You might do a little better if your campaign advisors don't insult your own party's base. From the New York Observer (italics mine):
I got to talk a little bit about it with Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the subject of genocide and an informal advisor to Mr. Obama's campaign who is helping to write the speech."We're going to hear something very unusual on the left, which is a genuine pride in what America can be again," she told me. "It's a bigger story about failing states. It's not a regional story. It's more freedom from fear and freedom from war."
Drafts of the speech, she said, call for a return to "legitimacy and competence" as the two pillars upon which America should rebuild its standing in the world and fortify its national security.
Does Power even know anyone on the left? The reason we were the first ones beating the "legitimacy and competence" drum--not the Compulsive Centrists--is because we want to take "pride in what America can be again."
I don't expect candidates to agree with me on all the issues. But, please, if Power is any indication, stop lying about those of us who have supported the Democratic party. If you're going to attack anyone, go after the idiots you got us into this mess, not your own base.
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Samantha Power is a leftist. She wasn't referring to the entire left.
Michael Bérubé on the different lefts:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/26/how-do-i-sleep/
Please, this was just political pre-speech hype for Obama's upcoming "big foreign policy speech." Powers was employing a little pre-game triangulation. If a candidate claims to be new and different they can either offer something new and different or campaign against old politics straw men, which does that comment sound like?
Does Power even know anyone on the left? The reason we were the first ones beating the "legitimacy and competence" drum--not the Compulsive Centrists--is because we want to take "pride in what America can be again."
I think the way the comment was meant to be taken is that people like you, I, Samantha Power have been beating this drum all along. However, this is not the kind of person who has been speaking for the left, this kind of person has been relegated at best to message boards and blogs and other extensions of the private sphere. Instead the left has been spoken for by the Democratic Party, the alan colmses of the world, the terrified "centrists" who were too focused on their own self-interest to do anything but repeat the Republican party line. Now the left is starting to be spoken for by leftists again, and so the message from the left that actually reaches people is going to be different.
But the comment was so torturedly presented that on a plain reading all it does is feed the very the-left-is-so-weak frame it's trying to smash...
I see this as mostly just yet another example of why I think words like "left" or "liberal" should simply not be used whenever possible. They mean too many different things to too many different people. The word "left" is useless to anyone, apparently including leftists, except as a straw man...
Powers was employing a little pre-game triangulation.
If so, that's bad. I think the kind of people Obama needs to be drawing strength from right now are precisely the people who are tired of engineered triangulation.
Obama IS an engineered triangulator. Only makes sense his advisors are, as well.