Post-Partisanism
I don’t know if I belong to his same generation, but I am sure that my conception of what post-partisanism entails is vastly different from Barack Obama’s. It is my generation that will eventually have done with and put paid to the Democrat-Republican dichotomy that the American Republic depends on. Something else will arise and by a different name. I think a transitional three-party era is nearing. I think the Democrats are about to split in half.
Party is American, but I don’t belong in either of the major ones. Or in any of the minor ones but to my own self. So, for me, the old dichotomy is personally irrelevant.
But do you suppose the same is true of this man, less than a decade my senior, who now runs for the Presidency of the United States? Party is entirely relevant to Barack Obama. So what is he going to do to show that he is above partisanism, as he claims? Because that’s all he does is claim to be above or past such things.
I have never heard a politician resort as readily and insistently to the idea of page-turning, bridge-building, consensus-seeking, and change for change’s sake as this man does, so where is he going to break away from the Democratic Party and reach out? What issue will he exploit to show that he can be trusted on foreign and military policy? What else will he do, besides disown Jeremiad Wright, to show that he recognizes the group psychosis that is the social gospel of his church? When will he show the courage to disagree with his party? And how is he not a typical Leftist politician, spouting bromides about rising above it all when he has no moral or experiential authority to persuade me that rain falls?
If this guy is a revolutionary, why don’t he show up and kick it?
