tune in tonight to Larry King Live on CNN.
Sen. Barack Obama will be on tonight. He has my full support. Does he have faults? Doesn't everyone?
But this man fires me up when it comes to the future our party!!
If he runs, as some close to him are suggesting he will, Hillary stands to lose the most.
Therefore...
He will be unelectable when the Clintons and their ilk get done with him. Hillary wants it; for that reason, he won't run; he'll be her running mate - deals being hashed out right now, I bet.
I'm backing Obama. Hillary will just need to bite the bullet and realize she missed her chance. But Obama, I pray and hope, will move the democratic party back to where it needs to be.
conservative supports BO:
October 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Run, Barack, Run
By DAVID BROOKS
Springfield, Illinois
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Second, he should run because of his age. Obama’s inexperience is his most obvious shortcoming. Over the next four years, the world could face a genocidal civil war in Iraq, a wave of nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism and a demagogues’ revolt against globalization. Do we really want a forty-something in the White House?
And yet in his new book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama makes a strong counterargument. He notes that it’s time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday, that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.
Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world.
“Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality,” he writes in his book. He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.
He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of Time counted 50 instances of extremely judicious on-the-one-hand-on the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems like the guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.
And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a president who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.
During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power, not conversation. He pointed out that he’d risen from nothing to national prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation.
The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview. At least in the way he conceptualizes the world, he is not an orthodox liberal. In the book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social mobility. The contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.
He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.
The chief problem in his book is that after launching off on some interesting description of a problem, he will settle back, when it comes time to make a policy suggestion, into a familiar and small-bore Democratic proposal. I’d give him an A for conception but a B-minus for policy creativity.
Obama, who is nothing if not honest about himself, is aware of the problem, and has various explanations for it. And what matters at this point is not his platform, but the play of his mind. He is one of those progressives, like Gordon Brown in Britain, who is thinking about the challenges of globalization outside the normal clichés.
Coming from my own perspective, I should note that I disagree with many of Obama’s notions and could well end up agreeing more with one of his opponents. But anyone who’s observed him closely can see that Obama is a new kind of politician. As Klein once observed, he’s that rarest of creatures: a megahyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype.
It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president.
===================
You can bet $1000 that Rove and Mehlman already have this guy targeted for swift-boating and vicious slime jobs.
Barack Obama has an unparalleled oratorical ability to take liberal ideas, and communicate them in a way that the unsophisticated conservative listener thinks he agrees with them.
And not only that Oprah is supporting him. So he is a shoo in and Oprah for
VP. Damn, wished I could learn to shed tears at the right time and make her
kinda money. Is America great or what? Oh, I forgot, blacks are the disadvantaged,
well some.
How can Obama have faults? Don't you have to have positions on issues to have faults? The man stands for nada...
Obama/Hillary=Landslide Repub. victory, this country is not ready for a minority or a female president.
I see your Obama with Robert Kennedy Jr.
I think it is you who is not ready.
There are plenty of minority and/or women who could be president.
I, too, would like a non-baby boomer to run and win. MAYBE then we could do something about Social Security.
I think I'm gonna get Obama's book.
I still think he'll be Hillary's running mate; no way they go mano a femano.
I like this cat too, but I'm sure he'll run for president, win, and then just become one of "them". I have no faith in our elected officials any longer and only look out for myself now.........sue me.
Yup.
The GOP doesn't have ANYONE who could even touch this guy in terms of class. I would love to be proved wrong about that.
The subpoena is in the mail...
Seriously, I don't quite share your cynicism. There are good people in politics. What makes it politics is that good people have to sometimes achieve less-than-optimal solutions because less-than-optimal is sometimes the only way to do things.
I don't know whether Obama has what it takes, but it all, at least the guy is articulate, which is a big negative for many red-staters. They don't like their leaders too articulate, not too smart, they like them dumb, simplistic, down-home, tongue-tied like dubya (and like themselves).
Last edited by boutons_; 10-20-2006 at 09:23 AM.
When you distrust the gubmint; it's reassuring to be pretty sure you're smarter than the top banana.
I like the guy immensely. If and when he were to ever entertain the idea of running for the WH, I would do serious research into his stance on key issues.
As it stands, he seems to be very common-sense oriented, which by political standard is a real exception. Disagreeing with a candidate on some hot-button issue hasnt deterred me from casting my vote in their favor before, and it certainly wouldnt in this man's case.
Scary but true. It gives sheeple the ludicrous idea that they in fact could probably do better.
I just don't get it, Bush is dumb, he cant speak, he misspeaks, he is a
cowboy......but he causes all the problems in the world.
How does he do all those negative things. And he keeps beating
the dimms at the voting booth. And comes up with all the plans to
stymie all the dimms plans.....oh, I forgot you got to have a plan to be
stymied.
His new book is a great inspiration and I've bought copies for a few young family members. Very impressive.
Colin Powell could give him a run. Too bad he didn't run in '00 or '04. The only decent guy in the whole administration of Bush the Lesser, who for his trouble got used, abused, and spit out by Buschencrofeld.
Dumb people can cause problems, too. Failure to listen is a "dumb" trait, and the cause of most of the problems brought about by this administration.
Obama may be the future, future, but Gen. Wesley Clark is the immediate future...(you just don't know it yet, but you will)...
Madonna agrees with you.Obama may be the future, future, but Gen. Wesley Clark is the immediate future...(you just don't know it yet, but you will)...
I'd vote for Obama before I'd vote for Clark.
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