Simon St.Laurent: March 2008 Archives

I've been thinking lately about the different styles of the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Doonesbury had some fun with the "poetry of Barack Obama" vs. the "prose of Hillary Clinton", but I think there's something more complicated underneath.

Both candidates promise change, but their rhetoric - or what I hear in it - offers a very different perspective on the power needed to make change happen.

To me, I hear Hillary Clinton asking voters for the power she needs to make the change that they want. I hear Barack Obama calling us all together to make change with the power that we have together.

I could be totally off-base, and this may be as simple as the number of times Barack Obama says "we" having some effect on my mind.

(And I hear John McCain mostly asking for power to do, well, whatever he and his friends want to do. I'm not sure why we're supposed to give it to him, but then I wasn't particularly sympathetic to him anyway.)