Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Granny and the coming storm

Senator Barack Obama will suspend his campaigning for more than 36 hours this week to visit his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is gravely ill in Hawaii. Mrs. Dunham, 85, all but raised Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii, and he has spoken of her often on the campaign trail. New York Times

'Le bon Dieu est dans le detail' Gustave Flaubert

'Get there fustest with the mostest' Nathaniel Bedford Forrest
David Seaton's News Links
As any Indian scout in an old Hollywood western would tell you, small things: a broken twig, a startled bird or a dog that doesn't bark, can have great significance.

Just as a small child knows that daddy sleeping on the sofa is filled with unknown portent, those who wish to analyze current events should never neglect the small but significant detail.

For example: when Rodrigo Rato suddenly left his job as head of the International Monetary Fund on June 28 2007 to return to Madrid because, "my family circumstances and responsibilities, particularly with regard to the education of my children, are the reason for relinquishing earlier than expected my responsibilities at the Fund", it was a clear signal, for anyone sensitive to these small details, that the world financial system was about to implode... If you had sold all your shares on that news item and bought treasury bills and gold, today you would be laughing at the crisis, picking up bargains, and all your friends would consider you a financial wizard.

In the same vein, Senator Obama's suspending his campaign to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii is a sure sign that the Republicans are going to open the Reverend Wright can of worms in the next few days.

What Obama does with all this is to hit the news cycle first with a huge human interest story that will remind the voters that Obama was raised by a nice old white lady from Kansas, ergo he is not really that "different". In the next few days TV viewers will be treated to endless "profiles" of Madelyn Dunham.

At the risk of sounding too cynical; if Mrs. Dunham chose this weekend to pass on, thus offering the candidate and his wife the opportunity of weeping copiously at her graveside, this might offset some of the damage that ten days of Jeremiah Wright's God damning America in an endless loop will surely produce. DS

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What, then, do Strauss-Kahn's current difficulties portend? Or is a cigar sometimes merely a cigar?

Anonymous said...

If all they have is the Wright rants best of luck to them. Can't they drag out something fresher and more incriminating than that? They only have two weeks left. The ideal days of course to spring the trap would be November 2nd and 3rd. So we shall see what precious surprise they have been saving.