Obama urges the world to win the future

The writer M.S. at the Economist's Democracy in America blog, who finds Obama's address to the U.N. "cogent, right, sensitive, sophisticated and moving," meditates on the various audiences it was addressed to and concludes that the main audience was a domestic American one. He is skeptical that Obama's eloquent re-presentation of American values as universal ones would reach Arab citizens in any meaningful numbers.

I will leave that question alone. But I do want to amplify the author's point about the way Obama's speech resonates in our domestic political realm. M.S. cites the following passage as evidence that Obama is responding to the political imperative to denounce the violence against American missions abroad more robustly than he denounces the bigotry of the anti-Muslim film that ostensibly triggered the violence. I hear a different chord struck:

I feel you, DiA

This clip-out from DiA on The Dish triggered an image:

The worthwhile, boring, essential parts of war and life do not make good television. They do not even make good narrative: David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel tries to sanctify boredom (and if I ever manage to slog my way past page 56 I'll let you know if it succeeds; he's a great writer, but come on, I'm only human, I have my narrative needs too), but otherwise writers and filmmakers wisely steer clear of the subject. People standing around tables in offices sorting documents into files or making minute adjustments to photographs does not make for compelling reading or watching. But make no mistake, those people are the ones who put the SEALs in that compound.

What I saw was the preamble (there's got to be a more technical term -- the medley of images and theme song at the beginning of each episode) to The Wire, David Simon's epic HBO drama of the Baltimore drug trade. The medley tracks the movements of cops and bureaucrats and people on Baltimore's poorest streets. It's often struck me that the sequence captures the dignity, the intensity, the concentration in the most mundane human tasks -- punching the buttons on a pay phone, dragging on a cigarette, snapping a  photo, exchanging cash for product, u-turning a bicycle. It somehow screens out any moral content we might impose on the actions, shows us all as conscious animals doing what we do.

In any case, the association was no accident. Jumping to DiA, here was the upshot:

What is a political "argument"?

Questioning whether the Tea Party can be effectively countered by argument, DiA, I think, whittles away its (his?) own premise:

...do intelligent arguments make a difference? I'm trying, and failing, to think of an instance where voters on any side have been persuaded by a reasoned opposition on any issue. It might happen with individual voters on particular issues, largely of the technical variety—if someone sits down to figure out whether they support a bond issue, maybe—but I can't think of a single issue where an argument, however elegantly expressed, has tipped the balance. These, I think, are the methods by which public opinion may be moved:

• A momentous event (9/11, the oil spill, a botched execution)
• The gravitational pull of mounting social change (gay marriage)
• A timely and effective message, repeated ad nauseam ("It's the economy, stupid;" "change")

Nothing against ideas, but their effect seems to come after they trickle down (as in the messaging method described above), or if they have the fortune to hook on to a current event. It does seem that individual politicians can benefit from having lots of good ideas (Barack Obama, Bobby Jindal), but it seems like the political gain from that is, "that guy's smart", rather than "after careful consideration, I agree with the content of his platform.

Sullivan finds these postulates depressing  But do they boil down to much more than "arguments don't occur in a vacuum"?  I don't think that the causes of shifting opinion that DiA outlines suggest that "argument" has no effect.