In the next couple of chapters, Barack writes about the workings of Washington. The structure of the Constitution and how it lays out like a set of blueprints on how our country is run is amazing. It forces a certain amount of dogged deliberation. It encourages compromise between competing interests. It tempers idealism and chains it down to bedrock reality.
“And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower your scope of interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit than the people you represent.”
Barack also places a distinction between corporate PACs that “use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence (page 116).” I would disagree. All “special interests” garner much more political influence than the largest group of Americans, those who are unaffiliated.
Barack's Democratic primary victory demonstrates that he is capable of winning an election against the odds. Its something to point to for those who say he has been “lucky.”
And Barack's demonstration of how the media shapes are views sticks (page 124): “--how a particular narrative, repeated over and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them."
This article shows the many “political caricatures" of Hillary Clinton: Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary.
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