BE STILTED, MY BEATING HEART Steyn on America
t’s a bit late in the day to say what I’m looking for in a candidate. So let me say what I’m looking for in a voter. It was nicely summed up by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic Monthly, contrasting McCain and Obama back at the end of primary season as they clinched their respective nominations:
The enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.
And God bless ‘em: Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them. Alas, we stingy stilted cheerers are a dying breed, and, if present polls are any indication, on November 4th Americans will be looking for a leader they can exalt with more full-throated hosannas. Two and a third centuries after the Declaration of Independence, the monarchical strain in American politics is stronger than ever: Not for us a citizen-executive promising a chicken in every pot; we seek a benign sovereign promising hope in every pot – presumably a specialty item hand-crafted by some Vermonty artisan type.
Steyn keeps knockin' them out of the park. Well worth following the link.
On edit:Replaced goofy long and confusing subject line.
