In this morning’s Observer Armando Ianucci has written the most penetrating and biting analysis that I’ve read yet of Barack Obama’s policy-free political messaging :
[…]
So why does Obama, billed by everyone as a cross between Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, but without the terrible looks of either, just leave me puzzled? Maybe it’s because his is a rhetoric that soars and takes flight, but alights nowhere. It declares that together we can do anything, but doesn’t mention any of the things we can do. It’s a perpetual tickle in the nose that never turns into a sneeze. Trying to make sense of what he’s saying is like trying to wrap mist.
But, rhythmically, it’s quite alluring. It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse.’
How do all the other presidential candidates stand on four-legged seating? Commenter wikipedia has taken Armando’s ball, or rather chair, and run with it:
wikipedia
January 13, 2008 1:43 AMSUMMARY
Biden: I have worked with chairs all over the world, and most members of Congress agree with my plan for how to make chairsBloomberg: I’ve put together a committee to survey voters on whether they want me to make their chairs
Clinton: I have the most experience in making chairs
Edwards: I will fight the chairmakers!
Giuliani: I can best protect you from the danger of chairs, just as I did in NYC
Huckabee: Chairs did not evolve, but were created
Kucinich: We should have a one-payer system for chairs
McCain: My friends, I believe we can sit together in our chairs and work out bipartisan solutions without torture
Obama: Together we can create chairs in a new way
Paul: Why is the government involved in making chairs?
Romney: Venture capitalism has made American chairs the greatest in the world
Tancredo: We must build a fence to keep out foreign illegal chairs
Thompson: I like a comfortable, yet presidential looking chair
Utterly brilliant.
