Finally the illusion is over

For a president once mocked by his critics as little more than a celebrity, it was the ultimate indignity: Scores of people left a packed campaign rally Sunday before President Obama finished speaking.

It wasn't immediately clear why, according to Reuters, "a steady stream of people" departed the event held for Maryland's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Anthony Brown. Reporters guessed they just wanted a photo of the president, or they wanted to beat the inevitable traffic jam caused by the 8,000 some-odd people who stayed. Perhaps those who departed a rally held just outside the Beltway suddenly realized they had heard Obama's stump speech a dozen times before.
Perhaps those who departed suddenly realized they had heard Obama's stump speech a dozen times before.

Whatever the reason, the conjured image was a sad one for the president, whose approval rating is stuck in the low 40s and who is already a surrogate non grata for many of his party's candidates. At a moment when a popular president would be crisscrossing the country in the midterm campaign's final stretch, Obama's schedule this week is actually rather light. He's casting an early vote in Chicago on Monday ahead of an afternoon fundraiser, and after that the only event on his public calendar for the rest of the week is another fundraiser in Washington.

The White House will undoubtedly point out that Obama is keeping his schedule clear so he can oversee the government's Ebola response, the war against the Islamic State, and the myriad other crises that seem to keep popping up. But the plain truth is that there isn't much for Obama to do on the public stage right now. Democrats still want his money, although even among donors there were signs of fatigue over the summer. But the party doesn't have much use for his oratory anymore, and the weeks before an election is not the time for major new policy pronouncements. What must be even more frustrating for Obama is that his fading star can't simply be explained as voters wanting something new; after all, the Clintons remain as in-demand as ever.

Obama's campaign skills haven't diminished, and thousands of people still pack the halls and cheer his name. But at the moment, he's out of style. And if any Democrats were having second thoughts about passing up a presidential appearance, Sunday's headlines from Maryland probably cleared them up quick.

Wiki wrote:Federalist No. 10 continues the discussion of the question broached in Hamilton's Federalist No. 9. Hamilton there addressed the destructive role of a faction in breaking apart the republic. The question Madison answers, then, is how to eliminate the negative effects of faction. He defines a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". He identifies the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues such as what regime or religion should be preferred.

However, he thinks that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society". He saw direct democracy as a danger to individual rights and advocated a representative democracy in order to protect what he viewed as individual liberty from majority rule, or from the effects of such inequality within society. He says, "A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths".

Like the anti-Federalists who opposed him, Madison was substantially influenced by the work of Montesquieu, though Madison and Montesquieu disagreed on the question addressed in this essay. He also relied heavily on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume, whose influence is most clear in Madison's discussion of the types of faction and in his argument for an extended republic.