Category: Barack Obama

Bob Reich on the parallels between RFK, JFK and BHO.

The Obama movement comes to rural Texas.

He helps explain his attraction to the candidate. It springs from Zakaria’s own background as an American who came from somewhere else:

Africa to India and China are getting richer, stronger and prouder. For America to thrive, we will have to develop a much deeper, richer, more intuitive understanding of them and their peoples. There are many ways to attain this, but certainly being able to feel it in your bones is one powerful way. Trust me on this. As a Ph.D. in international relations, I know what I’m talking about.

Obama is the same. The deepest question in this election is how America interacts with the world. If you care about this country, you will care about America’s isolation, awful p.r., stressed military and growing debt under Bush-Cheney. Sometimes it helps to see things a little from the outside.

Heh:

My sense is is that Mr. Nader is somebody who, if you don’t listen and adopt all of his policies, thinks you’re not substantive. He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work.

Bill Kristol doesn’t waste time in using it. Yes, there’s an artful attempt to explain that he’s actually talking about Obama’s self-regard. But I’d actually forgotten about the Obama flag lapel story. That’s the brute politics Kristol knows beneath the urbane exterior; and when your main task is defending the occupation of a Middle Eastern country for the next century, it’s a diversion worth trying, at least. Meanwhile, the AP does a story on Obama’s "patriotism" question and CNN delivers a Clintonian push-poll. I’m actually fine with this. The only way to overcome this kind of politics is to endure and transcend it. If we want to say "goodbye to all that," you need to say hello to it for a while.

James Pethokoukis looks at the evidence:

Obama…is a plausible pragmatist. His domestic policy advisers are hardly a radical bunch. One economic adviser, Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard, has coauthored an interesting compromise plan on Social Security that would raise taxes a bit, extend the retirement age a bit, and put a bit of money into personal retirement accounts.

Or look at Obama’s tax plan. In addition to new middle-class tax credits, it has a technocratic reform proposal that would make filing many tax returns easier by letting the Internal Revenue Service fill them out in advance. And the economist who devised the plan, the University of Chicago’s Austan Goolsbee, is no class warrior on taxes or China basher on trade. Don’t forget, too, that in his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama himself found a few kind words for President Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which slashed the top marginal rate to 50 percent from 70 percent, saying that the old sky-high rate did "distort investment decisions." Sounds pretty pragmatic.

Garfield County, Washington State. He got a vote tally worthy of Putin.

You never know what might happen at a British stag night in the 1990s.

A commenter on Ben Smith’s blog tells it like it is:

Boo! Im a Republican. Yes, you have found yourself in the company of a man who wears button down Oxfords, who flies his flag every holiday and prides himself in a neatly mowed lawn. But something happened in the last few years that has brought me here to this campaign… my party changed. Where once was a belief in the power of the individual, came a heavy, overbearing government that dared to challenge how people should live their lives. And then came the war. Where once I viewed the party as one who ended wars and focused on balanced budgets and living the American dream, there was now one that started one and leveraged our dreams with debt. And then came the loss of privacy. Where once there was the beiief in live and let live, there was now a strange curiosity on the part of the government, to peer into the most private parts of our lives. Where once was a party with a rather sunny disposition came one that was dark, glowering and saw the future as a threat … a place to be fortified … where dreams had to be put aside to allow in, the harsh realities of our times. I wanted to dream again. I wanted to crawl out of the cave that that day in September drove us to. I want to fly my flag not for our fallen soldiers but for our ideals again, I want to befriend my neighbors, be they black or white, gay or straight, Catholic, Muslim, Christian, or Jew.

I want to think that tomorrow can be better than today. I want to live free. I want to walk down a street anywhere in the world knowing that I come from a country that is admired and is a force for good. I heard the words of Barack Obama on one cold day in January, broadcast from the frozen fields of Iowa. And it was like the wind – a chinook wind that seemed to melt away the dark and cold that was offered up by candidates from both parties. And it was like the sun – with warming words that spoke of not taking it to the Republicans with anger or revenge, but getting them to join up in something bigger than a political party … a political force. It dared to look at things differently like having the audacity to talk to everyone… even those we do not like be they Republicans or Iranians.

It came with an easy smile and words that made you believe it was all possible. It made me feel proud to be American again. So here I am. Boo! And there are other Republicans in the room too. Yes, we are a bit out of our sorts. But like you and the millions of other Democrats and Independents, we too want to believe in something again that is not weighted down by special interests and questionable ethics and certainly not a step back to any past. For we have only achieved the great things when our mind has been on the future. I look forward to marching with you.

A meme is developing is that support for Obama is all emotion, fantasy, hysteria, etc. There’s no question that the emotions behind Obama are powerful. And any fool can see why. His oratory does what oratory should. He is the greatest public speaker in American life since Reagan. And the shame and demoralization of the Bush-Cheney years – when we launched a war with reckless indifference to planning it, when we tortured prisoners and called it "enhanced interrogation", when we saw a government rendered so utterly useless that a hurricane made the US look like the third world, when conservatives added $32 trillion to the debt of the next generation, when a president made sophomoric jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction he leveraged American global credibility on … if you don’t feel emotions in wanting to put this disgrace of an administration behind us, then you are not being rational.

But the strongest case for Obama is not emotional; it is as coolly rational as he is. I tried to express it in my "Goodbye To All That" essay. On the most critical issues we face – Iraq, the war against Jihadism, healthcare, and the economy – he makes more sense as a president than Clinton. And when you watch the knee-jerk opposition to him, I think it is actually more emotional and less rational than the support for him. Fear is more emotional than hope.

And defending Clinton on the grounds of "experience" and "substance" is a fairy tale on both counts, if you pardon the expression. Her legislative experience is one term longer than Obama’s (and that’s if you don’t count Obama’s state legislative record), is notable mainly for its uninspired diligence in constituency work, and on the most important issue of the day, Iraq, simply wrong. Her main executive branch experience was destroying a historic opportunity for healthcare reform through arrogance, secrecy and over-reach. Her "substance" claim is just as phony. There is no detail in her policy apparatus that isn’t matched by Obama’s. But you’ve heard a lot from me on this. Here’s a video that shows a conservative cynic being slowly and rationally disarmed by the logic of young, shrewd voter.

A vote for Obama is a vote for reason over sentiment. Check it out: