Thank you, I was just curious. He does have his faults. I am well aware of it. I just like him better than Hillary, I think he will make a stronger leader and will be immune to being “handled” by his VP & Staff. By the time, the election comes along, if by some odd quirk he is still in it, I will be happy to vote for him, faults and all. As far as tact, I think Rudy and the Clintons both lacked a lot of that. Bill was still a good President. Teddy had little tact and he was a great President. Tact, I will not worry about.
If I had to choose from the top three Dems, I like Obama the best and I still have 18 months to learn a lot more about him. I can live with HRC, I really do not like Edwards.
Can you give us a few examples, if you please? (And please do not bring up the “baking cookies” comment from 1992. The statute of limitations has expired on that one.)
I have a number of reservations about Giuliani. He’s had no experience working with the federal government. Based on his actions as Mayor, I feel he was overly impulsive (which was acceptable at a city level where there where limits to what he could do but worrisome in a President). He showed disdain for compromise (which again is a skill a President needs a lot more of than a Mayor). On a personal level, I feel he was egotistical and vindictive. And I wonder about his record as a moderate - he was after all running as a politician in a very liberal city and may have been only as moderate as his circumstances required. The conservative consensus is against him but he might secretly be a true believer.
I’m against her push to create a division of the Department of Homeland Security to cover the entirety of the US-Canada border. I can’t say that’s necessarily stupidity on her part, but I will say that any attempt to make the US-Canada border ‘watertight’ seems doomed to failure. We can’t manage that kind of security on the US-Mexico border where there are some impressive geographic boundaries to assist that, how are we supposed to make the border with Canada as secure as her rhetoric implies she wants it without even a river to serve as a physical marker of the border over much of its length?
Included in that are some specific comments she’d made back when the City of Rochester was trying to get a fast ferry link between Rochester and Toronto. At one of her press meetings at the time she was pushing for the more secure Canadia border she was asked what about the fast ferry, and her reply was that it would obviously have the same kind of controls as air traffic. Which, considering that ferrys don’t even get accurate head-counts seems a bit unreal to expect.
I can come up with more, if you like, but they’re the first ones off the top of my head.
Please note, I’m not saying she’s noticebly worse in this manner than any other politician, just that they bother me.
I’ll be glad when the day comes that I will be happy to vote for a particular candidate, and quit having to think “who will do the least damage” or “lesser of two evils”.
“Conservative” covers so many camps that it is really hard to answer the question. What kinds of things about liberals scare you most?
HRC is, IMHO, more conservative overall than Obama. She’d probably be more Big Business freindly. She’d certainly be more hawkish. Less concerned with individual rights and freedoms. OTOH she’d be less likely to craft compromises with Republicans and more likely to result in attempts to demonize a Republican minority in Congress. It is unlikely that she’d let anything of a conservative agenda through if it gave the Pubbies any credit. If you are afraid of that then be afraid of her more. Bottom line is though that it is hard to really know what she believes other than that she wants the power. I don’t think even she knows what she’d do if she ever caught the truck she is chasing.
Obama is more of a straight up left leaning moderate. If I was a conservative I’d be afraid of him because I think that he has the negotiating skills to get an agenda accomplished. He is clearly for an orderly scheduled down-sizing of our Iraq involvement and while strong on national defense his version would be to accomplish those goals more with the tools of multilateral diplomacy than with unilateral military force. The antithesis of the neocon position if that is your conservative stripe. If you are a neocon you’d do better hoping for an HRC victory. Obama will likely take on Biden’s federation of Iraq ideas once Biden drops out.
Either one would nominate judges who would be expected to preserve Roe v Wade and for clear seperation of Church and State. Both would likely push for universal healthcare, and neither will, at this point push for single payor as a way to do it. Neither will make tort reform a major initiative. HRC will likely be more for continuation of the Homeland Security spying on Americans provisions. Some conservatives would like that, other more libertarian ones, would find that objectionable.
So bottom line. Neocons will dislike Obama more and be pleasantly surprised by HRC’s copmpatability with them. Libertarian conservatives will dislike HRC more.
I disagree with your assessment. Many Pubbies have an overriding loyalty to the GOP, & see the Democrats as The Great Enemy. Rather than liking a Dem that wields power like a Republican, they will be as horrified by a strong Dem President as by a strong Soviet premier in Cold War days. If any Dem can shake the “soft on defense” label, that would undermine the GOP to irrelevancy; therefore, it must not be allowed to happen; therefore, by sheer definition, no matter what a Dem does, it must be considered a mistake.
Frostillicus, I kind of figured that’s what you were expecting. No worries. And thanks for acknowledging the legitimacy of my response. I appreciate it.
I’d also like to point out, while I don’t particularly like her, she did get my vote for re-election. She’s not the monster some people want to present her as. Nor is she incompetent.
It’s worth pointing out that that one of the key distinctions between them might well be the sort of people that will comprise their administrations. I think we can expect a second Clinton administration to look a lot like the first; many people will be coming back to departments they left in 2000. Thus, if nothing else, one would expect a high degree of basic competence in administering departments and advancing policy.
Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t been in politics long enough to amass as large a number of associates and contacts, so it’s not as certain how he’d fill out his team. Would he also aim at primarily bringing back centrist DLC holdovers from the 90s, or would key spots go to more ardent liberals, who have not been in power since Carter? If the latter, I think you can expect them to make some mistakes and have a slower learning curve.
From the start at least, Hillary and her people are likely to be better at putting their policies into action than Obama’s would. I suppose that a really devout conservative might prefer Obama for that reason; since you would oppose either Administration’s policy, you can hope he and his people prove inept in implementing it.
Of course, a patriotic conservative might also conclude that even if you dislike their policy, the country is still better off having people with some experience in charge; in which case you’d prefer Hillary.
