Bitterly whining for change
Phil Gramm’s recent remark:
“This is a mental recession. We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet… We have sort of become a nation of whiners.”
is the perfect bookend to Obama’s comment:
“You go into these small towns … and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then 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.”
And wasn’t the reaction just too perfect? A nation of whiners bitterly whining about being called a nation of whiners.
The common element is dissatisfaction, the motive force of modern civilization. Obama and McCain both want us to be dissatisfied, in different ways, dissatisfied enough to vote. The media want us to be dissatisfied enough to watch endless coverage of this, the most important election since the beginning of time.
Of course, the problems never get solved, there’s always someone pointing out the urgency of change, and every election is the most important election since the beginning of time.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Wait a minute! There is something not quite right about this analysis. Both of these statements (both true, I believe) met wide disapproval. If the two candidates want to profit from voter dissatisfaction, they better not say so and in general they know better and don’t (or they retract such statements). Americans may be dissatisfied and whiners but they don’t want to be told that they are (cf. Carter’s “malaise” problem). So the two recent statements can’t be taken as indications that the canididates want to stress voter dissatisfaction, although I do agree that the Democrats are counting on dissatisfaction whereas the Republicans prefer to count on our fears. And I agree with the conclusion that things go on as usual after the election and little ever gets done.