Maybe Obama was never that liberal, but I have to say that I’d hoped he would be. The point is to use his energy to move America to the left. We’ve been moved to the right by the likes of Reagan and GWB. A great leader isn’t supposed to just represent the average of all Americans. A great leader is supposed to make us do things that we need to do, even when we might not want to. He doesn’t seem to be the type who’s wanting to stand up and give us what we need, not what we want.
“He doesn’t seem to be the type who’s wanting to stand up and give us what we need, not what we want.”
Just out of curiosity, what politician who is that type has ever gotten elected to anything?
I don’t think you have any reason to worry that this wouldn’t happen under an Obama presidency.
Here is the odd thing; I have been a basically moderate (liberal) Republican all my life. I was looking for a non-Republican candidate and I came down to Clinton and Obama as the two closest to my centrist positions based on the positions they went into details on, on their websites. I never saw Obama as a Liberal like Edwards (who I seriously despise).
I have not seen much movement from Obama from where he was 15 months ago and none from his website as of January 2008 when I was doing my heavy research.
Jim
(Disclaimer, after casting my vote for McCain in the Primary*, I sent in my paperwork to become unaffiliated with either party. This is the first election in my life where I like both candidates. I just like Obama better and want the Republicans out of power for an extended period of time until they drift back to the center.)
- I would have voted for Obama in the Dem primary, but NJ required too much lead time to switch so I waited until the day after our primary and sent in my paperwork. My wife did vote for Obama and then sent in the paperwork to leave the Dems. We are both free agents at this point.
To illustrate:
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as a parent I’ll make sure that my (non-teenager) kids not get a chance to fill up on junk (I can win that; I just don’t buy it) but I won’t fight over making them eat their broccoli (I’d lose and they’d learn that they can win a battle with me - information that I do not want them to be in possession of)
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for my politicians I’d rather see healthcare reform that is near universal and covers most people well using current insurers than lost cause fights for what I think is better (a mandate ala Hillary’s plan).
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and hell go international. The Palestinians may believe that they “deserve” all of Israel and some Israelis may believe that the Palestinians do not deserve a sate at all. I’d rather each side accept a solution that is possible than hold out for impossible causes. Every body would be better off.
Just as examples.
BTW, not that I expect to understand, the reference to parenting is called an “analogy”, not “Appeal to Authority” - not unless the subject under discussion was parenting techniques and then I would expect to defend my position on its merits not on my alleged authority. Those who have kids can probably understand about choosing your fights and not fighting ones that the kids have a good chance of winning lest they realize that you are beatable.
Obama only sits in the center when surrounded by Liberals.
- Yes, he lost my vote but it has nothing to do with his alleged move to the right. It’s his voting record and ill-informed opinions that lost me.
2&3 - N/A
- No, even if he did seem to move to the center, he’s a politician after votes so I assume he’s lying. Unless he had some kind of record to back it up, it’s pure BS IMHO. You can’t vote straight party line your entire career and then, 4 months before the election, claim to be an aisle reacher acrosser.
It’s a good thing, then, that this doesn’t describe Obama, at all, and certainly leaves out many of his accomplishments in the U.S. Senate, such as one the first laws he had cosponsored and passed successfully , which was written in collaboration with Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Here’s another example of an Obama/Colburn collaboration.
Coburn’s communications director in 2006 made the following remark:
A little effort will bring up numerous more examples.
Here’s an example of Obama teaming up with Richard Lugar.
Here’s an example of Obama teaming up with Chuck Hagel.
Obama is not really a centrist ideologically, at least by current U.S. standards. However, he is capable of reaching across the aisle to achieve goals that do not fundamentally betray his ideals–something very few politicians can do, and something that Obama is particularly respected for by a number of his colleagues.
There are two different questions:
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Is Obama capable of working with Republicans to get them to go along with bills Democrats want? Absolutely.
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Is Obama willing to cross the aisle and vote against his party when he believes it’s right? No. Or very rarely. And if he’s a centrist, there must be times when he thinks Republicans have the better plan.
Obama’s voting record in the Senate shows his vote aligning with the Democrats 97% of the time.
The real centrists are people like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, two politicians who have shown their willingness to buck their own party when they think it’s right to do so. McCain has voted with Democrats on a number of occasions. Lieberman has voted with Republicans. They are the exact center of American politics. Lieberman is center left, preferring more progressive domestic policies but being on the right on defense. McCain leans more to the right on social issues like abortion, but leans to the left on climate change, immigration, corporate regulation, and campaign finance reform. Both men seem to follow their principles, even when it’s personally costly.
Obama, not so much. His gift of crossing the aisle is basically the gift of being able to poach votes from the other side for your side. The bills mentioned in the links above are pretty much non-partisan - they don’t characterize you as right or left. Good government reform and nuclear nonproliferation are widely agreed upon by both sides. Obama did not have to stand up to his party and try to lead them the way McCain had to on immigration, campaign finance reform, or when he turned on Bush and complained about his Iraq policies and strategy before any other Republicans were willing to stick their necks out.
Obama’s got gifts, and it was obvious from the start that he was going to have to occupy the center to win the election, so none of this is a surprise.
But to say he’s not changing positions is ridiculous. Take the second amendment - Obama has voted for every gun regulation to come down the pike. He has said in the past that he would support a total handgun ban and even a ban on semi-automatic weapons. But since he didn’t explicitly state that he thought the second amendment applied only to militias, he gets to wiggle now and say that he’s always supported the second amendment.
But come on. Ask yourself this honestly: If the Supreme court had come down 5-4 the other way, and said that the second amendment did not guarantee an individual right to arms, do you not think that Obama would have been out the next day saying, “This has been my opinion all along.”?
McCain, on the other hand, would have spoken somberly about how he thought the court was wrong, and he’d probably start talking about how to correct it.
We know where they both stand, sound bites aside. McCain strongly believes in the second amendment guaranteeing an individual right to arms, and Obama wishes it didn’t, but he knows which way the wind blows and so he hedged his bets.
He does that a lot. He’s an extremely smart politician. Maybe the smartest I’ve seen. But he’s using that intelligence to walk a very thin line from where he wishes he could be to where he has to be to win an election.
I’ll give him this: I do believe he’s more in the center on social issues - he strikes me as an absolutely normal American in the way he approves of faith based charity, personal responsibility, and the need to be strong but also charitable. I also think he has an intelligent position on abortion which matches most Americans’ - he think it should be a woman’s right, and yet it’s unpleasant and there are clearly some gray areas that make you a little bit unsure. Partial birth abortions. When you read about babies surviving ‘failed’ partial birth abortions and then having to grow up with the damage, you think “wait a minute. We’re going too far here.” So he supports it, but with some reservations he hasn’t quite sorted out.
But economically, he is very liberal, and that’s where it really counts with a President. He wants significantly higher taxes on the rich, and he wants government to meddle in the economy to a much greater degree than it ever has. He’s a strong environmentalist, and he believes in government taking an active role in shaping industry and the economy.
This “failed partial birth abortion” thing. First I’d heard of it. Sounds ghastly. Sounds so ghastly it makes me a mite suspicious. Where’d you hear about this?
It’s complete bullshit.
I haven’t heard him state those positions before. The gun rights and his death penalty positions were brought up with regards to recent court cases. It looks like he just gave his views a more clearer definition which places them closer to the center.
He isn’t contradicting himself, but wherever his views are not clear, he is defining them closely to the center.
Here’s the scoop on the so-called “Born-Alive” Bill that Sam is referring to and confusing with intact D and X (commonly referred to by pro-lifers as “partial-birth abortion”).
Obama actually says he would support the Born Alive Bill which would protect a fetus if it hypothetically survived an abortion. That’s all but a theoretical possibility since abortions are almost never performed in the 3rd trimester (something like 1/16 of 1%), and when they are, it’s for urgent medical reasons. Virtually all intact D&X procedures are performed in the 2nd trimester, though pro-lifers try to myuddy the waters and call anything after 3 months a “lat term abortion,” (a medically meaningless term), hoping to fool people into thinking that they’re talking about full term pregnancies.
He has stated his position on both of those issues before in speeches, in his books and on his website. he’s always been big on the faith thing too. Sometimes I think he might actually mean it when he talks about his spiritual obligations.
I never expected much from Obama in the first place. I knew he wouldn’t accomplish much for the left, or for the center for that matter when I heard all that talk about compromise and ending partisanship and so forth; that’s another way of saying that he’ll just cave in to the Republicans. You can’t compromise with people like them; you can give them what they want, or do what you want in spite of them, but you can’t compromise with people who won’t compromise. He reminds me of all the talk after 9-11, about pulling together as a nation and nonpartisanship and so forth, which simply amounted to the Democrats handing the Republicans anything they asked for.
My only reason for voting for him is that he’s not a Republican. Having someone who’s not actively on their side should slow things down a little. Not much, since I expect he and Congress will still be giving the Republicans what they want. Caving in is what the Democrats do.
That number would be 11.7% — which is about the percentage of all cars that will be hybrids by the time McCain promises to balance the budget in 2013, or the percentage your life has reduced in value according to the EPA over the past five years. It is also the percentage of young children in Chicago in 2001 who were lead poisoned.
Except that there are almost no Republican centrists in Congress, not any more. There are plenty of Dem centrists.
And that’s by American standards. By world standards, the American “center” is way off to the right.
To which I had answered
Seems like Rasmussen was just noise, as it is back up to the 3-4 point Obama advantage they’ve generally had him in. Gallup continues to run Obama by 3-4 too. RCP’s average also still keeps it in that 3-6 point Obama lead range (4.8 to be precise). CNN’s poll of polls has kept it between 4-8% Obama for over a month now.
Sam don’t overreact to any single poll (or two) either way. For right now Obama is neither pulling away or dropping significantly. He has a consistent modest lead. For now. Obama’s support is more firm, and McCain’s is not Still 12% is totally undecided and another 46% is soft. 538 may analyze that as a huge structural advantage for Obama (see that link) but I still see that as a lot of people who can be influenced fairly easily by some particular event or sets of events to come. Lib’s point may be true, that the longer poll results stay in the same channel the more “real” it becomes, but 58% soft and undecided still leaves a lot of space for true swings of more than 3 to 6% between now and November - back and forth a few times even.
The reason I said ‘statistically tied’, is because the 3% that Obama is up is within the margin of error of the poll. However, other polls indicate about the same, as you say, so I’d say the likelihood is that Obama is indeed up about 3%.
That’s a surprisingly small gap any way you consider it, given that the current political playing field completely favors Obama.
But I wouldn’t get cocky if I were a McCain supporter, because probably the main reason Obama is only up that much is because the majority of the country hasn’t been paying a lot of attention so far, and won’t until after Labor Day. At that point, I’m expecting the polls to swing a round a bit. I wouldn’t be surprised to see McCain leading at some point, even if merely because of an Obama gaffe or some other external event which favors him. In the end, Obama’s support is really high with people who are paying attention, so if he continues at the current pace he’ll probably win the election by a comfortable margin.
But the McCain campaign and its surrogates haven’t really teed off on him yet - we’ll have to see if anything sticks. And the Obama camp will do the same - they or their surrogates will hit McCain with every criticism they think might have traction, and they’ll see which one sticks the most and try to define him with it. Three months from now, ‘everyone might know’ that McCain is crazy, or that he’s too old, or that he’s crooked, or that he’s mean. And Obama might be untrustworthy, or arrogant, or too liberal, or a flip-flopper, or a drug user.
Obama is smart in getting those pro-active ‘Who am I’ ads out - he needs to define himself before the McCain campaign does. John McCain has an advantage here only in that he already has the trust of the public and is fairly well defined. He’s been vetted. Obama is a little more vulnerable.
In regards to Obama’s movement towards the center, despite the media hub-bub about upset liberals, Gallup found that there hasn’t really been any effect on Democratic/Liberal inclinations to vote for him:
An eye-opener to me in today’s Rassmussen Report was this:
Obama is blowing the doors off McCain among voters who are not strongly religious. That shows me that a lot of McCain’s support is coming from social conservatives who are going to stick with the Republicans no matter what’s going on with the economy or in the Middle East. There is a core of voters who are just never going to vote for a social liberal, regardless of whether it’s in their own economic interests. That Obama is leading by 35 points among people who are not hardcore religious conservatives should be a real alarm bell for the Republicans.