Haven’t seen any threads on this general subject. I know all candidates for President do it but still …
Anyway, my question to each SDMB doper willing to share …
Has he irretreivably lost any of your votes yet?
Is he so close that if he doesn’t stop moving he surely will?
If not even close yet, what could he flip/flop on to do it?
Have any of you not inclined to vote for him up to now gotten any closer to voting for him because of his moves to the center?
Not being an American voter, I can’t really comment. What I do know, however, is that this issue was also discussed, albeit tangently, in this here thread.
He hasn’t lost my vote and likely won’t given the choices we have. I am concerned that he’ll lose enough support to make it a close race and lose the election.
I see he’s down in a recent poll and I heard callers on NPR saying they felt betrayed and would no longer support him. I hope voters take the time to understand his positions and communicate with him. He has to get elected before we can begin move in a different direction. Even those who disagree with him on certain issues should consider that.
The funny thing is, he’s a centrist Democrat to begin with, and a lot of progressives seem not to have noticed that during the primaries, instead projecting their own aspirations onto him. Or maybe they bought into the “Most librul Democrat in the Senate! Run away!” label that got hung on him by the right wing propaganda machine when it became apparent he’d be the nominee.
He was way too convervative for me from the very beginning, but that’s politics. Nothing would dissuade me from voting for Obama at this point, no matter how much tacking he does; we can’t afford another Republican administration, there’s too much that needs to be dragged out into the light and cleaned up, and McCain almost certainly would take us to war with Iran.
No.
No. Not thrilled with everything he does but then a politician who would do as I like 100% of the time almost certainly does not exist. I bet even if I was a politician I would not get to vote as I would like 100% of the time.
Not really no. Given my other choice Obama would have to kill a puppy before I considered voting for McCain.
N/A
He was always in the center. He hasn’t really moved ideologically on much of anything. He changed his mind on public financing because he had no choice, but that’s not really a right-left thing. The only thing that seems like an ideological shift is the FISA compromise, which is mildly disappointing, but his vote wasn’t going to make a difference anyway, and it will all be moot once he gets into the WH. The super liberal label was always a Republican myth to begin with. I don’t care what he says or does to get elected, as long as he wins.
Of course not.
No. Also, I don’t agree that he’s “moved” his political ideology in any significant way. Everything he’s said or done of late is within the boundaries of ideas he’s already presented in the past, excepting the campaign finance thing, which was a necessary change (not a right vs. left thing I agree.) He would have been stupid not to change his mind on that.
I’m not seeing the worthiness of trying to answer this question. Obama is hardly a flip flopper, compared to, say, McCain. But mostly I think the whole “flip flop” label should be a banned label for the 2008 election – it’s a feeble substitute for real political debate.
N/A
What ETF and the others said. I paid enough attention to know he was to the right of where I want to be, and as columnist the the NY Times said the other day, what the heck do you think a working across the aisle means, anyway? It means compromise. A lot of it.
Do I like it? No, not particularly. Will I stop supporting Obama? Heck no! In fact, I’ll continue to be highly enthusiastic about him, so that the silly right-wingers will call me a Kool-aider drinker and refer to it as the deification of Obama. Why?
Supreme Court judges. That’s my single most important issue, and on that, I think Obama will break slightly left more than far right (which is where I think a first term McCain would break).
War. I’ve never believed that Obama would get any significant numbers of troops home any sooner than McCain. But their goals differ. Obama doesn’t appear to have a goal of setting up permanent military bases in Iraq for our well-being (he may do a few at Iraqi request). More importantly, Obama doesn’t see going to war as a good solution to any problem, and he’s not expansionist at all. McCain scares me with some of the stuff I’ve seen him write or transcripts of stuff he’s said in the past.
Posturing. I don’t think Obama feels the need to play these stupid macho posturing games where, for example, we’ll talk to Europe and Europe will talk to Iran, rather than us joining Europe in talking to Iran ourselves. When did it become too big an honor to be able to talk to a representative of ours for just anyone to be worth of it?
If what’s happening to Freddie and Fannie doesn’t yet again demonstrate that de-regulation of business practices is not all it’s cracked up to be, let’s look at the case of China, where corruption runs absolutely unchecked, and thousands upon thousands of schoolchildren unnecessarily died in an earthquake because of poorly contructed school buildings. The public officials involved are punished very harshly - the death sentence in cases over about $14000. But the bribers? A single one has yet to be prosecuted, because the government is so terrified of slowing down development. After all, the one thing China has lots of is people. Who cares if a few hundred thousand die? The U.S. really doesn’t have that luxury. Obama knows it. Does McCain understand the connection?
The wealthy. For all their talk about small businesses and free trade, what the Republicans in practice are all about in reality is pro existent business, the bigger the better. And I’m not saying big businesses aren’t either necessary or desirable. But I would say that in general, they’d be the last guys on my list for federal aid. I know I won’t get what I want from Obama here, but I also know I’ll get closer to it than I would from McCain.
Obama is young, charismatic, a great orator, and African American. If elected, Obama will be the first president in my life to be younger than I am, and I suspect that will be true for a lot of us here on the SDMB. He feels more like a contemporary of ours than McCain does. He feels more like someone who gets the issues that are important to us. He’s a brilliant speaker, and between that and the fact that he’s black, what a terrific message that will send, not only to our own people, but all around the world!
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n) My un-enthusiasm for the Republicans and McCain continues to burn very strong, and they’re certainly unlikely to do anything between now and the election to change my mind. For the first time in eight very long years, we have a realistic chance of taking the White House back from an administration that has messed things up in about every possible way. Obama is to the right of me, but he’s still considerably to the left of McCain, even the old McCain. There’s no contest.
I don’t think Obama has really moved to the center. I think he’s been mostly in the center all along and some people have imagined him to be somewhere off to the left.
Not to hijack but I think there’s a difference in intent between Obama and McCain. In my opinion, Obama sees bringing the troops home as a goal in itself - not the only one but he’ll make plans to achieve a withdrawal. McCain, on the other hand, does not have withdrawal as a goal - he wants to achieve other goals and when he’s done that, he’ll withdraw the troops.
So both candidates are honestly saying that they do plan of withdrawing the troops at some point even if it’s not going to happen on day one. But they have two different paths to get from here to there.
And in the meantime, McCain moves to the right, the left, north, south, and the nth dimension…
I don’t see that much happening here, other than a propaganda move to depict Obama as a flip-flopper with no real foundation. Kinda silly, but they ain’t got much. I never expected, nor do I expect, that Obama will represent my political views. Being on the conservative wing of the extreme left, the closest I had any chance of getting would have been Dennis the K (D, The Shire), and I am most definitely not interested in a futile demonstration of principled seppuku.
What matters most is being sure that the same gaggle of goons who have been royally buggering our beloved country have their greasy mitts pried loose of the levers of power. If that requires some centrist posturing, then I expect him to posture like a motherfucker! The stakes are too damned high.
But which is the posturing and which is the belief, 'luc? Could be both are posturing, of course.
His FISA vote switch was real, and unforced, and for that matter unexplained other than in Weaselese. His new equivocation on Iraq withdrawal could still be posturing, but is also unforced. His switch on financing is certainly understandable in practical terms, but it would have been better not to pretend it was principled than to offer the cover story he did.
I’d prefer to hope he’s learning what it takes to win when it matters - but I wish he were more skillful about it. But at least the popular illusion that he’s somehow a fundamentally different kind of politician is being dissipated, along with the notion (popular among a different set) that he’s fatally naive. Or one can hope that’s happening.
Its a myth that anybody ever thought he was a “fundamentally different kind of politician.”
You must not have read all that much of this forum in recent months, then.
Shayna, is that a “myth”?
My impression of Obama has always been, more than anything else, that he is a pragmatist. He is not one who would prefer to die a noble death than to compromise. Instead he will determine what is the best possible of possible outcomes, and negotiate a way to get there. Once there he declares victory and moves on.
He has never sold himself as “the fighter” for (hopeless) causes - as Clinton and Edwards did. This sort of compromising and finding solutions that he feels are good enough (rather than perfect) is exactly how he is a different kind of politician. He will work to avoid the filibustering deadlocks ineffectual fights for principle that result in nothing getting done but tit for tat obstructionism.
He has always claimed that he is a progessive centrist who cares more about getting stuff done through working together than getting all that he wants accomplished or nothing.
In that sense, yes, he is a fundamentally different sort of politician - an effective one.
Yes, one can indeed avoid “partisan deadlock” by simply caving in. The FISA vote is a glaring example. One can “get stuff done” that way, yes - but only stuff the *other * guys want done.
We’ve already seen what trying to compromise with people who are uninterested in compromise, already knowing you’ll cave, accomplishes. Don’t try to justify it just because your guy is now doing it too. And by all means don’t cede the agenda to the discredited minority.
Well, either Obama is losing support or McCain is gaining it, because they are now statistically tied in the race for President.
This is actually a rather startling statistic. Because Obama has had numerous advantages over McCain - he’s getting a ton of very favorable press. He’s spending money like mad - he just ran a full-country ad, which McCain can’t afford to follow up on. McCain’s campaign is somewhat in disarray.
And yet, despite all that Obama has fallen at least 5 points in the polls, and as much as 15 if you believed that Newsweek poll. How come?
He hasn’t fallen. The 15 point Newsweek poll was always an outlier.
As to why McCain isn’t doing worse – that’s pretty easy to answer. The media does not go after him the way it goes after Obama.
Racism is also a factor, like it or not.
Not worry, though, the polling still shows an electoral blowout..
Not that any of this polling is particularly significant yet.