I waited for two hours to get into a Barack Obama speech at Magness Arena this morning, only to be turned away, along with thousands of others. Not fun for me, but still an impressive turnout.Pleasantly enough, Obama spoke to those of us left outside before going in for his prepared speech. He looked out at all of us and said, "We're gonna need a bigger boat." Yeah, that's a Jaws reference! So he won me over with that.
But now I'm thinking more about it. If he's Roy Scheider's character, who's the shark? Remember, the shark was a New Yorker who had migrated from down south. Hello, Hillary?
And maybe he wasn't referring just to the movie, but also to Achen and Bartels' shark attack paper. If so, that's serious dog-whistle politics. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who heard.
At any rate, I listened to his full speech later on the web in the warmth of my office. There were some interesting digs at Hillary Clinton in there, suggesting he was reaching out to the Edwards folks. He seemed to abandon some of that post-partisan talk in favor of saying that Americans need a choice in November, and that Hillary, with her Iraq war vote, is a bit too close to the Republicans on some key issues. That's the kind of talk that won me over to John Edwards in the first place. Keep talking, Barack.
3 comments:
Sorry you weren't able to get in. You would think as a prof, you'd have some pull. Your people need to talk to Obama's people next time. Or you need to get people.
If he was really citing Jaws, it makes me wonder if we're seeing a candidate who is going to start communicating in bizarre cultural references, which would be a real generational shift. For example, if you told him your name was Enik, would he laugh?
Good point. He's only like six or seven years older than I am. Think he knows the Sid & Marty Kroft stuff? Like, "We need to hire Dr. Shrinker to work on our deficit," or, "We can't have a president with access to the nuclear codes who shouts 'I said lunch, not launch!'"
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