Common Sense begins with the opinion that representative democracy is simply the extension of the Welch House meeting where all residents would convene to determine matters of utmost importance. This small meeting expands to become the Trinity College Meeting, which becomes the Joint College Meeting. Finally, the population becomes so large that it is impractical for everyone to convene in one place at a single time and individual constituencies elect one of their own to represent them. If the representative is typical of the citizens, he will faithfully advance their interests — because they are his interests. If the representative …
The Audacity of Whatever
Now that Barack Obama has finally become President of the United States, he must put his plans into motions. Grand ideals must transform into nuts and bolts, a campaign of change into possibly a deficit budget. Hyperbole has become acceptable discourse in politics. Rather than debate the details of Stéphane Dion’s carbon tax and how it would be implemented, Stephen Harper called exaggerated the policy and called Dion another tax and spend Liberal (if a government is going to tax, it should be a consumption tax). Rather than introduce his own policies, John McCain tossed key words like Socialist at …
Medium=Message
If the medium is the message, where does Barack Obama’s announcement of Joe Biden as his running mate fit in? First leaked by CNN and announced shortly afterwards via text message and on the Internet at 3:00am, the message employed an entirely different medium than previous vice-presidential picks. Does Obama wish to say that he is the candidate of change because he used a new format or that his ticket now possesses stability and foreign policy experience because of Biden’s profile? Marshall McLuhan meant to say that fact that people in the 1960s had begun watching television in mass numbers, …