Hopester Politics

(This post is in response to today’s Challenge in the Blogagauntlet. See here for details)

Last winter I read a book called Blink by Malcom Gladwell. In this book Gladwell explores the idea of “thin-slicing:” the phenomenon of making snap decisions in the moment and the accuracies and inaccuracies of this system. In the spirit of Gladwell, I hope to attack Ryan’s question.

Friends, I am a Hopester (a term beautifully coined by a friend of a friend of mine, which I sadly cannot claim as my own). No surprise there. Obama is my candidate. I know it is Taylor’s too. And I could go down the laundry list and point out how I agree issue by issue, but let’s try thin slicing the men and woman in this debate.

So much of Presidency is about character. And this begs the question, How do we judge character? Both Longfellow and The Muppet Christmas Carol suggest we count the measure of a man by his friends. Seems sound enough to me. In that spirit, let’s look at friends:

The biggest Libertarian in the race is a former Democrat – Mike Gravel. And he’s friends with rocks! I think we can do better.

McCain? Gross. On many levels. And image courtesy (?) of David Feldman.

This leaves Clinton and Obama. Let’s see:

Clinton: Rupert Murdoch, Celine Dion, and Wal*Mart

Obama: Lawrence Lessig, The Cool Kids, and Wayne Coyne.

Power by association. Without a word of policy or politics, a glance of who he associates with can tell you so much about how progressive and engaging and interesting the man is.

And as for the second half of the challenge. I see now that T-Bett has posted “It’s Raining McCain.” Kudos are due – it’s a good post. But the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” to that “Being There” is clearly the followup, “Here Comes McCain Again.” Right around the 2:00 mark it gets really good

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• Weekly Wrapup
• It has begun.
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• Blink !