Me @ UPenn 4 Barack

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Lessig

My talk at UPenn about Barack. Download other formats at blip.tv.

This entry was posted in presidential politics. Bookmark the permalink.

14 Responses to Me @ UPenn 4 Barack

  1. AJ says:
    March 30, 2008 at 4:51 am

    Excellent talk, really enjoyed it.

  2. Steve Baba says:
    March 30, 2008 at 4:55 am

    Just a conjecture – but couldn’t the fall of vaccinations be caused partly by nuts (amateurs, extremists) on the Internet being more able to associate with other nuts.

    You can’t judge anyone’s judgment on the basis of ONE decision, especially one that has a random element in it. Also making the “correct” decision on the war were Ron Paul and Rev. Wright.

    Have I been banned from this website or has my last comment on the DC speech been drooped because of computer problems last week?

  3. Miguel de Icaza says:
    March 30, 2008 at 4:56 am

    As always, a great presentation.

    Am forwarding to my friends, and some potential supporters.

  4. Maria H. Andersen says:
    March 30, 2008 at 5:06 am

    I always love your presentations! Out of curiosity, do you write a script to go with the slides? Are the slides timed? How many times do you have to practice it to get the timing down?

  5. Richard Mondello says:
    March 30, 2008 at 5:09 am

    Great talk. I enjoy your style of presentation, like always.

    If we could only get people to sit down and watch a logical argument like this, they’d be convinced. I do not see what Hillary supporters see in her. The experience point is dubious at best, as you’ve just elaborated on.

    Let’s just hope Pennsylvania makes the right choice.

  6. Seth Finkelstein says:
    March 30, 2008 at 5:34 am

    Quite skilled rhetorically, but debatable on key points.

    As in: http:// abcnews.go.com/print?id=3677868

    “Nobody can dispute that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the
    start and, with striking prescience, predicted U.S. troops would be
    mired in a costly conflict that fanned “the flames of the Middle
    East.”

    But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator’s claim
    that he was a “courageous leader” who opposed the war at great
    political risk.”

  7. Federico Pistono says:
    March 30, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    Excellent speech, as usual. Thank you Larry for all your great work, which I follow with much interest even though I live in Italy and I I virtually nothing to do with the US.

  8. Andrew Drinkwater says:
    March 30, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    I thought the campaign funding points, and Iraq war points were new and interesting. Remember folks, Lessig isn’t talking about reality, he’s talking about transparency. After all, even highly educated people drop into poor, surface level reasoning when it comes to politics. If things are more transparent, maybe the quality of the discussions will improve.

  9. Seth Finkelstein says:
    March 30, 2008 at 5:48 pm

    The logical flaw in Lessig’s presentation is that out of the entire universe of political actions, he cherry-picks one that makes Clinton look very bad, another that makes Obama look very good, implicitly arguing that these are representative. One could easily make a different presentation with Clinton’s best moment contrasted with Obama’s worst moment. But that’s politics.

    http:// http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/10/sb-a-little-bit-more-on-obama-1161881683

    “To anyone who thinks Obama is blissfully oblivious to the fundraising imperative, consider the following: in one of his earliest votes as a senator, Obama helped pass a class-action “reform” bill that was a long-standing and cherished goal of business groups. (The bill was the focus of a significant lobbying effort by financial firms, who constitute Obama’s second-biggest single bloc of donors.)”

  10. Deb says:
    March 30, 2008 at 6:35 pm

    I enjoyed your speech yesterday, but it bothered me a bit that you referred to Obama only as a “mixed race person”, both during the speech and in the question and answer session that followed. As as mixed race person myself, I believe one of the most important rights we have is to choose our racial identities. Like Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack’s sister, I identify as a hybrid (see her interview with Deborah Solomon in the NY Times). However, in his public discussions as far as I have seen (if you know differently, I would be very interested), Barack has chosen to acknowledge and celebrate his mixed racial heritage, but to call himself black. It is of course not incorrect to refer to him as a mixed race person, but it is not the racial identity he has chosen.

  11. Jared Burke says:
    March 31, 2008 at 3:38 am

    Referring to Illinois as a “state with a Republican governor” and not the bright blue, progressive state it is overstates the courage involved in opposing the Iraq war at the time.

    I require no further convincing that Sen. Clinton is an inferior candidate, I require convincing of Obama’s superiority.

    Lessig brings up important points, but I fail to understand how Sen. Obama can value these issues yet not push legislation as sitting Senator. The Democratic party holds a majority in both houses of congress. Can they pass veto-proof legislation to correct these issues? Perhaps not, but I fail to understand why it is not in their interest to force a vote none-the-less. Is it not in the party’s interest to go on the record supporting the things they support and forcing their opponents to go on the record in opposition of the things they oppose? Should they not be sending legislation ending the war to the president as frequently as possible, forcing him to veto? Would this not clarify the Democratic party’s anti-war position and solidify Bush’s responsibility?

    Sen. Obama could write legislation today that would settle this “I opposed the war/she voted for the war” nonsense once and for all, yet he doesn’t. Nor does she.

    Why?

  12. David says:
    April 1, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    Responding to Seth Finkelstein’s argument saying that Lessig cherry-picks examples, one could argue the same of his examples. Finkelstein cherry-picks a counter example, whereas, one could argue, Lessig’s choices are indicative of a larger pattern. There are several examples of Sen. Clinton making a vote or choosing a side based on political expediency: cluster bombs, NAFTA, exaggerations, health care (now vs. 1992-3), Iraq, etc. In contrast, Sen. Obama has a pattern of consistency on Iraq, ethics/lobbyists, foreign policy, etc.

    Responding to Jared Burke’s question about whether the Democrats can pass legislation to change the course in Iraq, the answer is no. They do not have enough votes (60) in the Senate to close debate on a bill, thereby leaving themselves vulnerable to Republican filibusters. So they cannot even get the bill to the president. Also, they did try to bring up such a bill several times in 2007 with predictable results. Eventually they stopped as most Americans would like them to actually get something done as opposed to playing legislative chicken.

  13. Stephen Allison says:
    April 2, 2008 at 12:25 am

    though it’s clearly not central to your argument, i have one minor question: why do you take a negative tone of voice when saying the term “brain attack”? did you first encounter this term in a drug marketing context? though i don’t know where the term originally came from, the pathogenesis of a stroke is very similar to the pathogenesis of a heart attack. i can see an argument to be made for using this term for better patient education and public advocacy about strokes, independent of drug selection. if this term is inherently money-driven in its history, i’d be interested to hear a more direct argument for its non-use.

    as a medical student who supports the “pharm free” movement i appreciate your drawing attention to the issue of money in medicine in the course of drawing attention to the issue of money in politics.

Leave a Reply