Saturday, February 09, 2008

Does anyone else find this as creepy as I do?

Volunteers told to share personal conversion stories with voters - not policy views.

There's been a lot of this crap lately, but this is just plain weird.
"He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words," said Mack, now a regional field organizer. Obama hugged her and whispered something in her ear – she was so thrilled she doesn't remember what it was.

Then Mack brought home the point of her story for the crowd of 100 or so eager volunteers, sipping coffee and watching a PowerPoint presentation in the Obama campaign office on a recent Saturday.

"Did that make more impact on you than if I had talked about his health care plan or his stance on the environment?" she asked.

...
...Mack wanted to drill home one of the campaign's key strategies: telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion.
...
She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama...
...
She told the volunteers that potential voters would no doubt confront them with policy questions. Mack's direction: Don't go there. Refer them to Obama's Web site, which includes enough material to sate any wonk.

The idea behind the personal narratives is to reclaim "values" politics from the Republican Party, said Marshall Ganz, a one-time labor organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers who developed "Camp Obama" training sessions for volunteers.


This is just plain freaky. These people are talking about what amounts to a religious conversion, finding their messiah. You usually hear this kind of crap from one of two groups:
People who have an actual religious experience, and
People taken over by a cult.
This mess is not "values" politics, this is a damned personality cult. As Sondra says,
No, Dearie. Values are concepts. Ideas. Ideals.

Feelings are just that—feeeeelings. They are by-products of perceptions which mix with Values to become thoughts which are then translatable into actions. That’s what makes things run.

Actions based on feeeelings alone are just blind flailing.
Which, granted, can be powerful. Powerfully destructive as well as accidentally constructive.

Not so efficient, ya see.


I'll make a bet with you: many of these people, if they hear someone talk about finding Jesus or returning to their faith or whatever, roll their eyes and gag. And start talking about 'separation of church and state'.

'Coming to Obama', jeez.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It will end in tears!

ptg said...

Barack is the messiah, or hadn't you heard?

Firehand said...

The other day somebody referred to him as Obamessiah; that seems to cover it for these idiots.