? To Axelrod On A Plane: "Is this 'change we can believe in'?"

[kpete]

The Audacity to Ask a Question
Micah L. Sifry | December 15, 2009 - 10:05am | 2 comments | Email This!

It's not every morning that you run into one of the most powerful men in the country in relatively intimate and unguarded surroundings, so today as I was boarding the shuttle down to DC and saw White House senior advisor David Axelrod seated by a window just behind the first class section, I decided I had to seize the moment. My parents gave me "change the world" disease when I was young, after all, and I probably will never shake it.

..................................

"Is this 'change we can believe in'?" I asked. He didn't respond at first so I repeated the question to make clear I was talking to him. It was his slogan, after all, that he and the rest of the Obama '08 campaign, had offered to the nation.

Axelrod looked up calmly, peering at me over the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. What are you referring to, he asked.

...................

"Do you have health insurance?" he asked me. Yes, I said, a bit nonplussed. "Well, we're trying to get coverage to the millions of people who don't," he said. (It struck me later that perhaps he thought I, a 40-something white man, was perhaps not an Obama voter.)

Don't get me wrong, I said. I want that too. But I wish you'd "be less poll-driven and lead the country." (Morgan Freeman's performance as Nelson Mandela in Invictus was on my mind, having seen it Saturday night. Go see it and you'll know what I'm referring to.)

more:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/audacity-ask-question

[Pirate Smile]

1. Good response by Axelrod.

[hlthe2b]

4. What about Axelrod's response did you find to be "good?"

pretty boiler plate to me, at least....:shrug:

[tabatha]

2. The comparison with Invictus in this instance makes no sense.

Mandela never delivered what he promised (not because he did not try, but because he could not overcome the forces against him.)

[Mari333]

3. axelrod is a liar.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7242143

[tabatha]

5. Hollywood gets it wrong over Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/news/6796296/Hollywood-gets-it-wrong-over-Nelson-Mandela-and-Francois-Pienaar.html

also

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-mandela15-2009dec15,0,3903566.story

"Watching those euphoric scenes in the film, when South Africans of all races poured into the streets to celebrate the Springbok national rugby team's eventual triumph over the New Zealand All Blacks, it would be easy to believe that this was, as the book suggests, "the game that made a nation." Yet 15 years later, the country remains in many ways racially divided.

Impoverished blacks continue to live packed into third-world townships on the edge of modern cities, where the best neighborhoods are mostly white. Many of them now complain that too much time has been spent allaying white fears and too little reversing the injustices of white rule."