"That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."

A few posts back, I linked to a clip from The American President. That movie is packed full of blog ideas so let me do one now.

In that same clip, President Shepherd (Michael Douglas), in reference to his reelection opponent, Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), says, "Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it." He then goes into a spiel about Bob, a Republican, not being interested in solving problems but rather, making voters afraid of something and getting people to vote for him.

The movie speech is definitely inspiring. Heck, in the edit room, I'm sure someone could make Hillary Clinton look inspiring. But in reality, Bill Clinton was naturally good at this kind of speech. On teleprompter, Barrack Obama's also good at it.

But the irony is, when they do it, they themselves are guilty of the very thing Shepherd accuses Rumson of doing. Shepherd is making people "afraid" of Rumson by accusing Rumson of making people "afraid." There's some liberal logic for you. And in the movie speech, Shepherd goes on to make people "afraid" of global warming and guns.

In real life, Obama does the same thing. He keeps trying to make Americans "afraid" of global warming, guns, the rich, free speech, you name it. Obama's career would have never gotten started without finding and exploiting the fears of his constituency. Hillary's trying to do it, too, but she just doesn't have the flair for it. For one thing, she's so robotic in her delivery but her biggest problem is that she just doesn't have a shred of credibility.

Anyway, they all get their tricks from "Rules For Radicals" by Saul Alinsky. I wanted to introduce him to the continuum of my blog to write about him occasionally.