Feb 14 2008
HRC Vs. BHO = VHS Vs. DVD
By now, everyone has heard the comparisons being used to depict the Democratic presidential nomination race. There seem to be thousands of them.
- Hillary Clinton is Dunkin’ Donuts. Barack Obama is Starbucks.
- Hillary is a PC. Obama is a Mac.
- Hillary is prose. Obama is poetry.
- Hillary is analog, Obama is digital. (Which doesn’t work because analog records still definitely sound good and have their place)
Those comparisons only tell part of the story.
A more effective comparison is that Hillary Clinton is VHS, while Barack Obama is DVD.
VHS definitely had it’s day. It beat out all its competitors (like Betamax), and stayed on top of the game for some time. It got the job done during its day. Not too long after its inception, however, we knew that bigger and better things would eventually come along. We knew someday we would outgrow the format. Someday relatively soon… at least many of us hoped.
Then DVD comes along. After a couple failed attempts (ahem, Laser Disc), people thought that the format was too good to be true. It sounded better. It looked better. Everything about it seemed to make it a vastly superior product. Despite the legitimacy of DVD, people remained skeptical. While some consumers took the DVD plunge and reaped the benefits, others stuck by the tried and true dinosaur format of VHS.
The skeptics haters said things like:
- “I’ve invested so much in tapes, and they’ve always been dependable. I think I’ll just stick with these tapes for a few more years. No need to change yet.”
- “Why should I go for change? Could VHS be better? Sure, but it’s always worked for me. I think I’ll play it safe for now.”
- “DVD looks and sounds pretty, but does it actually work? How can one little disc accomplish all that stuff? There’s no way it can do all that.”
It took some time, but after a while the entire nation realized that we had outgrown VHS and its limited abilities. We moved on to DVD and never looked back.
I don’t just associate Hillary Clinton with VHS either — I associate the past quarter century of prominent politicians as well. That’s Bill Clinton. That’s George W. Bush and his pops. That’s Dick Cheney. That’s John McCain. That’s Newt Gingrich. That’s Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Did they get us through that time in history? Yes. At the same time, we know we can do better. Much better. I have a hunch that someday we will look back at the Bush-Clinton era and ask ourselves how we lived like that. Kind of like VHS and how we reflect back on all the tedious rewinding and fast-forwarding, not to mention the piss-poor picture quality and lack of special features. We will feel blessed.
Barack Obama is DVD. He is the future. Just like DVD changed the entertainment game, Obama has forever changed the political landscape. We’ve already seen him bring in droves of new voters and produce record voting turnouts. We’ve seen him bust through barriers we thought would stand forever. Young people are making a difference. Black voters have mobilized behind a candidate like never before. Rural White voters are voting for a non-White presidential candidate. Cynical Baby Boomers are dropping their guards. National voters are actually choosing a candidate, instead of being force fed the establishment’s inevitable one. Widespread change has already begun.
Albert Einstien once said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” That’s the progressive mindset that gave us DVD, and that’s the mindset of Barack Obama. He’s not just “smoke and mirrors,” as Bill Clinton recently put it. People said the same thing about DVD players, wondering amidst the hype if they’d ultimately get the job done. Bill Clinton just doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he doesn’t want to. He fears the future because he is an agent of the past.
The American people are sick of VHS, sick of the same old shit in Washington. We’re ready for DVD, ready for change. We see that Barack Obama is the person to start this process of change, to launch this new era. We don’t want “just okay” anymore — we want better all the way around. And we know Obama can deliver. How? By looking at his past…
Obama went against the political grain and rightfully stood up to a popular war that was wrong — both fundamentally and morally — when nobody else did. Obama’s refused to take money from lobbyists and special interest groups throughout this entire election process, and has already helped reform ethics in Washington during his short tenure as a U.S. Senator. When other Harvard law grads took seven-figure corporate jobs, Obama chose to work on the streets of Chicago — for the people. Even Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger have applauded Obama’s work when it comes to carbon emission standards and creating green jobs. Despite Obama being the youngest presidential candidate in the field, the Washington Post gave his economic stimulus package its top grade. Obama had the guts to vote yes on the FISA Dodd Amendment. Obama has the guts it will take to shut down GOP torture amusement parks like Guantanamo. Obama has the guts to end this lost war in Iraq.
The list keeps going on and on and on. That’s why this whole experience thing is bullshit; Obama has executed the forward thinking we now so desperately need time and time again. Just like DVD, Barack Obama didn’t just show up out of nowhere a year ago and decide to run for the highest office in the land. He’s been a work in process that’s been developed over the past twenty or so years. He actually has more legislative experience than Hillary Clinton when you count his eight years in the Illinois State Senate. The experience is there. The substance is there. Most of all, a new way of thinking and the ability to get people to embrace that thinking is there.
I have faith that people will continue to put aside the old for the new as this race for the nomination moves on. Why? Because like DVD, it isn’t just the newness or trendiness that is behind the Barack Obama phenomenon. He’s simply a better product. Put the past away in boxes somewhere. You can still pull those old tapes out and reminisce from time to time, but we’ve reached the point where only DVDs should deck our shelves. It’s time for us to let go as a country and embrace our future.
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I did a little bit of unscientific math that I thought was interesting. I took the average poll numbers obtained by pollster.com for Obama and Hillary in each state and compared them to the ACTUAL poll numbers from each state. Obama, on average, did 7.5 points better than polls showed he would do, while Clinton, on average, did 1.62 points better than polls showed she would do. I even excluded the numbers where Obama did 20 points better or more than polls suggested, so his number should be higher, but those polls were done weeks before the actual vote and would have skewed the results. So I’m basically going to look at every poll or Texas and Ohio and add maybe 4 points to Obama’s and leave Hillary’s alone, which may in fact account for Independents and Republicans who are NOT surveyed.
That being said, what do you think happens if she wins Ohio, Texas and Penn. with an average, let’s say, of about 10% each? Have you seen any online projections that compare these wins for Hillary with Obama’s likely success moving forward into other states? I’m confident, but am reserving my excitement. I’m sick of all the uncertainty. I wish someone would sit down and do the math and see who actually has the better chance (and someone may already have). I believe it to be Obama, but I don’t want to underestimate the power of the 3 big states she is likely to win.
Change, change to what? The DVD analogy is silly. We had records once upon a time. We changed to CDs because technology allowed us to get there, but there was no change until that happened. We changed from VHS to DVD because of technology. Now how did we get that change, by allowing entrepreneurs to grow and make money and make big corporations. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, became rich because he was smart, and he took IBM to task. He got IBM to finance his MS-DOS and he kept the rights because Gates understood the money was to be made in the software not the Hardware which is what IBM thought. Here in your populist examples you give are examples of capitalism, elitism, big corporations, venture capitalism, and the list goes on. Obama talks about class warfare. Had this class warfare existed back then, we would probably still be playing records with VHS tapes.
I agree with change, but change should be keep the government out of our lives and let us make our own way. You don’t even realize it, but that is exactly what your VHS vs DVD analogy is all about.
Keep the government out of our lives? What about keeping the lobbyists and special interest groups that run Washington out of our lives? Elitism? That describes George W. Bush and the GOP perfectly… We don’t want government meddling in our affairs, except when it comes to cutting taxes for the rich, keeping gays from having anything close to resembling equal rights, protecting our rights to have as many firearms as we can possibly hoard (and a million and one school shooting rampages won’t change that a bit), forcing Christian values down the rest of the country’s throat, retroactive immunity, etc… that’s all I hear from your side. By the way, I am a Christian so don’t even go there.
We already had one long, protracted argument about this kind of stuff. I don’t have time for another.
I guess we’ll just call Obama Blu-Ray for now. While the rest of us embrace the promise of the future, you can just go back to playing your old, dusty Reaganomics records. A new majority is forming. It’s time for you to swallow that pill of truth.
Funny, I thought the DVD, VHS analogy was simply regarding new vs. old, and that old ‘Hillary’ will be phased out while new ‘Obama’ will be ushered in. I guess you can create a back story about capitalism, etc. if you want, but that obviously wasn’t the intent of the analogy. Republicans are pretty good at making something out of nothing and doing nothing about something.
“Had this class warfare existed back then, we would probably still be playing records with VHS tapes.” I’m not sure we ever played records with VHS tapes. I think we used record players to play records.