Hi Amy!

First, sorry about your fire, but glad to see you're back and posting.  Very glad you and the cats are OK, if shaken and temporarily homeless!

Thanks for starting this thread.  I'm an Obama supporter and totally agree with you about the "gotcha" news coverage.  If nothing else, it's boring.  I mean, unless they're getting caught tapping their feet in an airport bathroom and loudly declaring they're "not gay!!", it's just not that interesting.  Plagairized cookie recipes?   Flag lapel pins?  Please.  It's funny the things people focus on when assessing candidates.  Pretty much everything except their actual world view and policies.  Of course sometimes it can be hard to pin them down on their policies.  They're slippery devils by profession.  But I don't believe you can accurately extropolate a person's leadership qualities, or predict how they're going to govern, based on a few random moments from their lives, especially when they're taken out of context and blown up and dissected beyond recognition.  I know we sometimes try to convince ourselves that these moments, or tiny behaviors, are true reflections of people's characters, but I try to judge candidates by their voting records and the content and manner of their speeches.  The ability to communicate effectively is absolutely key to being a good president, IMO.  Bush has shown us just how problematic not being able to explain policy coherently can be.    

Like you, I've always liked Hillary, and I really would like a woman to become president.  I genuinely understood the letdown and anger her supporters felt when she conceded.  I wasn't as bothered by her campaign as you and many other Obama supporters were, but in the end, I felt that Obama's ability to inspire, a la Martin Luther King, was more important for the country right now than competency.  (Not that Obama isn't competent too, but that seemed to be Hillary's main claim.)  I have confidence that Obama will pick a good team and will *listen* to and learn from his advisors.  He's obviously intelligent and thoughtful.  And tough and ambitious in his own intelligent and thoughtful way (as his decision not to take public financing shows). 

I know it's unlikely to happen, but I'd love to have Hillary as VP.  I think the two of them together would make an awesome team--very ying and yang.  They say Webb won't fly with women, because of past anti-feminist statements he made while Navy Secy (not sure what they were).  I like Richardson, too, and he certainly might help get the Western vote.  Don't know much about Gov. Strickland, but his name's been floated, too.  I think Gov. Warner of VA is a good guy, but I guess he's already said no.  No go on Nunn, I agree. 

I like Michelle a lot too, but I'm not sure I agree with Obama that wives should be completely off-limits.  If they campaign on behalf of their spouses, as both of them have, then their remarks are fair game, IMO.  That doesn't mean I think it's OK to accuse them of terrorist fist-bumping or having illegitimate babies with their black lovers, and other patently obvious crap like that.  But if Michelle makes a speech and says she is in favor of universal health coverage (please!), then I think it would be OK to grill her on why  And hold her accountable for her statements.  And if there's any potential conflict of interest in regards to the wife's family business (beer), then that's fair game too.   

Anyway, I certainly hope the tenor of the campaign and the coverage improve with the upcoming conventions.

(Another) Amy

I wanted to add that I think Edwards would be a good choice for VP too, if for no other reason than that would mean Elizabeth would have more visibility and influence.  That would have to be good for us!  Elizabeth's presence might also help with the Clinton vote.  I think she is greatly admired among Dem women.  John would help with the South and working class voters.  I like him a lot too.     

Amy, that's really awful what your neighbor and landlord said about Obama!  Obviously those folks wouldn't have been voting for a Democrat anyway, but still, who wants to hear that crap?  Do these people honestly believe that Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate?  I love it when they say, that guy's a Muslim, and by the way, did you hear what his pastor said?     

The whole Clinton drama is just that, a weird drama.  I don't know if Bill is losing it in general, or is just frustrated over Hillary's loss.  I read somewhere that he's taking it harder than she is.  Maybe he feels partly responsible for it.  A friend of mine who was working an event here in LA last week met him backstage and said he was amazingly charming and friendly.  A true politician, he went out of his way to thank her and shake her hand even though she was just standing there.  (And she's not really his type, physically speaking.)  So he can still turn it on when he wants to. 

I guess because I've been following politics for a long time, I don't get that worked up about gaffes and "evolving" positions anymore (OK, pandering).  You just hope that, overall, your "guy" is going to support the positions that are most important to you.  I agree that if you expect a paragon of virtue, you're going to be disappointed.  I guess we each pick our candidates based on which virtues matter most to us.  For me, openness, thoughtfulness, and compassion -- virtues Obama  seems to have -- are the most important virtues a candidate can have.  Sexual behavior is definitely not high on my list!   

Amy G. 

Amy:  Well I must admit, although being a Hillary fan - I do like Obama now.  Hope he picks the perfect vice-president to win over McCain.  Oopps sorry to all of my good friends especially Shokk ane Shirley.

Its so good to see you Amy.  You know me, politics definitely not my forte.  I think about you alot and hope you get back to your apartment very soon.  Weird the fire happened on Friday the 13th.

Lots of hugs for you and your kitties.

Nicki

Hey, finally something I can agree with on this thread - Hillary on the Supreme Court. That would be cool.  Not gonna happen but it's a nice thought anyway.

I suspect I'm the only liberal on this board, since I seem to be the only person who is totally, and I mean totally, offended by Obama's pandering hypocrisy.  I am proved right every single day as this campaign continues.  The man hasn't a single principle that he'll stick with. Now we have the faith-base initiatives.  Common, you guys, at least admit what's happening, as I predicted. Wow, Italy here I come, again.  And this time driven out by a Democrat!  Who would have thunk?

I wonder how long it will take for him to back out on his support of gay initiatives.  Another week, month, or, like Bill Clinton, will he wait until sworn in!  Should we start a pool? 

anneshirley, quit trying to poison this thread like you did the other.  This is the POSITIVE OBAMA THREAD!

I'm wondering what's happened to all the high-minded liberals on this board, who were for Obama because he would be equally high-minded and principled.  See articles below.  Of course, if you view politics as a grand old game of gottcha and win at all costs, as apparently some of the posters here do, then what does it matter that Obama is turning right on just about every position he held during the primary. Even Bill Clinton waited until after he was in office to do most of his right hand turns.  I will add that it was Clinton's decision to renege on his promise to allow Gays to serve openly in the military (he waited until after he was elected on that one) that prevented me from voting for him a second time.  How long will it take Obama until he throws that one out with the bathwater?

• •  

Call it the Potomac shuffle, the traditional election-year dance in which a candidate who has earlier moved left or right to win over the party faithful in a primary campaign promptly slides back to the centre to appeal to the rest of the country. Barack Obama, quite a mover on the dancefloor, has spent the month since he beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination giving a demonstration of this time-honoured piece of Washington choreography - and at an unusually high tempo, too.

Just yesterday he announced, in a speech on religion aimed at wooing evangelicals - who Democrats believe are no longer a guaranteed bloc for the Republicans - that he would continue George Bush's support for "faith-based initiatives", channelling public money to religious groups to perform social services, whether drug rehab or care for the poor. (Side note: watch for David Cameron, who also favours this approach, to claim he is Obama's spiritual brother.)

A day earlier Obama had delivered an equally long address on the virtues of patriotism. On his lapel was the flag pin he has worn since mid-May, the same pin he once disdained as an unnecessary, shallow display of love of country. More substantively, Obama has tacked towards the centre on a string of issues where a matter of months ago he was to be found much further left.

He once opposed legislation needed for Bush's much-reviled programme of domestic surveillance; now he supports a new law that would grant immunity to phone companies that help the government eavesdrop on US citizens. He was an advocate of gun control, but only hemmed and hawed when the supreme court struck down the District of Columbia's ban on hand guns last week. He now says he will consider joining his Republican opponent John McCain in calling for a cut in the corporate tax rate. Suffice to say, these were not positions Obama took when he was trying to win Democratic votes in New Hampshire or Iowa.

What will most strike - and disappoint - those outside the United States, those who have been all but panting in their excitement at the prospect of an Obama presidency as a break from the Bush era, is the Democrat's march rightward on foreign policy. His signature stance, which propelled him from obscurity into challenging the mighty Clinton, was his opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to bring the troops home. Now, though, the talk is not of immediate withdrawal but of pulling out one or two "combat" brigades a month, a pledge so vague it leaves acres of wriggle room. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, had been concerned that Obama would withdraw US forces too hastily, but came away from a long phone call with the candidate "reassured" that a President Obama would not do anything too "drastic".

Last autumn Obama skilfully contrasted himself with Clinton by promising to replace Bush's bellicosity with a willingness to talk even to America's sworn enemies, the president of Iran among them. But in a major foreign policy speech last month, he diluted that promise of talks and said he would do "everything in my power" to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb - pointedly repeating the word "everything" in case Tehran had not got the message.

Obama's most leftwing supporters have dutifully played the role expected of them, howling betrayal, with the activists of MoveOn leading the lamentation. But even centrist Democrats, who understand the politics of the Potomac shuffle only too well, are troubled. "He's overdoing it," says a longtime party strategist (who, admittedly, did not back Obama in the primaries). "He's reversing too many positions too quickly."

This view is shared by those who reckon Obama is a special case. Of course, they say, presidential candidates always have to shift towards the centre after a primary campaign; indeed, as Michael Tomasky argued in these pages on Monday, it is a sign of McCain's weakness that he has not been able to do so nearly as extensively as his opponent. But Obama is not just any candidate.

"You can't do it if you've run as Gandhi," says Leon Wieseltier, who observes Washington from his perch at the magazine New Republic. He contrasts Obama with the Bill Clinton of 1992, who also moved rightward once he had bagged the nomination. Both men offered to transcend the old categories of left and right, but Clinton did so by promising to be ideologically flexible. Obama's implicit promise is that he is above left and right, not because he is pragmatic so much as because he is morally good. In this context, says Wieseltier, U-turns are much less tolerable: "They compromise his radiance."

There are other contrasts. Bill Clinton could finesse shifts by wrapping them in the language of policy detail; Obama is the very opposite of a policy wonk. He operates at 30,000 feet, somewhere in the rhetorical stratosphere. While the Clinton of 1992 talked obsessively about the economy, ensuring hard-pressed voters knew he felt their pain, Obama has not yet persuaded Americans that he has the answer to current woes. One Democratic strategist thinks Obama should be talking about rising gas and food prices every single day, not making grand speeches about faith or patriotism.

Indeed, Obama's sheer eloquence, combined with the string of recent policy flip-flops, points to another worry many Democrats are beginning to voice about their nominee: that there might be a hollowness to him, an absence where there should be a clear core of belief (not that Bill Clinton had that either). When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, it was clear that he relied on two ideological pillars: free-market economics and a fierce anti-communism. Obama-sceptics ask what the equivalents would be for the senator from Illinois. The harshest say his campaign has no theme beyond his own life story. They note that in his three years in the Senate, he found no time to author legislation - though he did manage to write a second volume of autobiography.

Yet none of these grumblers and doomsayers will go so far as to predict that Obama will lose in November. He remains ahead in national polls, while some analysts say a reshaping of the electoral map is possible: if black turnout rises, several southern states could be Obama's, while wins out west, in New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada could, by themselves, be enough to give the Democrats the White House. Obama fervour remains high, especially among the young. This weekend word emerged of a new fad on college campuses, as students, both male and female, adopt Obama's middle name of Hussein - the target for much xenophobic whispering - as their own. Think "I am Spartacus".

In this light, Obama's U-turns look different. They suggest that he is determined not to be just another principled loser - and the Democrats have had plenty of those. The clearest illustration came in Obama's most blatant reverse. He had promised to stay within the system of taxpayer-funded campaign finance, which would have obliged him to stick to an $85m spending limit. Once it became clear he could raise, and spend, many times that amount, he broke his pledge. Sure, it was unprincipled. But it suggested a man bent on winning and ruthless enough to make sure he does. That's the standard operating procedure for Republicans. For Democrats it takes some getting used to.

freedland@guardian.co.uk
 

From Stephen Ducat:

OK, we all knew, deep down, that our wondrous golden boy of change would one day reveal his feet of clay. What most of us did not anticipate was just how easily they would fit into jackboots.

There has emerged a conventional wisdom among progressives that is not entirely wrong about why Obama has so readily embraced police state surveillance, and why he felt compelled to express his solidarity with Scalia, et al, on the death penalty. As the thinking goes, these moves are simply the expectable, if disheartening, political positioning typical of Democratic presidential candidates, once they enter the general election campaign.

He surely did not want to rebut Republican ads like this:
Low, rumbling, ominous music gradually increases in volume as a solemn voice that oozes manly gravitas announces, "Barack Obama voted against a bill to that would help our intelligence agencies detect terrorist plots against our nation before they can be carried out. Why does he want to protect the privacy of Al-Qaeda's phone calls more than he wants to protect Americans from Al-Qaeda? [Cut to an image of a World Trade Tower falling.] Barack Obama doesn't want the death penalty applied to criminals who sexually assault and brutalize little children. Why does he care more about child rapists [cut to image of a swarthy unshaven convict doing the perp walk] than he does about their victims? [Cut to an image of doe-eyed little blond girl with tears rolling down her apple cheeks, as she lies in an oversized hospital bed holding tightly to her teddy bear.] Barack Obama and his friends at the ACLU care about terrorists and rapists. Vote for John McCain. He cares about us." [As reassuring music swells, cut to an image of a younger looking, photo-shopped McCain in his crisp Naval officer's uniform. One arm is around a child, the other rising in a determined salute to the flag.]

It is certainly reasonable for Democratic candidates to fear they might face attack ads such as this, and we might have seen something like this one air had Obama opposed the new FISA bill. Facing the possibility of this kind of right wing assault, it is not surprising to see so many erstwhile liberal politicians preemptively surrender their principles. That Obama, too, would adopt this strategy has been particularly demoralizing for his progressive supporters. After all, he has a mostly excellent and morally consistent voting record. But more importantly, he has very vocally eschewed the Machiavellian political calculations that we have come to expect from other members of his party. To see Barack Obama behave like any other invertebrate Democrat is an especially painful blow.

However, this conventional wisdom on his political cowardice doesn't plumb the problem deeply enough. Obama's resort to the triangulation of the old politics is an admission of a much more serious limitation. It tells us that he does not believe in his own ability to reframe certain key issues in a way that makes a progressive stance the one that is obviously the most moral. It shows that he does not feel up to the task of rendering some liberal principles intellectually clear and emotionally compelling.

His limited ability to exercise moral leadership leaves him with no choice other than to accept Republican frames on issues. So, on the FISA bill, for example, loss of privacy and immunity for criminal telecom companies become a trivial price to pay for protection from unfathomable and pervasive Evil.

But this raises the question of what a progressive reframe on an issue like this might look like. Here is one idea. But I'd love for commenters to offer theirs. Someone from Obama's staff is probably monitoring the Huffington Post in order to take the temperature of the progressive blogosphere, which has grown increasingly feverish over the Democratic candidate's recent unprincipled retreats. If they are reading this, perhaps together we may be able to revivify the Obama campaign's moribund moral imagination.

The 30-second ad opens on a scene in a middle class suburban kitchen. A mother is speaking on the phone. Her voice is muffled and is drowned out by an intermittent electronic beep, along with the sounds of someone frenetically striking a computer keyboard. The screen quickly splits in half to reveal the woman's nine-year-old daughter speaking by cell phone to inform her mother that she is ready to be picked up from the school bus stop. The screen is then split in thirds to reveal a man wearing headphones sitting in front of a computer typing notes, obviously monitoring the mother-daughter conversation. Behind him is a massive warehouse filled with computers and scurrying NSA technicians. This image then takes up the entire screen. The voiceover says, "Republicans, like George Bush and John McCain, have taken away our freedoms, invaded our private lives, and made us less safe." We then quickly see a succession of images -- a scene from Iraq that features a burning American tank, a scene of grenade launchers being placed into a packing crate, a scene of an unguarded American port where uninspected shipping containers are being off loaded, and finally a scene of a car with blacked out windows slowing down in front of an unsecured nuclear power plant. A window rolls down. A hand holding a camera reaches out to snap photos. Then the car speeds away. The voice over then concludes, "Protecting America means preserving our rights [cut to an image of the Constitution in which the camera scrolls down the Bill of Rights section], along with defeating terrorists." The last image is a scene of Barack Obama standing up and pointing toward a large map of some unidentifiable part of the world. Below him is a large conference table of twenty or so advisors who are listening with rapt attention.

In spite of his limitations, there is too much at stake to not work hard to make sure Barack Obama moves into the White House. And, once there, we must hold his clay feet to the fire.

.

Me:  Please note my disagreement with Ducat's last paragraph.  

Oh my Gosh.... Ann Shirley...PLEASE spare us the endless articles....for everyone you copy and paste here, there is another with a different point of view. I don't know ANYONE who lives and dies by what the Huffington Post writes. 

I don't look at Obama's so-called about face as a negative thing at all.  Of COURSE he is going to move toward the "middle", just as McCain will move a little to the left. I also don't believe it is a "vote getting" ploy.  His main focus has always been and will undoubtedly continue to be working towards unity not divisiveness. Why is that so sinister?  Maybe, just maybe this guy is for real?  As far as ending this war, we are SO SCREWED thanks to the current administration that I don't think ANYONE can say when we'll get out.  At least Obama is TALKING about getting out.   Right now, I am trying to figure out how I am going to pay next month's bills...

anneshirley, did you read what you just wrote??  You just confessed to having hostility towards Amy and everyone else who has come to this "Positive Obama" thread to post positive thoughts about Obama.  We can individually block your comments, but wouldn't it be more respectful of you to just not post on this thread?  Are your positions so precious, in your opinion, so correct, that you feel it's fine to disrespect and insult us?  Clearly since Amy started a thread called "The Positive Obama Thread," this isn't the place for criticizing not only Obama but the people who support him.  Sheesh.  Given your hostility, why should we be in the least bit interested in anything you have to say?  What the hell difference does it make whether you've been "objecting" to Obama since January?  You clearly don't want to initiate a thoughtful dialogue, you want to shove your self-righteous indignation in our faces.  Please, don't waste your time trying to enlighten us.  I'm sure you have better things to do.    

Amy G. 

Anneshirley, haven't you figured it out yet that people here are not interested in what you have to say on this thread so go back to your other thread where a few do want to hear you.

Anneshirley, I'm with you on this subject! I swear that I hate to gloat but I do believe I'm going to after this next election.....

I'm STILL going to write in Hillary's name!