E.J. Dionne Writes About the "Real America"

The first time I read E.J. Dionne Jr. was during my freshman year of college when he covered politics for the New York Times as a journalist. His dispatches from Iowa and New Hampshire during the '88 presidential campaign were far more incisive than the standard beltway drivel. Almost twenty years later his op-ed columns in the Washington Post are a must read. In his most recent column Dionne writes,

"When a nation alters its philosophical direction and changes its assumptions, there is no press release to announce the shift, no news conference where The People declare that they have decided to move down a different path." Yet 2006 is looking more and more like one of history's hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways. The changes in politics and culture are visible in the many sudden and outright reversals of the conventional wisdom.

Nowhere is the evidence of change more striking than among the young, whose attitudes and behavior are usually leading indicators of social transformation."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF DIONNE'S COLUMN.

I concur there is something percolating in America. Truth and hope are empowering and the public senses it is receiving neither from today's political class. Our current leadership has either provided fear saturation, shameless lies on an epic scale and crony capitalism or been too cowardly to stand up to them. The end result is a corporatist plutocracy, apathy and collective sense of vulnerability. This I believe explains the hysteria for iconic figures such as Guiliani and Obama. Sadly, Guiliani is another corporatist fear merchant and we just don't know about Obama yet.