I found this over at Sobering Thoughts.
Do you have the audacity of hope? Or the urgency of now? Perhaps you feel the audacity of now and the urgency of hope; or the ferocity of what: the adverb of where; the gerund of when or the vacuity of who. Then you are ready for a new kind of politics.
What are the defining features of The New Politics? Well, for a start the new politics is good. This is important because the old politics was bad. The old politics is sterile; the new politics is vibrant. The new politics is hope; the old politics is despair. If you are the candidate, the old politics is your opponent; the new politics is you.
The new politics doesn’t do detail. But it doesn’t matter because the better you say it, the less it has to mean. The new politics is about mood and vision. It claims to confront hard truths while sticking to old remedies. It purports to seek the end to corrosive negative campaigning even as it derides and dismisses all the alternatives as the old.
The beauty of the new politics is that the less experience you have the better you are at it. You just need to be personable, articulate and uncontaminated by power.
The current king of the new politics is Barack Obama. Consider the pithy but marshmallowy soundbites that form the heart of his rhetoric. They would be be just as valid for a man trying to entice a woman into bed. Imagine the scene at the front door.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
“On our first date?”
“I have the audacity of hope.”
“I have work in the morning.”
“But I’m feeling the fierce urgency of now.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t do this kind of thing on a first date.”
“It’s time for a change.”
“We can’t.”
“Yes we can.”
This may not work on a lady’s porch but politically it gets a foot in the door. But even as it appeals to disenchanted voters it plays the most cynical trick of all. For the new politics is the same old politics tapping into an unformed desire for change.
Chauncey Gardner comes to mind.
