June 21, 2017

An unmentioned problem with Ossoff

Sam Smith - Coming from a time when politicians were real people, rather than poor television simulations of them, my first standard for a new politician is: do I like him?

It's not a particularly helpful standard because there are so few politicians these days you'd want to have a beer with, Joe Biden being perhaps the most striking current exception.

But if you're going to find someone to run into a race so presumably important that it attracts as much money as the recent George House contest did, you ought to at least try to do better than Jon Ossoff.

Ossoff I could easily judge by the drinkable standard because I knew nothing about him. What I saw on TV was a dull reciter of canned political arguments. No smiles, no heart, no personal manner. Just a carefully trained political trooper.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was hardly surprised to learn that Ossoff went to the Georgetown school of foreign service and the London School of Economics, another example of the glum  gradocracy that has increasingly come to define liberal politics.

While some gradocratic candidates - Obama being an example - get away with this, it's not the best way to take back an America where working class whites are being increasingly conned into supporting people like Trump, thanks in no small part to increasingly well educated liberals ignoring those without the proper letters after their names.

For the Democrats to regain power they need to regain what was once their strong connection with the souls of ordinary Americans.  Ossoff, competent and sound politically as he may have been, lacked the touch.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"you ought to at least try to do better than Jon Ossoff"

Well it's clear the Democrats don't exactly have what might be described as a deep bench. They've done it to themselves by making it perfectly clear that folks with opinions outside the thin prevailing narrative are not welcome. Hillary's dismissal of the left as being unrealistic is indicative of the party's mindset on the whole with the ultimate result being the party has no one of originality to present. They've rejected the authentic center and the left for so long now that it is amazing they have such difficulty comprehending why the authentic center and left now reject them. Will the message eventually sink in?--betting not

Anonymous said...

The Democrats abandoned the center. They also abandoned pretending to care about the left. Their mantra is: "We're Democrats - Vote for us."

The only voters they have left are a few small special interests and those traditional Democrats too stupid to walk away from what is almost a mirror image of the Republican War Machine/ Republican Cater to the Rich Machine.

Is it any wonder all they do is lose?