Ranting about Politics

I'm guessing by now that most people have read about the Barak Obama Thing wherein he made fun of some college reporter at one of his events, and the reporter wrote a flaming article about it, and then he called the reporter to apologize.

Because of doing this, he's suddenly the "good guy", the "decent man", the one who "speaks the language of the younger generation and honestly wants to reach out to them", who will let NPR listen in on his phone calls out of the kindness of his heart just to indulge them and their audience.

I suppose it's probably par for the course, but I'm really irritated by the amount of headfirst feel-goodness that's coming from this - not because Obama did something decent, but because of the utter hypocrisy in people's responses to it.

Imagine that it hadn't been Obama, but some Republican instead. Then, instead of lauding him (or her) for doing such a great deed by reaching out to the youngsters, there would be accusations of "exploiting" the situation for personal political gain, accusations that the person was just using the publicity generated as free campaign capital. Letting NPR or some other media outlet listen in would have only emphasized that argument - instead of a pure act, it would have been seen as a slimy political maneuver. (And honestly - how pure are the intentions of a guy who can't simply call and apologize to someone without making sure that the rest of the world knows he's doing it?)

I thought this generation was supposed to be more savvy, more intellectual, more able to look at the "deep, underlying" aspects of a situation and make well informed decisions instead of being swept along by superficial acts and attitudes.

Blah. This upsets me as much as when people vote for one particular party just because of a strong, overly emotional obsession with a single issue (and in many cases, an issue that the candidate or party won't be able to fix by itself) and don't take into account any of the issues that will more likely be affected by that candidate.