then she should be willing to put herself out in front of it and motivate all these keyboard-bound Democrats to close their laptops and grab some signs.

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A Second Look: Poll Finds Faith in Obama, Mixed With Patience – NYTimes.com….and…a look at Obama’s “it” factor.

Jan 18th, 2009
by Tom.
No comments yet

via Poll Finds Faith in Obama, Mixed With Patience – NYTimes.com.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: January 17, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

New York Times/CBS Poll
New York Times/CBS Poll

While hopes for the new president are extraordinarily high, the poll found, expectations for what Mr. Obama will actually be able to accomplish appear to have been tempered by the scale of the nation’s problems at home and abroad.

The findings suggest that Mr. Obama has achieved some success with his effort, which began with his victory speech in Chicago in November, to gird Americans for a slow economic recovery and difficult years ahead after a campaign that generated striking enthusiasm and high hopes for change.

There has never been a more synergistic President-elect than Barack Obama. At a time when we need hope, when the Bush administration has stated equivocally that they don’t care for the people and have lavished the rich, he bases his whole campaign on hope. When we all hurt and yearn for healing  and hope, and even though we realize that the healing may be a long process, we get it with Barack. At a time when that bright spark of intelligence in our leadership is long overdue, he brings more of it to the table than any president in thirty years. When we crave for the best and the brightest in the White House, we get it with the Obama administration. At a time when we need someone with level-headed, straight-forward pragmatism instead of fake cowboy swagger, we get it in Barack. And above all, when we desperately need a sense of national identity instead of a policy of preemptive war, torture, and an anything goes foreign policy, Barack marches with it to the Capital steps to loudly proclaim that we are once again a nation of laws.

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