Oh wait... ;-)

Obama aides, however, say their approach will work because most voters are looking not for a new vision for expanding health care but rather for a reformed political system such as the one Obama calls for, one that would solve problems rather than resort to bickering.

The only, ONLY people who think that way are the Beltway media like David "Pearl Clutcher" Broder. No one who actually needs healthcare is sitting around, hacking up a lung in an emergency room, thinking, "Golly gee! I sure hope Obama can stop the partisan bickering in Washington!"

No, that person is thinking, "Why the h**l can't I afford my doctor bills?" In other words, that person wants to EXPAND HEALTH CARE.

I have always found this message to be funny.  Imagine they are all getting along because no one is working on any legislation.  Reminds me of team building exercises we were forced to have at work.  BBQ anyone?  We will send them all home with a book of affirmations and they will have to take turns reading one at all of their meetings.
Do you think they will partner up, one will put on a blind fold, and the other has to give instructions on how to move around (with the hope of finding the bathroom)?

He has not dissented from party orthodoxy in the way Bill Clinton did on the way to the presidency in 1992

So he has been pretty much a standard Democrat.  This is now a flaw?  

Perhaps he should run to the Right ala Bill Clinton?  

All Democrats want to change health care.  The degree change may be argue but the desire is certainly there.  

......a reformed political system such as the one Obama calls for, one that would solve problems rather than resort to bickering.

i think the logic behind this goes something like this: if we can reform the political system, so everyone is playing nice and being rational, then the problems we face, such as expanding health care to cover the entire population, will be more amicably and quickly resolved.

that's my guess, anyway. this premise rests on a couple of questionable assumptions:

1. the person in question (sen. obama) can, by shear force of his dynamic personality, bring everyone involved together in one, big, happy lovefest.

2. everyone in congress really, really, really wants to play nice, and is just sitting there, waiting for that dynamic personality to come along and get the process started.

as for 2, i think this is, at best, wishful thinking, at worst delusional.

however, this does explain, in a nutshell, his inability to clearly articulate what, aside from his wonderfulness, he thinks is important to the american people, and how he intends to accomplish it.

It's the policy, that's what people will vote for.  When there is little difference between candidates, and frankly that was the case on trade, jobs in '04, and it's looking fairly similar now, then it turns into that 50-50 national split because there is no real choice.

But the irony is that it is precisely on the issue of his potential clout and efficacy that he is almost certain to fail. His "new politics" is by now a transparent joke. His "unity" is a chimera, given that he and his campaign have engendered such deep division and resentment even within the Democratic Party. And he is now clearly perceived as far out-of-touch by vast segments of the voting public. I simply don't see how he recovers from those defects, because they go the very core of who he is as a person and a politician.

Obama is not a politician who will ever be able to develop clout and real political clout over the long run. If he were to become President, his fate seems quite certain: he will ride a good Democratic brand and a honeymoon period into some decent popularity ratings for a time, and then he will return to his natural, and quite low, level, where his current strong constituencies remain loyal to him, and all others turn against him.

Yes, with his vast public policy experience, he will manage the government machine and improve it.  No direction, just improvement in how it is managed.  Of course all the academics who will run the administration have great theories.  

The two key differences was that Bush was the choice of the party establishment before the primaries began, and there was at least some "meaning" to the message -- "change the process" is about as completely meaningless as you can get.

Barack Obama is the political equivalent of "Seinfeld"-- "a candidate about nothing"

But if Obama had embraced universal healthcare, General Electric wouldn't have embraced him.

Protecting profits at GE Healthcare was the price Obama paid for GE's support.  Obama was willing to sell out Democrats on healthcare to get better press coverage.

"His message of uniting people and trying to do something new was apparent from the beginning, and so he sort of had me at hello," said University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economic adviser.

Well, it takes more than HELLO to unite ME!

and we all know how Goolsbee did with his mission to our neighbors to the north.

I want someone who knows what is right and who will fight for it as long and as hard and as smart as necessary to accomplish the most good - and I do not want that person to start from a position of compromise.  Nor do I want someone who believes that softening up the opposition requires bad-mouthing one's allies.  I don't want someone to talk down to me in an effort to help me understand the finer points of the opposition.  

There are millions of us who feel this way, who know without a doubt that Obama is not what we need now - maybe ever.  And if we get him - by some fluke - Jimmy Carter will lose his place as the most ineffective president in modern times, and the revolution that will run through Congress in 2010 will make the 1994 debacle pale in comparison.

Paraphrasing the Obama campaign;

'We do not want to fight the old battles and want bipartisanship'

Actually they are the ones stuck in the 90's reference, not the electorate.  Speaking for myself, I am looking for someone who can fix:

Judicial appointees (and legislation) that are anti-consumer and pro business
Health Care cost fiasco
Business and media consolidation
Meltdown in financial markets
Neglect of infrastructure to build more prisons
Selling of the commons to the highest bidder
Employing mercenaries beyond the law in war zones
ETC.

I can tell you on H-1B, in spite of dozens and dozens of credible studies, including the GAO itself, I have seen Obama literally cite corporate lobbyist propaganda on it.  Now that's unreal because his own colleague, Dick Durbin, introduced a bill, S.1035 to reform this program and guess who refuses to co-sponsor it?  Ya got it, Obama!

(Hillary has not either which also says something about the power of corporate lobbyists, NASSCOM).  

Heather Higginbottom, who runs Obama's policy office at the campaign's Chicago headquarters, cited education as one area in which Obama offers ideas that are not traditionally Democratic, arguing that the problem is not all about schools or funding, but about parents who let their children watch too much television.

"I think a new vision for expanding health care is exactly what Democrats are looking for."

This is not in defence of Obama or against HRC.  Changing healthcare funding in the US will not solve the crisis.  It will dig a deeper whole that will draw a huge perrcentage of taxpayer money, and ultimately (not too far down the road) go broke and then they will say, "See, told you 'socialist' healthcare doesn't work here!".  Back to the past.

The US is the only country in the industrial world where healthcare and health insurances are a lucrative for-profit business.  Most hospitals and clinics have shareholders and financial boards, like GM and GE.  And most physicians are practicing for the standard of living that comes with the job, not the service.  Then there is the huge multi-billion malpractice insurance industry.  And 80+% of healthcare dollars spent in the last 6 months of life "'cause we really love grandma."  While actual outcome measures for major diseases are among the worst among non-third world nations. I can go on and on; if you need to be suicidally depressed any further, just page trough the last few issues of the journal Health Affairs.  

You cannot just fix the payor mix and pretend its over.  Many, many issues have to be resolved before the funding issue will actually work.  It is like trying to help your alcoholic IV-drug user homeless cousin, and just giving him lots of pocket money and a nice apartment.  He will flush the cash down the loo in a few days.

No, the change man does not want to detail his policies at all.

Coal is Obama's idea of alternative energy.  There is nothing green about him.

His economic advisers want to privatize social security.

Good governance for him is the Chicago way of corruption.

May God save us all.