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Saturday, November 08, 2008

MUTT LIKE ME

President Elect Obama's affable quip that he was a mutt has attracted far more attention than anything else he said during his historical first presser yesterday. Although you may be inclined to see in this fact further evidence (as though any were needed) that our lazy and superficial media figurines are incapable of reporting anything actually newsworthy or substantial if they are given any opportunity at all to report anything else at all, it seems to me that in this case, as sometimes does happen, this laziness and superficiality has prompted the media to cover for a change what was indeed the most newsworthy and substantial -- even, dare I say it, epochal -- thing that happened in the Press Conference.

In referring to himself as "a mutt," Obama was playing The Mutt Card. This move was nothing short of an act of genius in my view, even if it amounted to an off the cuff comment on the President Elect's Part, and well worthy of the wide attention it has garnered. Like many truly genius plays of such cards from the political deck, Obama's play of the Mutt Card was especially powerful in large part because few people are likely to have known there was such a powerful Mutt Card to play in the first place.

They do now. Upon hearing it on a newsclip show, my partner Eric said of Obama's playing of the Mutt Card, "just a reminder, for anybody who may have forgotten it already, or may be trying to forget it, the Southern Strategy is Dead."

I couldn't agree more. One of the best things accomplished by the play of the Mutt Card is that it threatens to throw the Race Card out of the deck forever, and to the benefit of us all.

"Mutt Like Me." America the beautiful, land of mutts, lovable freaks, and working class heroes...

Not a place likely to be fooled again by authoritarian minorities who pitch themselves as a "Moral Majority," not a place likely to warm up to mean spirited assholes who pitch themselves as "Values Voters," not a place likely to fall for a weird marginal klatch of violence-prone know-nothing racists who declare the majority of Americans "un-American."

Mutt Like Me. Mutt Like We.

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