Tag: Obama

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up

Here we have the Left-wing citing a litany of links to prove that Obama is a right-winger.
Make Them Accountable / He ain’t a saint: A citizen’s guide to Barack Obama

And then we have the leading Right-wing magazine saying that “Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal‘s 27th annual vote ratings.”

As long as Obama can continue to succeed by just delivering his formidable inspirational message, he can be the “Big Tent”, which will continue to be filled with our hopes. As he said in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic Convention: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

Just like the business cycle, there is the political cycle. There was the Kennedy-era swing to the left and the Reagan counter-swing to the Right. Now with both houses and the presidency held by the Republicans the swing is going back the other way again. With the same party leading the House, Senate & Presidency, the Democrtas will over-reach, just like the Republicans just did, and there will be another counter-reformation. That is the rythmn of life, of change. You can make the analogy back to the counter-reformation against Martin Luther’s revolt from the Catholic Church (the dominant political party of the Middle ages). So if its the Democrats turn, I would gamble on Obama, an unknown, over Hillary, a known.

A school-mate, from a prominent Republican family who is working for Obama, says he is a quick-study and may surprise us. If the Democrats blow it, then the pendulum will swing back again to undo the damage.In the meantime it would really mess with the rest-of-the-world’s head and their preconceptions about the US to elect Obama, especially the Jihadists.

If Obama Doesn’t Win

Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War – New York Times
Frank Rich doesn’t think that the Clintons will go quietly. He says: Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

back_on_the_plantation.jpgA race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.

Education Divides Democrats

Questions for Dr. Retail – New York Times
The essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop. And as the post below points out there are Latte Liberals a nd Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats. If Obama loses the Nomination, the resulting backlash could put another Republican in the White House.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer. As Ron Brownstein of The National Journal pointed out on Wednesday, she won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts and 54 points in Arkansas. She offers voters no frills, just commodities: tax credits, federal subsidies and scholarships. She’s got good programs at good prices.

Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. Continue reading “Education Divides Democrats”

Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats

Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats | Gerard Baker – Times Online
Among voters whose voting choice is not based on identity politics, Mr Obama’s supporters are the latte liberals. These are the people for whom Starbucks, with its $5 cups of coffee and fancy bakeries, is not just a consumer choice but a lifestyle. They not only have the money. They share the values.

They live by all those little quotes on the side of Starbucks cups about community service and global warming. They embrace the Obama candidacy because to them he transcends traditional class and economic divides. He is a transformative political figure – potentially the first black man to be president – and is seen as the one to revive America’s faith in itself and restore America’s status in the world. For these voters the defining emotion is hope.

Mrs Clinton is the candidate of what might be called Dunkin’ Donut Democrats. They do not have money to waste on multiple-hyphenated coffee drinks – double-top, no-foam, non-fat lattes and the like. Not for them the bran muffins or the biscotti. They are the 75-cent coffee and doughnut crowd. For them caffeine choice doesn’t correlate with their values but simply represents a means of keeping them going through their challenging day. Continue reading “Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats”

Obama to End the Culture Wars?

Goodbye to All That

Consevative blogger Andrew Sullivan comes out for Obama with this week’s “Atlantic” magazine’s Cover Story, as the cure for our ongoing, self-destructive 60’s Boomers Culture War.
The Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.