Peter Beinart, Clinton Apologist: Wedge Issues and the Obama Candidacy

Peter Beinart's comments in May 26, '08; Time, that the viability of the Obama Candidacy has Bill Clinton's Presidency to thank presupposes that politics and it's American variant is static and the American people are an easily manipulated and buffoonish bunch.

Beinart suggests that without the Clinton Presidency removing the wedge issues of Welfare, the Death Penalty and Affirmative Action off the Political table, the Obama Candidacy would have relatively been impossible.

I disagree. Granted that Welfare as an issue, the Death Penalty and Affirmative Action have been in one form or the other issues Republicans and reactionaries have exploited. The fact is just as any other facet in ideology-less politics the body politic would have wised up to the inherent manipulations of it's practitioners.

In non-ideology politics the operative is opportunity. In non-ideology politics one of the means of exploiting opportunity is a complicit media dumbing down the relative facts and as a practice it can only go but so far because at a certain point people will have to remove the blinders from their eyes and start reacting positively to their economic reality.

Wedge issues in American politics exist simply and solely because they present the path of least resistance to political office, because wedge issues are camouflage for that ineffable undercurrent of American Political-Economy, Race, injustice and the concurrent fear that historical injustice has wrought.

It isn't that Clintonism approach to wedge politics which by the way is a misnomer because all politics in one form or the other is wedge, banished those three symbols of American injustice from the landscape. The fact is the Global and National political dynamic is what is making the Obama Candidacy viable.

• On Welfare: How would Welfare as an issue fare against the present economic reality of those Reagan-Democrats who have been historically susceptible to it's plyings?
• On the Death Penalty: How will the Death Penalty exposed to serious National critique do in the face of the reality that a number of people sentenced to die have been released due to wrongful convictions.
• On Affirmative Action: Is America in the milieu of a type of radicalism which during the 1970's and 1980's was a blip on the Cold War radar, confined to pockets, but is now the International reality. Willing to reveal it's or the inherent Racism in Affirmative Action as a debate?

So to imply as Beinart does that the American political environment is static and hermetically sealed perpetually enthralled with idealistic wedge issues is status quo elitist reduction.
By Apropos