Yet another point in Obama’s favor: the Christian Conservatives and evangelicals have decided that McCain is, after all, God’s candidate. That is to say, while many of them feel that McCain was most definitely not God’s first choice, God most definitely prefers him to Barack Obama.
So even though they — meaning the lead mouthpieces of the Christian Right — said they would never, ever do it, Senator McBack ‘n Fill carefully repudiated his every principled stand during the primaries. Besides: he’s incontrovertibly not Obama. They’ve evidently decided on these grounds that they have to support him for not being Obama, whether they like it or not. I get the impression that they don’t much, even now, but are trying to make the best of him. That’s so sweet.
But if I didn’t already know how I am going to vote, I’d take their decision to unite behind McCain as a sign. As a small-C christian small-L liberal of the Quaker, or Friendly, Persuasion — if of any persuasion — I view the stance of the opposite sort of Christian as a fairly reliable indicator of on which side of the line I should not plant my banner.
They may mean well. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I cannot agree with their objectives.
Is Barack Obama’s honeymoon with Europe over already?
After months of the most effusive and unrestrained praise for America’s first serious Black presidential candidate, some of Obama’s most energetic European backers - the Germans - are growing skeptical.
“In the end, a disappointment is a deceit. So it’s for the best that we cast a serous German glance in the direction of the American Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. He has called for the death penalty for child rapists, defends the right to possess firearms and is the first candidate since the Watergate scandal to reject public financing of his election campaign in favor of private, unlimited contributions. ‘Hey,’ some on this side of the Atlantic now ask, ‘we thought he was one of us?’ Far from it.”
“The facade of the wise, eloquent and charming golden boy has begun to crumble. There is a second - other Obama. And he’s about to be discovered: unscrupulous, selfish, and overambitious.’
“Who is the real Obama? Nobody knows for sure. For now because of his vagueness, it’s still possible to project various expectations onto him, in USA as well as in Europe. But here and there the impatience is growing: Obama, perhaps the first Black President, must not only be flexible, he has to take a stand.”
Many Democrats have had reason to comment lately on the conventional wisdom that Democrats must always tack to the center to win an election in this country.
Count me among those who want to see more challenges to that conventional wisdom (which to me just means ‘last year’s assumptions’). While I understand the reasons why candidates do it, the fact is that eight years of neoconservatism has moved all the goal posts way to the right.
To repair the damage done by Bush and his gang of neocons, what’s needed isn’t a balancing bipartisan approach but immediate corrective action. It’s outmoded ‘conventional wisdom’ to believe that Democratic candidates always have to tack centerwards (meaning shift right) to prevail in a general election or to attract swing voters and independents. I don’t buy it.
What most Democrats I know want now is an entirely different approach. With the Republicans still mechanically spouting policies consistent with Bush-era neoconservatism, what’s needed to achieve balance again isn’t compromise action, but corrective action. What most Democrats I know want is a different choice: in our government’s approach to the economy, national security, civil liberties, health care, energy policy and the environment and on and on.
And back-room deals and trade-offs between our elected representatives just aren’t going to cut it. We want to see changes that will restore to us as a nation and as individuals what we lost during Bush’s failed regime.
This is a crucial post from Crooks and Liars for disillusioned Dems (like me) and for anyone, anywhere who has considered voting for McCain (unlike me). It’s extracted from a June 19 post by Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report, the The Carpetbagger Report.
I’ve been disappointed by Obama’s recent stance on several issues, aptly summarized here, and have acknowledged the accuracy of the following:
But though I am all for casting a cold eye on Obama’s policy shifts and inconsistencies, I don’t wish to imply that he is less consistent than McCain. Let’s just review the list which Crooks and Liars has helpfully compiled:
Glenn Greenwald has administered a swift and deadly kick to Olbermann’s credibility on the issue and to any lingering hope that Olbermann might recover sufficient detachment to be considered a reliable commenter on any issue relating to his Hero, Barack Obama.
Now that Obama has made his position on FISA crystal clear, Olbermann has apparently decided how he is going to spin the issue: by being as disingenuous as Obama man. When W was fighting for FISA, Olbermann called it "an ex post facto law, which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive and blatant collaboration with [Bush’s] illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass email."’ (Salon)
Now that Obama has changed his mind about telecom amnesty, so has Olbermann. Now people who disagree with him and his idol — including Obama supporters sufficiently candid to admit their disappointment — are ‘the far left’, silly pie in the sky idealists with impractical and impracticable notions about civil liberties and the constitution that Obama is bravely prepared to resist: Obama won’t cower to ‘the far left’, so called; no sir!
For those keeping score — and for Hillary Dems thinking of voting for McCain or enabling a McCain victory by not voting at all —The New York Times has a handy tally of points on which McCain and Bush agree and disagree. Before it’s all over, we’re all going to need one. Dana Milbank says it best: ‘Put Your Right Wing In, Take Your Left Wing Out —If John McCain keeps dancing like this, he’s liable to break a hip’.
“The McCain-Obama face-off is already turning the November presidential election into an exceptional moment in American history. A Republican rebel in his seventies confronting a mixed-raced newcomer to national politics almost looks like an accidental hiccup. It is a sign that the political apparatus no longer knows how to respond to the nation’s challenges. Both candidates embody the quest for what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called ‘the vital center.’
When California’s Supreme Court decision nixed a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage the question immediately raised by some talk show radio hosts was: will this be back now as a big campaign 2008 wedge issue?
The likely answer: back…yes…….but not quite..because voters have a few teenie-weenie other things on their minds this year. The Associated Press has come to the same conclusion:
[NOTE: An earlier version of this story had this link attributed to the New York Times. That was an error, due to a reference from a Times story on the ruling that was cut in favor of using the more recent AP piece. We regret the error.]
Yesterday’s California Supreme Court decision striking down a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage reintroduces a hot-button social issue into the presidential campaign.
Republicans used same-sex marriage to great political effect in 2004, putting proposed bans on the ballot in Ohio and other states to get conservatives to the polls. But now it will have to compete for attention with the economy, the Iraq war, and other issues.
Indeed, there were already rumblings yesterday reflected in some news reports and on some talk shows of some thinking of trying to put a new measure on the ballot and of a court challenge to the California ruling.
But the dynamics are different this year:
And impact of the gay marriage issue could be muted, not just because neither the Democratic front-runner, Barack Obama, nor the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, support gay marriage, but because McCain’s opposition to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage - on federalist grounds - makes it more difficult for the right to get a lot of traction out of it.
Still, the issue is likely to come up in some races (or be raised by the so-called “independent” groups that make commercials to support or negatively define candidates). And you can already see how even this clear-cut California court ruling can be spun.
“California Court Strips Children of Right to Mother and Father,” declares the headline of Cybercast News Service’s hot-button-pushing article which declares “the court does not recognize that children have any right whatsoever to a mother and a father. In the decision, the California court sees children primarily through the eyes of same-sex couples who want to secure custody and control of children. The court makes emphatically clear that it deems this to be a right of same-sex couples that is equal to–and identical to–the right of married mothers and fathers to adopt or conceive and raise their own children.”
Spin is spin is spin…
So will it become another wedge issue used against the Democrats as hot buttons are pushed and voters cast their votes on this issue? Read the rest of this entry »
In his book, Schecter makes the case for why, although he supported McCain in his run in 2000, McCain no longer deserves support and in fact, his candidacy should be fought actively, without hesitation and on all fronts. Schecter outlines his reasons for these sentiments and fills in those reasons with more details than you may be able to absorb. Schecter draws a portrait of both McCain’s political trajectory and the parallel trajectory of how his political choices since 2001 are a thumbing of his nose at the very people who got him to the presidential precipice in the first place.
A couple of disclosures before I offer you my phone interview with Cliff: I’ve never been a McCain supporter. And I haven’t known of Schecter that long either - here’s the first post I ever wrote about Schecter. However, it was fascinating talking to someone with a seemingly vast knowledge base about someone whom I’ve never really studied.
JMZ: You argue on behalf of former McCain supporters who should be able to realize that McCain isn’t what he once was. Who, then, is the alternative and why?
CS: Well. There’s always, “What we have versus what we’d like to have.” I’m an Obama supporter and he has a lot of appeal to Independents. But he hasn’t done it the way McCain did it – by attacking his own party in big speeches. Obama has done it by standing up, not by splitting. Obama talks about rising above partisanship and reaching out to all people on all sides and getting past the muck where politics has gotten so nasty. Obama says, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. And that’s what McCain had called “straight talk” – but he hasn’t given us much of that [this election cycle.] Read the rest of this entry »
