We have to have a talk about Barack Obama.
I know, I know. You’re upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way to the right. Drifting to the center. Going all moderate on you. So you’re withholding the love. Also possibly the money.
I feel your pain. I just don’t know what candidate you're talking about.
Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.
Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?
It's so sad watching the happy lights go out of Obama supporters eyes. It's never good watching people whose hopes and dreams are being shattered. After all the rhetoric, the nasty comments directed at people (one of which was me) who didn't believe what he said about hope and change, they are waking up this morning to a candidate who cannot be distinguished from any other politician running for office. Oh, they were s proud of themselves when they vanquished Clinton, made Edwards out to be too pretty to be effective and gloated unceremoniously when their candidate was anointed the winner by the same people who have been bought off by the telecom companies. Now they are beginning to realize that what they got was a wolf dressed up in Little Red Riding Hood's clothes on the way to Grandma's house. My, what big teeth he has.
-- DEB
Viewed in a certain way, you can argue that everything Obama has done is consistent with his general views and his habit of avoiding confrontation, but this is not very flattering for Obama and it is even less flattering for his conservative admirers. As a supporter of the PATRIOT Act, Obama has never exactly been a champion on civil liberties, so when he said that he would filibuster the FISA bill it was may have been nothing more than pandering and a refusal to court confrontation during the primaries. Once he became the nominee, he wanted to avoid confrontation with the telecoms and the executive, which was easy enough since he has been a fair-weather civil libertarian all along, because to be anything else would be to court resistance and opposition from entrenched power in the government and the media. On the whole, a pattern emerges where Obama will never challenge a constituency or an interest group at the time when it can damage or derail his advancement, but once he has used them he will be quite willing to throw supporters overboard to appease the demands of the political establishment.
McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina isn't above stretching the truth about the candidate's positions. For instance, Fiorina recently suggested that McCain took issue with insurance companies who pay for Viagra but refused to cover birth control. (As you might imagine, this a sore spot with many gals.)The folks at NARAL were quick to point out that, in fact, Senator Straight Talk has twice voted against measures--once in 2003 and once in 2005--that would require insurance companies to pay for birth control. When asked about this apparent discrepancy, McCain insisted that he did not recall those votes and noted, "It's something that I had not thought much about."
"Anticlimactic" is a mild description for a scandal that began with disclosure that the President of the United States and the telecom industry were committing felonies for years in how they spied on American citizens, only to end with a Congress controlled by the "opposition party" legalizing the surveillance, protecting the lawbreakers, terminating the only meaningful process for discovering what really happened, and embracing the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law as long as, in his sole discretion, he decrees that doing so is legal.
When a man has endured torture as a prisoner of war, you'd think he could take a little criticism. Apparently not, in the case of John McCain, whose demand that Barack Obama "cut loose" General Wesley Clark is as ridiculous as it is demeaning.Clark of course is the retired commander of allied forces in the Kosovo war who in June said getting shot down over Vietnam is not in itself "a qualification to be president." Making like his feelings had been hurt, which McCain has gotten extremely good at with experience, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee issued his demand. In the ensuing hubbub, the fact that what Clark said was obviously true got lost.
A comparable comedy played out when Charlie Black, an adviser to McCain, told Fortune magazine that another terrorist attack on the US would "be a big advantage" to his boss. That this was surely true as well has also failed to register.
McCain and Obama have dutifully disowned their surrogates' remarks (not abjectly enough, their other surrogates claim), with this lamentable result: From now on, it will be even less likely that our presidential candidates will be associated in any way with unvarnished truth, except by happy accident.
Cartoon by Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate
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