You folks really are this delusional, hey?

That is the thing Carl, I am not sure there is a “conservative populist” style. There is just a sort of conservative posts-a-lot and gains cred and earns money(?) by always attacking Obama style. It is more or less a sort of bad faith negotiating, style. A sort of heckler obnoxious parent style (the ref can never make a good call against our team!) I don’t think it is effective negotiation strategy. So what you want to call “conservative populist” style is really just a sort of character type, maybe a personality type, maybe even an occupation.

I will leave the Eliot to you(As an undergrad I think I read some with Dr. Weaver and Schramm as part of a Jane Austen book club, maybe partially for the text itself or maybe just for the discussion and to impress a girl), and what you wrote is pretty good.

The deeper question is how far we can take “Shelialism”. On one level of course it is the simple Nurse Shelia who decides to do her own thing, a la “Do what you do Dr. Pepper”…

But what if there is the Obama Argument: ““There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people,” Obama said during an interview. “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am.”

I think I believe that statement by Obama, what is more I think I believe it myself.

Why then should I be limited by some sort of nonsense “front” of conservatism, liberalism, christianity, islam…all of which are brands/ shadows. I think Shelialism is more honest.

So the answer to your question is already provided. The depth of fine modern literature doesn’t stop you from getting in bed with “radical” X-Y-Z. In fact all the brands are actually “faux” outrage. You meet enough human beings and you have met them all. If someone wants to call himself a black nationalist theologian I am not too worried.

Leave asside for the moment legal ethics obligations to defend unpopular clients…

The Universal Human Truths obliterate and genericize the brands. The “populist conservative” style might be an effort to comoditize the brand. But the “brands” themselves only exist to help us render summary judgement and think quickly.

I certainly don’t know for example that the Rev. Wright was a bad guy. All the questions of political character are formulated in part via smear campaigns. Associations not even of ideas, but of brands(Identity forms important to human action, but not necessarily robustly predictive) Obama could easily turn the tables on your knowledge base. Your question presupposes those “brands” are foundationally relevant.

“I had a New York girlfriend, and she didn’t understand/How I could still love my parents, and still love the old world./So I told her:
I want to keep my place in the old world/
Keep my place in the arcane/
‘Cause I still love my parents, and I still love the old world.”

But Richman’s important arcana are understandably different from the young Obama’s circa 1981, but both seem desperate in an attempt to reconstruct a meaningful inherited tradition to which neither of them ever seems to have felt a deep connection. If Obama is aloof even in the sincere pathos of his rhetoric, Richman is even “COOLER” and far more distant.

One wonders what would have happened if Obama instead had become a poet, and Richman had attended law school and later gone into politics.

Regardless, when you go into politics you will inevitably be called an a**hole, unlike Pablo Picasso and whether it is a fair judgment or not. Surely these letters provide ample material for such an assessment when compared to the man currently holding the office of the Presidency of the U.S.

But if legend holds true, Picasso was a true a**hole, while Obama’s youthful letters indicate a serious student who was struck by real questions, and who was reading serious literature to help him gain a better grasp on things–and trying to woo a young woman as well. All in all, not bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCb2aArq9HM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veNzHk-ZNEs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2iLAubras