He didn’t live there when he was a corporate organizer.
I see. So everything about him is false. Dreams From My Father, which he wrote before he was famous or had ever run for anything was a memoir expressing a catalogue of carefully cultivated lies. He truly cared nothing for the poor and had no honestly felt ideology. Every move he made was calculated to achieve one thing and one thing only – political power! Nothing about him is sincere. No choice has ever been principled. He is a brilliant, carefully cultivated sociopath hungry only for power. And the fastest way to power was working for peanuts in the Chicago projects. Or maybe he is what he appears to be. An authentically idealistic person. Apply Occam’s Razor a little bit here.
How do you know? Hillary got her start in corporate law. Lots of politicos do. It’s what is done. Corporate law wasn’t even Obama’s only choice. He was also offered a clerkship at the Supreme Court. That would have been a hell of astart to his resume if all he was ever really driven by was his lust for political power.
Let’s apply your cynicism to John McCain. He wouldn’t have gotten where he is now if he hadn’t been a POW for 5 1/2 years. Who’s to say he didn’t deliberately let himself get captured just so he could earn that war hero status for his future political career.
Any of those high paying jobs would have gotten him going faster than being a community organizer and civil rights attorney in Chicago.
He also would have risen exponentially faster if he’d chosen to poses as a conservative instead of (as you imply) pretending to have compassionate, liberal principles.
Gee I thought this was great debates. It looks like someone might be really upset because their candidate (who should have run in 2004 but didn’t want to) is losing.
Please explain to me how Hillary is so much better than Obama on experience?
Editor in Chief of the Harvard Law Review is a big deal. Being on the ditorial board of a law review at Yale (other than the Yale Law Journal) isn’t much of an improvement over being a Yale law student generally.
I admire Hillary CLinton and I think that if she had run in 2004, she could have won but in 2008 against Ovama, she can’t. Why didn’t she run in 2004?
Or you could win by a ladnslide. Bipartisanship doesn;t mean unanimaty.
What do you think will happen?
It depends on where you think the center is. That poll indicates which direction the candidate would take us from where we are today. Obama would take us to the left of where we are on a lot of things and McCain would take us to the right of where we are on a slight majority of things. Its not like Obama was voting fo a communist state.
I support Obama but he is not a centrist. It is just that conservatives have created such a caricature of liberals that almost anyone can run away from that caricature.
Indeed. I don’t think I’ve sufficiently emphasized that I think placing him on the spectrum as it is layed out according to conventional wisdom is a fruitless task. Like I said, ethics reform, securing nuclear weapons, cap-and-trade, etc., are all political positions with no easy place on the conventional spectrum.
This always amuses me. Mostly when people go over the top. But considering the way the Baby Boomers still fawn over JFK 45 years later, I tend to believe that had the Internet in its current form been around in 1960 we would have seen the same thing.
So young voters and new voters are actually excited about a candidate and about politics for a change. What’s so wrong with that?
Nothing, it’s refreshing. Certainly something I have not seen in many, many years, if ever.
I have the great opportunity to be a part of Obama’s campaign, I work with a lot of people between the ages of 20-30. It’s amazing how excited they are about this man, they are knowledgeable about his issues, they are concerned for the country and if you were to ask me, they are going to aid in getting him elected in the fall.
Young folks are only one demographic Barack is doing well in, he is also doing very well nearlty across the boards with other demographics - I think older folks are amazed and somewhat happy to see young people getting involved.
This is probably true to some extent. I don’t think becoming a community organizer was solely motivated by ambition, however. There are better, faster ways to positions of power, and he already turned down his chance at significant wealth. I think Obama actually does have certain civic ideals, and becoming a community organizer let him try to promote those ideals while always keeping in mind his own personal career advancement, too.
If being an organizer was definitely a career dead-end, he probably wouldn’t have done it, but then again, if he didn’t hold to any principles at all, he probably would have chosen a different route to wealth and power.
What’s the difference? The point is that he doesn’t care enough about the poor to give them his money. He’d rather blow it on a 1.6 million dollar mansion. That leads me to believe that he doesn’t really care about the people he was serving.
It’s not a black and white issue. The point is that his actions show that his activities haven’t been quite as altruistic as everyone seems to be portraying them. Let’s apply Occam’s Razor here. He’s made millions of dollars from his book. Would he have been able to do that as a corporate lawyer instead of a community activist? I think not. A little over 15 years after graduating from law school, he is poised to be elected President of the United States. Something like that doesn’t happen by accident, and it seems like Obama had to be pretty calculating to get to where he is.
I never said that Obama couldn’t have made it to political power after going through a stint as a corporate lawyer. What I am saying is that he wouldn’t get there nearly as fast.
Uh hu. Let’s try to avoid this discussion moving to “really freaking stupid” territory.
How? His power base in the democratic party, and across the nation, comes from his unique background and work with the disadvantaged. If it weren’t for that he would have no demographic base to work from.
As for him posing as a conservative, that’s pretty laughable. What black men held any sort of power in the Republican during the early 90s? It was a white guys club then, and it pretty much is still one today. The chances of a black person rising to power in the Republican party today are remote.
First, two things are being conflated. He worked as a community activist after graduating from Columbia, instead of going to Wall Street. Then, after law school, he again chose to work in the public interest instead of going to a corporate firm.
The second choice, to not go to a corporate firm (or any number of other prestigious gigs–say Supreme Court clerk), has nothing to do with his books. He could have written both books and been a corporate lawyer. Indeed, he wrote *Audacity *after he was a State Senator. The books have nothing to do with whether or not he pursued corporate law. Dreams of My Father isn’t even about his life after law school.
Moreover, as a corporate lawyer he would have been making around a million dollars a year in 1996-97 anyway, depending on how quickly he became partner. Suggesting that he made more money via his books by eschewing corporate law is absurd.
Your explanation that he chose Illinois civil rights law as a step-ladder to the Presidency is also pretty weak. John Edwards had as rapid a transition from law to the Senate as has ever been seen, and he was a trial lawyer. Hillary Clinton, as already noted, was a corporate lawyer. He could have done either of those things, or one of a dozen other higher-paying jobs that would offer him basically the same shot in politics. As has been pointed out, it is possible to ascribe impure motives to any decision. But Occam’s Razor certainly does not suggest that this one was about money or power.
There’s definitely nothing wrong with it but I distinctly remember unprecedented numbers of new young formerly apathetic but now excited voters getting all fired up in '00 and '04. They didn’t actually accomplish anything and the Florida Blue-hairs Hulk smashed 'em. New, excited young voters are good at making an album go gold or making a movie a blockbuster but they’re not so good at electing presidents.
She didn’t run because she felt she owed it to New York to complete her initial senatorial term. There was a strategic element as well. Obviously she had presidential ambitions, but there was a general feeling that her senate campaign was just a stepping stone at the expense of New Yorkers.
Obama was tagged for the presidency at the same time he ran for the Senate. But for some reason, whether it was sexism or likability the public never once challenged his senatorial bid as self serving.
I personally think she was trying to put as many years as she could between her and the last time she lived in the White House. I think there is an air of entitlement that she unconsciously lets out, and it turns people off. I doubt if she loses bad to Obama that we’ll see her again in 2016. She’s 60-61 now right?
Of course, a huge difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s senatorial stints is that Obama “moved up” from a state-level legislator to federal – within the same state. Which provides much less of a “self serving” perception than moving residence to a state just to run for office, as attested to by the “carpet-bagger” charge leveled against Clinton.
He was already running for Senator before he came to any national prominence, much less “got tagged for President.” He came to national public attention during his keynote speech at the '04 convention. He was already on the ballot for the IL Senate race at that time, but he was not yet well known nationally. That speech was basically what made him famous and what started the POTUS talk. There was no way anyone would have seen his Senate bid as a stepping stone to the White House before that convention speech.
He also came from the state legislature in Illinois, not from some other state or circumstance. He was not a carpetbagger.