Yeah I was for Hilary.  I consider myself an independent.  Don't agree that you should always automatically vote by party designation.  As a male I wanted very much to see a woman as president.  I feel that a woman's time had come and I just feel woman would be better at being diplomats then men. Don't get me wrong the woman had to be a special person like Hilary.   I think Hilary was that type of person and she was very sincere throughout her campaign.  I did not see her changing her mind like I see Obama doing.    I feel Obama is overly ambitious and basically just wants to be elected for the sake of saying I was the first black president.  

Can't say that I find this statement to be reassuring about the direction of the Democratic Party:

A liberal opponent of the Senate wiretapping bill virtually wept with joy when Barack deserted the cause and voted with the law-and-order folk.

Take a lesson from the residents of Unity, Hillary fans. Everybody has to do their part. Sometimes it's sleeping through Election Day..........

Clinton would not be going after Joshua Generation youth.  She actually had a universal health care plan.  She's not wishy-washy on social security - after the senate defeated Bush's social security plan and he mentioned it in a State of the Union, she was the first to stand and clap and lead the cheering.

Now, we don't see any of that anymore.  None of it.  Now, it is, "I am your standard, run of the mill, centerist democrat."  That is what will get someone elected in the general election.

That is why Clinton would have won.

But not this year.  They can threaten and hold their breath 'til they're blue in the face, it's still not going to make me vote for an inexperienced candidate with no inclination or ability to push an agenda, never mind a principled one.

The best realistic argument I've seen for voting for Obama is that on the issues, he'll be marginally better than the other guy.

. . You'd like to think that after 17 months of angst over its presidential nomination, the Democrats would not wind up with the exact same candidate they started out with, except for a different gender and a higher quotient of panache.

I never bought into Obama's 'I'm so different from the rest' schtick although I started out supporting him thinking he was a true progressive. And I was never so much a Hillary supporter as much as I became a Hillary defender after seeing how unfairly she was being treated.

Should we really be surprised that Obama has turned out to be just like the Clintons, insofar as he will do what it takes to win? Would we really have him do something different, like lose?

Standing against the liberal majority on the death penalty took some courage, if not a ton of it. Obama expanded the death penalty in Illinois, so agreeing with the Court would've actually represented a flip-flop, would it not? So on that point Obama was simply consistent in his views.

On the gun case, Obama made it clear that his reading of the Court's decision conformed with his own belief, that the individual's right to bear arms is in the Constitution, but that 'sensible' regulation is still possible. He seemed to be saying that cities simply had to be more careful in crafting their gun laws; by no means did he depart from his previously held view that guns can be regulated within Constitutional bounds.

That Collins criticized Obama for his opting out of public financing is kinda funny considering that Obama's stance is new. After all, he's the first candidate in how long to not take public dollars and funnel the rest through the national party or 527's? That is a new way of doing things, no?

Finally, the FISA 'controversy' is anything but. Obama has made it clear that he wants to be sure that there are protections against a rogue administration deciding willy-nilly that they are going to spy on Americans. If Olbermann and Dean are right that the 'compromise' legislation does not preclude future criminal trials, then Obama can still pursue the crimes of Bush & Rove next year and into the future.

All that said, it's likely that we'll see more of this type of 'Why didn't he just let Hillary have it if he was gonna do it this way' musings.

While Obama is clearly trying to heal the Obama/Clinton divide, the press seems intent on bringing it back. There can only be one reason, they (media) don't want her as VEEP.

Not many serious observers took the O=JFK comparison too literally, any more than people in the 70s went overboard with the absurd notion that Gov Jimmy Carter was "the South's JFK" (Time Magazine).  Though it didn't hurt Jimmy obviously in the getting elected part.  

There are some surface similarities besides the oratorical skills though, which are fundamentally important going forward to Nov -- a roughly similar political ability or at least potential (O) to appeal to both the liberal and moderate wings of the party and to energize voters with their personal charm.

Like O today, Kennedy in 60 didn't offer voters a "pure progressive" (back then, he proudly called himself a liberal) posture, especially with his tough anticommunist stance -- and had a young Al Gore been foresighted enough to invent the internets back then, no doubt many clueless folks in the progosphere of 1960 would have gone nuts denouncing JFK for sounding just like a Repub.

Something like that did happen though among some on the lefty-lib side -- so much so that Kennedy's aide Arthur Schlesinger had to quickly prepare a book for publication carefully explaining to the slower learners just how Kennedy was different from Nixon.  Amazing but true.