Reply #159: But if THAT'S skirting around the issue, then what the hell [View All]

is Dean doing. He's skirting around an doing pirouettes and waving flags and hoping you don't look past the fact is that all he's selling you is some illusion that bluntness carries the day, and that he's got a pocketfull of blunt.

Both of these guys are telling stories to get accross an idea. Allegory and analogy is how EVERYONE tells you about their ideas and what they stand for. MLK did it. Malcolm X did it. Everyone does it. Stories are very powerful. In many ways, these stories tell you more than the simple statement, "I'm for AA because it's good for everyone."

Edwards's story about race is very powerful to me, because I find that it suggests a highly intelligent, historically appropriate, left, liberal, progressive policy attitude that grasps the political and economic reality of racism.

Dean's story about blunt talk directed at red necks tells me that he wants you to believe that he's blunt and that he has the cajones to confront rednecks. It tells me nothing about his grasp of the political and economic realities of racism. In fact, if his stories don't start to include an economic component which acknowlegdes that solution includes getting people who are discriminated against into the middle class, even if it costs a few rich businesses a little in labor costs, I'm going to get very confused about where he stands on the liberal spectrum.

And, by the way, were are those economic plans? I read his WSJ thing and that, to me sounded like a paliative aimed at big business, and I spent yesterday explaining why I thought tax 'reform' aimed only at the poorest and not at the middle class isn't my full cup of tea, as a Democat.