Music to whose ears?

George Packer has some interesting thoughts on Barak Obama, but like so many reporters, he has a disturbed view on the elections of 2000 and 2004.

Barack Obama’s recent statements about Iraq and Darfur have stirred up controversy: is he nobly making genocide a special focus of concern, or cynically declaring it something that America will have to live with? On the one hand, he has ruled out the prospect of genocide as a reason for American troops to stay in Iraq, or the reality of it as a reason for them to go into Darfur; on the other hand, he has visited Darfur several times, talked about it frequently, and even brought up the much-neglected tragedy of Congo, which is not a vote-getter in any American precinct. His advisers include Anthony Lake—Clinton’s national-security adviser during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, who has apparently been agonizing over his failure to act to stop it ever since—and Samantha Power, the author of “A Problem from Hell,” the best-known book on America and genocide. So who is the real Barack Obama?

The answer may lie in the record of the politician he most reminds me of: J.F.K. Senator Kennedy based his Presidential campaign on the appeal of youth and hope, calling Americans to high ideals; Senator Obama is doing the same. Kennedy’s idealism was wrapped around a basically conservative temperament, and he made most decisions in the cold light of political pragmatism; Obama’s character, as Larissa MacFarquhar’s Profile of him shows, is similar. The J.F.K. of the New Frontier created a soaring political style (and the music of politics matters a lot, as the Presidential candidates Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry learned); but the President himself was cautious to the bone. My guess is that a President Obama would govern similarly. Because he is young, black, attractive, and rhetorically inspiring, Obama has generated outsized hopes for a transformative Presidency that will make America good again. For better or for worse, some of his admirers will be disappointed.

Emphasis mine, acourse.

The music of politics? Where? I would like to remind everyone that Gore and Kerry were running against one George W. Bush, an orator in nearly the same league as his father ("Message: I care."). Gore didn't lose because he couldn't hit the high notes. He lost because the press -- particularly, as this Vanity Fair piece reveals, the Post and Times -- decided it would be a good idea to perform a political hit on him that was vicious and truly fucked our country in ways we'll be figuring out for the next decade. In Kerry's case, the press (and, admittedly, Kerry) didn't know how to handle the massive machine created to undo his veteran's credentials.

"Music" didn't enter into the equation.