October 25th, 2006 → 12:50 pm @ Seth Mnookin // No Comments
Jon Friedman, self-proclaimed “hard-bitten” journalist (is that legal?) says he “gaped and gawked” at a recent Obama siting; nonetheless, Friedman says (in an article charmingly run through with exclamation points!), Obama “failed to wow” a conference of magazine editors and publishers.
So the self-hating and often confused Friedman says neither he nor the rest of the media world is impressed; meanwhile, Bloomberg News, Time, The Washington Post, and many others say he’s an electrifying and ascending star.
Really, I don’t even need to comment on this one.
Post Categories: Jon Friedman & Media reporting
tinisoli
17 years ago
A little over a year ago, shortly after Bush’s reelection, I was working for a week aboard a trawler out of New Bedford, MA. The captain, a guy named Toby, was a hardcore rightwinger, a grouch who listened to Fox radio all day while lamenting the sorry state of the New England cod fishery and blaming the government for all of it. He hated Hillary Clinton (“that butch dyke Billary Clinton”), despised environmentalists, loathed Kennedy, and thought Kerry was nothing but a rich guy. He liked Bush. When I argued that the Iraq war was wrong, that Bush was a fool and no less of a blue-blooded child of privilege than Kerry or Kennedy, that he was running the country into the ground, Toby would just say “Leave my Georgie alone” and rail against Billary and the “bullshit economy of the ‘90s.” We carried on for a week like that, whenever I wasn’t on the deck taking data on his catch (as a fisheries observer) and he wasn’t peering out the wheelhouse hatch at his deckhands and muttering how “skullfucked” they all were. He thought Laura Ingram was great, Ann Coulter a real hoot, O’Reilly a smart guy. And so on and so forth.
But he liked Barack Obama. He’d seen his speech at the ’04 DNC. Of course, he couldn’t quite remember his name (“Osamabama?”) but he knew the guy had something that Kerry and Billary and all the others lacked. That intangible “it” factor that seems to strike a chord in most people. Maybe it’s simply authenticity. Whatever it is, Toby sensed it and responded, despite loathing everything the democrats supposedly stand for.
It’s just one fisherman’s opinion, after just one speech. And I really doubt Toby would ever vote for him, no matter how much more damage Bush does between now and ’08. But I think such stories––and there are thousands of them, of people simply responding to this man with admiration, trust, and hope––suggest that we non-Republicans should indeed hope that this man gives it a go in ’08.