What’s so funny about . . .

Stephen Colbert discussed the idea of the peace candidate and the anti-war candidate shortly before Thanksgiving. Obama was the anti-war candidate, not the peace candidate. Why? Obama talked about hope and change, why should peace be off the table? Colbert notes that McGovern was a peace candidate. True, and that earned him the attack of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion,” along with one state in the 1972 election. In 1968 “Clean” Gene McCarthy ran in the Democratic primary as the candidate that would strongly oppose the Vietnam War. More recently in 2004, Howard Dean gathered strong support in the early primaries through his opposition to the Iraq War. Dean and Obama were both anti-war candidates, but why couldn’t they just have been called peace candidates? It may simply be semantics, but it makes one wonder why peace was ignored. Is it because, as Colbert suggested, peace would make a candidate look weak and unwilling to protect America? Possibly, but if the election of 2008 was based around the ideas of hope and change, is it really such a leap to hope for peace?

Stephen Colbert, “The Word,” November 18, 2008: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/210689/november-18-2008/the-word---love-lost