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I have to come out of the

I have to come out of the closet (not for the first time in my life) and fess up to the fact that I do not find this Obama video moving. Never having been one of the cool kids, I may not be part of the target audience of this piece. But to me, it just repeatedly (as in over and over and over again) calls attention to the thing I find most worrisome about Obama's candidacy: namely, I wish I new what the object of that "can" was: "Yes we can!"...what, exactly? It's still not clear to me. I'm also wary of the kinds of appeals on which it explicitly relies. In another context I have written about why this is: it reminds me of nothing so much as the "will you accept the call" missions videos I used to be shown at church camp. Simple acoustic guitar...chanting and repetition...mournful piano solos... I realize this has something uniquely to do with my background, but: it kind of creeps me out...

(And I will add that I *do* find it really catchy; I just really dislike it as a piece of persuasion aimed at influencing my politics: in fact, precisely because I find it manipulative rather than persuasive.)

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