Inside Man
McCain claims he's a maverick, while Obama tries to paint him as a Washington insider. How did it get to this? I know Jimmy Carter was elected when America was looking for an outsider after Watergate, but now it seems like running against Washington is an automatic stance.
Was it always this way, or is this a modern phenomenon? You might think knowing your way around D.C., understanding how to get things done, would be considered a positive. (Not that it is necessarily a positive--I'd rather have a neophyte try to pass laws I like than an old hand pass laws I don't.) Furthermore, you might think that both McCacin and Obama, who are members of a pretty exclusive club, are insiders.
But every election, we get this running against the establishment thing. Hey, aren't we the establishment we've been waiting for?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:09 AM
2 Comments:
When the "government is terrible" crowd got in power, it became an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy.
While I think that those in charge will always be have some measure of unpopularity, the situation becomes more extreme when each side can use it as a club ("All government is bad" vs. "this government is bad")
Its a no lose situation to beat up on the powerful and pretend to be an outsider- the populace needs someone to blame for problems-illegal aliens, oil companies, welfare cheats/Wall street cheats why not the annoying prevaricating media-whore squawkers on cable?
I have a lot of sympathy with the view that government is bad. It may be necessary, but it's mostly a necessary evil. The smaller the better, as me and Jefferson say.
But that doesn't mean that the guy who's the "outsider" is any better than the "insider." They're both going to be running things, so all I want to know is what they're going to do.
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