DISQUS

Ryan Catbird · 8 months ago

I guess unless you are familiar with Umair's ongoing and consistently brilliant writing, it's easy to take this quote out of context and assume he's saying something to the effect of, "GET DEM TWITTER KIDZ AND TUBMLR BOYZ AND FACEBOOKERS, DEY CAN FIX TEH ECONOMY." In fact, what he is saying is that Obama took the presidency in part because he was willing to look outside all the established channels of campaign ing, and instead do something 'revolutionary'-- while w/r/t this economy, he is doing nothing *remotely close* to doing anything 'revolutionary,' he is still try to fix a broken old system by using broken old system methods. Haque doesn't want Obama to look to "tech" or "online" people to fix the economy-- he wants him to take on a "new" approach to the economy instead of trying to use "old" rules to fix it.

barthel · 8 months ago

Well, the post itself seemed to be more concerned with how he uses advisers and how information gets to him, and in that regard I'm not sure how a new system would help. I'm just saying that there's a pretty gigantic literature on this stuff that he does not seem to be familiar with, and he's drawing this rather facile comparison with GWB.