PRNewsWire.com
With fully ten months to go before the first primary elections for the 2008 presidential elections, Senator Hillary Clinton maintains a modest lead among potential Democratic voters over Senator Barack Obama. However, Senator Obama has more potential support than Senator Clinton among Republicans and Independents.
These are some of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,401 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive(R) between April 3 and 16, 2007. Like all polls conducted well before an election, it should not be read as a prediction. Rather, it is a snap shot of the presidential "horse race", at a very early stage in the race.
The survey includes a sub-sample of 844 adults who say they expect to vote in a Democratic primary or caucus. When asked who they would be most likely to vote for, 37 percent picked Senator Clinton and 32 percent picked Senator Obama. No other potential candidates came close. Former Senator John Edwards, whose wife's cancer has received widespread media coverage, was picked by 14 percent of potential Democratic voters while former Vice President and Oscar- Winner Al Gore was selected by 13 percent. Three percent chose New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson while Senator Joe Biden and Congressman Dennis Kucinich were each chosen by one percent.
Personally, I've been supporting Edwards. I'm pretty tired of all the smooth talking politicians and Edwards tells us what he intends to do. But Obama has some magic that no one else has. He may just be impossible to beat. Street Prophets describes it best.
Obama laid out last night the beginnings of a simple, effective and powerful frame for his campaign. If he sticks to this script, he'll best Hillary and any Republican candidate out there. His only real competition will be John Edwards, for reasons that should soon become clear.
Here's the frame:
"Our politics is broken". In this formulation, to use Jeffrey Feldman's diagnostics, is a designed to help us do something. Specifically, it is a tool designed to connect us to other people, and it no longer functions properly.
"We have developed an 'incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other'; we have come to believe that 'we are not fundamentally connected' - but as [I] said at the 2004 convention, 'I am my brother's keeper, and my sister's, too.'"
The result of this breakdown is the violence Obama mentioned last night: not just the physical violence of the VTech shootings, but verbal, economic, and cultural violence as well.
The "fix" to broken politics is to reclaim a particular political tradition. Call this the "Abraham, Martin and John" frame, or more properly "Abraham, Martin and Robert," since Obama cited Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in his speech:
Lincoln: government is "of the people, by the people, for the people"
MLK: "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice"
RFK: "whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded."
In short, we fix politics by restoring to the people the power to "do the right thing," that is, work together to solve problems.
The result of the fix will be a populace empowered to create political and cultural change for themselves. Obama mentioned as problematic "a coarsening culture, cynicism, and despair," as well as inner-city issues no doubt tailored to the audience. Still, this is an endlessly adaptable frame, and will no doubt continue to turn up in many different contexts.
So there's the frame. In short: is a that enables us to create . When it's broken, our connections to one another suffer. When it's fixed, we advance on moral and pragmatic grounds. It wasn't this articulate in Obama's speech, either because he had to do a quick rewrite due to the day's events, or because he's still working out all the kinks. Either way, it's got a lot of potential.
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