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Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 18, 2007, 11:39:43 am Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama-Clinton Issue By DAVID BROOKS Published: December 18, 2007 Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline. If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them. But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness. Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life. Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant. Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall. Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side. But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual. Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways. Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other. Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation. What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 18, 2007, 04:06:41 pm I have the feeling the Clintons are getting ready to dump a big **** bomb on Obama. They don't play very nice.
Obama is ostensibly a nice guy, but I really haven't heard much out of him that appeals to my vote. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: spoonbill on December 18, 2007, 04:58:45 pm Very well written article. I am also very interested in how the Clinton's begin the turn.
Bill always dams with faint praise before his machine pounces. I am starting to see the warning signs from the beast, but I could also anticipate some foundations being put in place for a possible collaboration. You have to remember that the Clintons operate on opinion polls 100%. They can bend with the wind and they're not sure which way it's blowing yet. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: TulsaFan-inTexas on December 18, 2007, 06:34:06 pm I'm a conservative, but with no real conservatives out there, or the ones that bill themselves as conservatives really being phonies I would definitely look at Barack. He's one of the few candidates of any political party that has the nerve to say what is on his mind without running it up a flagpole to see which way the wind is blowing at the time.
Who cares about "experience" in the Senate or whatever. How much experience did Hillary have when she ran for Senate? I also CAN NOT stand Hillary Clinton, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman. In my opinion, she is a liar and more. Barack Obama, in my opinion, is a really decent man that is no phony; it's more than I can say for 99.9 percent of the politicians these days. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: inteller on December 19, 2007, 07:32:51 am quote: I'm not voting for BHO because he has long spindly fingers that makes him look ghoulish and he smokes. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: sgrizzle on December 19, 2007, 08:07:32 am I don't want any of the front runners right now. I think Obama gets a lot of support from people who are just trying to shore up the African-American democratic vote which was faltering. Even if Obama loses the primary, they will get credit for trying. Hillary is only up there because their last success was Bill, so why not just swap an organ around and go for 8 more years? If neither Hillary or Obama was running, Edwards would be President in 2009, no contest.
McCain is a joke and the republicans need to stop supporting him. He didn't get elected the last 23 times he ran, why keep trying? Pick a decent candidate and support that one instead of 27 mediocre ones. Ron Paul, whatever his views, has really shown that there are other methods to reach potential voters and it's working. Whoever run in 2012 needs Ron Paul's campaign manager. Fred Thompson is middle-of-the-road enough to win a presidential election, but I doubt he can win the primary. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: spoonbill on December 19, 2007, 08:11:55 am quote: I agree, he does seem to have an honesty streak and is not afraid to speak his mind. Very fresh for a democrat. This however does not bode well with most of the democrat party. By their nature they will ask him to do things and spin positions that he will not be comfortable with. Opinion polls rule this party, that is why they seem to fall victim to the mob mentality and change positions so much. If he speaks his mind, that means he's not worshiping the opinion polls and will not have the wiggle room necessary to bend like a Reid. (no pun intended). I don't however agree with his thoughts on policy. Most of what he has proposed as part of his platform is unrealistic and half baked thought. You see his biggest weakness when someone asks him the question "how will you accomplish that?" I think he knows what he wants to do, but doesn't have the ability to formulate a strategy based on solid economic theory. He is simply Depeche Mode (Fast Fashion). The rugged sensitive face, that the weak minds in the democrat party want to swoon over. If he ever shows them that he's not their puppet, he will be writing his own eulogy. It is nice though, to see a black leader that the black democratic caucus doesn't accuse of being too white. I would like to see him succeed in obtaining the nomination. If the Beast gets the nomination, I would like to see her choose him as a running-mate. I however, cannot imagine either of them as an effective president. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: tulsa1603 on December 19, 2007, 08:40:09 am quote: Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Breadburner on December 19, 2007, 08:54:46 am Because you donated to his campaign.....
Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 19, 2007, 04:42:58 pm quote: Thompson is DOA. He's running for Vice President. There is something about McCain I've never liked, I can't say specifically what that is, he just has zero appeal with me. I'm disappointed that Richardson has been left in the dust by the glitz and glamour of Hillary, Obama, and Pretty Boy. He's got some serious creds and a wide variety of experience in government. Not only that, he brings the hispanic vote. I think he's running for VP as well. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 19, 2007, 05:30:33 pm Then who? Please.....waiting with baited breath.
Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 19, 2007, 11:38:25 pm quote: Truth? I'm not terribly excited about any of the front-runners from either the blue or red crop. Huckabee apparently looks good in the polls now, but that makes the GOP even more beholden to the Christian Conservative movement. Any more Repug sex scandals from anyone in the GOP w/ an ordained minister as president and I'll have to listen to the likes of mis-guided individuals like yourself and AA crow about it. I think Huckabee can win in Iowa, but when they get to New Hampshire, I Romney or Rudy will pick it up. Folks on the coasts won't tolerate a prude like Huckabee. I guess the biggest problem I have with Romney is the idea of a president with the name "Mitt". [;)] I'm shocked his wife's name isn't Buffy. I don't like socialism or liberalism, so whomever gets the GOP nomination will get my vote in the general. I'm still undecided who I'll vote for in the primaries. So why are you so infatuated with Obama, or is this just a game for you? Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 20, 2007, 12:00:48 am Basically, David Brooks sez it best predicting Obie-one would be better prepared for this madness....and I love a good crap shoot. Beats the shot of crap we got now. Anyone w/b better....
Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: inteller on December 20, 2007, 07:00:58 am quote: Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 20, 2007, 11:41:14 am quote: So you vote based on op-ed stories. Nice. You also seem to live by the headlines and first paragraph of a news story. You should do the thinking voter a favor surrender your voting card. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 20, 2007, 12:37:48 pm quote: I vote knowing ahead of time who is not qualified based on their record. Bush II was a coke head and even had Tulsa buddies and parties he had attended here in the 70's where he was a stumbling jerk. He had all the right wing religious nuts backing him. Ironic? See Pat Buchanans stupid editorial in this mornings World. I'd post the link if I could find it. Of course, I just read the headlines....right. Also, I knew reporters in Texas that told me Bush was a chronic liar and did not work well with others. It's unlikely I'd ever vote for another republican because the country has swung so far to the right it will take beyond my lifetime to calibrate it back to credible in the eyes of the world. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 20, 2007, 04:54:06 pm Dude, you're a Deadhead, the U.S. will always be too far to the right for you.
[}:)] Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: RecycleMichael on December 20, 2007, 05:20:12 pm Come on conan...don't make deadheads sound bad.
Many conservatives, including our past Mayor LaFortune was once a deadhead. Even Ann Colter claims she was once a deadhead. Being a deadhead once doesn't mean you have a political viewpoint...it means you liked good musicians and songs. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 20, 2007, 06:44:13 pm Back on topic....
~"Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil." Jerry Garcia Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: rwarn17588 on December 20, 2007, 09:34:23 pm <RM wrote:
Being a deadhead once doesn't mean you have a political viewpoint...it means you liked good musicians and songs. <end clip> That's rashly assuming you think the Grateful Dead are good musicians and good songwriters. I don't. I can think of 200 bands off the top of my head that are better than the Dead ever were. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: RecycleMichael on December 20, 2007, 09:40:00 pm I respectfully disagree with you Rwarn and I want you to prove that you can name 200 bands off the top of your head.
Next TulsaNow lunch...you are on. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: deinstein on December 20, 2007, 09:54:28 pm I'd love to see the list of 200 bands as well.
Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 20, 2007, 11:37:25 pm quote: Great quote from a great man. Thanks Deadhead. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 22, 2007, 02:28:32 pm http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1404 Illinois Sen. Barack Obama would defeat all five of the top Republicans in prospective general election contests, performing better than either of his two top rivals, a new Zogby telephone poll shows. Obama and Edwards have large advantage with independents over Billary. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: Conan71 on December 22, 2007, 09:10:12 pm quote: Don't believe anything you read until the Weds. paper after the general election next Nov. Who gives a **** about a bunch of nebulous polls? Hell even exit polls are incredibly inaccurate. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 23, 2007, 11:46:44 pm Moe gets it!
Op-Ed Columnist Savior or Saboteur? By MAUREEN DOWD Published: December 23, 2007 WASHINGTON Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill. Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes. It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire? Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama. Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur? Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over? “For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.” Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time. Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad? When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics? Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well. “They’re not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had jealousy as the lifeblood of their marriage,” said one writer who has studied the pair. “The lifeblood of their marriage is crisis, coming to each other’s rescue.” Bill is staying up late strategizing and recasting her message and speeches. But he’s off his game on the trail, making clumsy mistakes like his remark — bound to be shot down by Poppy Bush — that Hillary would send 41 and 42 around the world to restore prestige lost by 43. Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began. He got so agitated with Charlie Rose — ranting that reporters were “stenographers” for Obama — that his aides tried to stop the interview. He also got in the way of her message with stretchers about opposing the Iraq war from the start, and — in a slap at Obama — deciding not to run in ’88 because he lacked experience. Truth is, he didn’t run for fear of bimbo eruptions. While making a speech in Iowa, The Associated Press’s Ron Fournier reported, Bill used the word “I” 94 times in 10 minutes, while mentioning “Hillary” just seven times. At a London fund-raiser, one Hillaryite said, it took him nearly half an hour to mention her. As the Arkansas journalist Max Brantley told the Billary biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “He’s always evangelizing for the church of Bill.” It’s hard to feel sorry for Hillary because the very logic of her campaign leads right to Bill. When she speaks of her “experience,” she is referring not to the Senate but to the White House, thereby making her campaign a plebiscite on the ’90s. Running this way, she is essentially asking people to like her if they liked him. Whether she knows it or not, this is a coattails strategy. It’s almost as if she’s offering herself to Clinton supporters as the solution to the problem of the 22nd Amendment. Bill is a narcissist, but he’s also within his rights to think that she has invited him onstage. If she is his legacy, why should he muzzle himself? After all, you can’t ask Elvis to behave like Colonel Parker. If voting for Obama is a roll of the dice, as Bill suggests, voting for Billary is a sure bet: an endless soap opera. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on December 23, 2007, 11:57:36 pm Roll those laughing bones! If Billary is elected, count on Bill playing veep better than Cheney even though Richardson w/b her running mate. Richardson w/b relegated to funerals and fill ins as Bill globe trots. Yes, Americans are at the point where they are going to take a risk and roll them dice....
Op-Ed Columnist A Résumé Can’t Buy You Love By FRANK RICH Published: December 23, 2007 WE can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it. “I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton. But if Mr. McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates’ “record in public life” and thereby making “people think experience is irrelevant.” His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose’s show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether “no experience matters.” He insinuated that Mr. Obama was tantamount to “a gifted television commentator” and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice. Attention Bill Clinton: If that’s what this election is about, it’s already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it’s not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president. For many, Mr. McCain’s long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President Bush on Iraq. What his résumé mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the “undesirable” percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having “strained relationships” with one’s children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It’s not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore. For Mrs. Clinton, the failure of “experience” as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. Last week’s ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Mr. Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 percent to 8 percent. But to little end. That same survey had Mr. Obama ahead by 4 points over all because, as this year’s pervasive polling matchup has it, the electorate values change over experience. The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with “tested” Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn’t push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq. But for Mrs. Clinton, the problem isn’t just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Mrs. Clinton had mocked Mr. Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset. “Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people’s experience,” Mr. Sorensen said. “It’s not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity.” Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It’s what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That’s why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines. This was the moment when Mr. Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on “so many Clinton advisers.” Mrs. Clinton jokingly called out, “I want to hear that,” prompting Mr. Obama to one-up her by responding, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.” Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which ’08 candidate is instructive. The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Mr. Obama’s campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a prewar skeptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an “imminent threat.” Ms. Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was “trying to change the subject to Iraq” from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, “one, if not both, will suffer.” Her text now reads as a bookend to Mr. Obama’s senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall. Mrs. Clinton’s current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, Gen. Wesley Clark, he is balanced by Gen. Jack Keane, an author of the Bush “surge.” The Clinton campaign’s foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that “we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort” — an argument anticipating the one Mrs. Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorization. In late April 2003, a week before “Mission Accomplished,” Mr. Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was “fairly confident” that W.M.D. would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, “I don’t think that that’s a situation we’ll confront.” Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its Web site) arguing that “the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.” In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Mr. Clinton wrote: “If Senator Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it.” That’s a fair point — and a fair criticism of Mr. Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Mr. Obama claims, there’s no excuse for his absence. Mr. Clinton’s narrow defense of his wife’s Iraq vote in 2002 — it was not “a blanket authorization to go to war,” he wrote — doesn’t persuade me. But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband’s question as to why the public finds her experience “irrelevant.” What Mrs. Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics’ methods as well. Attacks on Mr. Obama’s record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks — the invocations of “cocaine” and “Hussein” and “madrassa” by surrogates — smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been “authorized” sound like Karl Rove’s denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000. If Mrs. Clinton is to win, she won’t do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a “change agent,” however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn’t tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on January 04, 2008, 01:59:15 am OH BAM AH!!!
Hillary must be madder than when Monica's blue stained dress stained her power. It's about momentum. Will he carry on? http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/group/ObamaHQFeature "This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance." Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: inteller on January 04, 2008, 08:00:21 am quote: sorry dude...Barack is crooked. You can see it in his face. You can see it in his hands. He symbolizes all of the slackers out there who have essentially done nothing but ride a wave of entitlement. His stance on illegal immigration is atrocious. You watch, if this SOB gets elected he will drop a bomb on the American public when his extreme left wing views raise their ugly head. Fortunately this guy is just a flash in the pan. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: tim huntzinger on January 04, 2008, 08:52:28 am And now when Hillary starts winning she becomes the Comeback Kid. Sorry to see Dodd go down.
After his victory speech Obama and Michelle were kind of walking around basking in the applause, but initially as individuals. That is, they were not together pointing to individuals or private-talking looking over the crowd. That struck me as odd. And Obama needs to stop affecting his MLK cadence and southern drawl as he delivers his Mussolini-esque Utopian speeches. I think it is funny that the record turnout is still a fraction of the total eligible population. The whole process has turned off more people than engaged, and the silliness of portraying the caucuses as some kind of important barometer is self-serving partisan crap. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: cannon_fodder on January 04, 2008, 09:15:12 am 1) The caucus is important because the media says it is, the candidates say it is, the population says it is (by paying attention)and because the parties say it is. I think that is all who are involved. They are not a tell-all, but certainly the best indication we have to date.
2) The speech was nothing like a Mussolini nor a classical Utopian speech. Such speeches were charectorized by strong party politics (the PARTY is the way forward, and I am the party!) and frequent fear mongering. None was present. His was a very strong speech under any grading system. Unless, of course, you feel all great speeches are Mussolini-esque. 3) I am, but blatant admission, not that familiar with Obama's politics. Where do you get the impression that he is a hard-core leftist waiting to shaft the American people? (and what's more, isn't that exactly what Hillary openly admit to?) Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: tim huntzinger on January 04, 2008, 09:26:50 am I gave some feedback on his speech at the other thread, and do not want to dump too much on him because he does not stir up strong negatives. Let's talk about the speech over there.
You are right, it is important because the Politicommercial Complex says it is. It validates the entire rest of the process, which I believe is crooked and broken. Most people get the futility of our system, and that is why even with 'record' numbers participating Iowans are still a fraction of eligible voters. Regardless, that Hillary lost by such numbers is amazing. I hope this helps Edwards, too. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: cannon_fodder on January 04, 2008, 09:45:07 am Well, actually I said all players think it is important. It is the first indication of the race and takes place in a divided state (not ultra religious, not all urban or rural, not overwhelmingly Democrat nor Republican). It's importance is over hyped, just like the first anything of the season often gets extra hype.
And the parties choose the system. They are free to change it as they please and often do State by State. What system would you prefer to see if not a republican system? Also, the "Politicommercial Complex" sounds so sinister. Really, the media uses the politicians to fill some space (free content!) and the politicians use the media for exposure. It's a match made in heaven as they both use the other (given the nature of both it works to a T). You can avoid this system in its entirety and get information just from the candidates' websites, but then you only get one side of the story. Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: tim huntzinger on January 04, 2008, 09:57:40 am I dispute the notion that the population believes it is important. To we who care and pay attention it is interesting and gives us something to talk about but most people pay it all no mind. As a political exercise it is not without meaning, but the idea that the general population finds the caucus is important is like saying most people think Britney is important. Most Iowans think so little of the process they do not even participate.
Title: Why Barack? Why Not? Post by: FOTD on January 04, 2008, 12:05:47 pm quote: That's rich with nonsense......look what we've been saddled with for 7 pathetic years by the son of alcoholics, one himself, and a man uncapable of making the right decisions. Our current person in the White House has swung us past far right and while some of Obama's views lean left, if you study his positions many are the same as conservative republicans. Try to be brave. Confront your politics of fear. Try optimism. Unless you'd prefer Billary.... |