In a continuation of his move to the Center/Right Barack Obama's campaign announced today that he'll be giving his acceptance speech outdoors, in Minneapolis, during the Republican National Convention.

It was filled with vicious, potty-mouthed little naifs who insisted, in literal terms and in so many words, that Obama can do no wrong and whatever he does is fine by them.

I remember such rhetoric -- though frankly more artfully expressed -- in 2001-2004, when the subject of said adoration was George W. Bush. It was wrong and dangerous then, and it's wrong and dangerous now.

The last post was on Sen Church vs Sen Obama.  A negative post against Obama
The emphasis added was the following:
   

Obama's actions can not be excused on this matter. He has failed miserably.

Is this not enough to question whether one should support Obama?   To rationalize and say well he is the only democrat nominee we got and I wish there was another one and yes he is better than McCain, is like saying I picking the better of two evils.  Every day I read more negative things about Obama than positive things as they are posted here on TL.  Maybe he will not be who the delegates vote for at the convention if this trend continues.

Now just withing the next day we have another negative post on Obama.  You keep making my point.

Your comment, "Thank Gawd for George Bush should be the Dem pol motto. Without him they would be nowhere" - reminds me of the Lenny Bruce "Masked Man" routine - wherein the Lone Ranger attributes the existence of his career to the thriving of pestilence and disease.

And as a Hillary supporter who has been trying to warn people that he is nothing different and that he will not be any sort of bastion of progressive ideals, all I can say is "Suckers!" and "I told you so." THIS is what happens when you actually believe a politician to be hope and change when he has no record to back it up. He said it, you believed it without any sort of proof. Obama has no core principles, no core ideology, to which he is wedded. Everything is seen as a matter of political expedience ONLY, there is nothing that he will stand for because it is right, and only because it is right. Now we will all suffer the consequences.

I agree that this one will be tough for Obama to lose because it is a Dem year and McCain is running a pathetic campaign, but I, for one, am not going to help McCain-lite get to the White House. He will have to do it without me.

Northern NJ location, mid-week, 3 guys and me: small business owner guy, working class guy, retiree in polo shirt guy, and me. All the business owners are hurting big time from the economic downturn and high prices. Retiree is parking his RV in a camping area in eastern PA for the summer instead of doing any traveling in it.

Hardly dispositive, but interesting. Of course, NJ went for Hillary, so maybe people just haven't "come around" yet.

"Caving in" to another party has the clear implication that one is giving up something one very much wants out of fear of consequences.

Yet the deep truth about Obama appears to be that he has never had a firm commitment about any of these issues. Why should he hold firm on FISA, or Iraq, or campaign finance reform, or late term abortion, or NAFTA, when he has never had strong convictions on any of these issues?

The story of Obama's political life is that he doesn't hold any values deeply enough that sharply opposing values offend him. That is the true and inescapable moral to be drawn from his attendance for 20 years at TUCC. Values, for Obama, would appear to be fungible; chips at the poker game of political power.

BTD's recommendation that Obama should hold firm and not cave to the Republicans can at best be understood, therefore, as a strictly political strategy for Obama. Obama is, at base, motivated only by such considerations. If indeed one can make the case to Obama and his campaign that he would be held in higher regard if he seemed to have "firm principles", then I expect that he will suddenly show that he has "firm principles". If that case can't be made to seem compelling, then he won't.

And this really is a way in which I think Obama is unlike any other major Democratic politician I can remember. I'm absolutely sure that Hillary (as Bill before her -- demonstrated by his fighting Newt Gingrich) has very strong basic values that she wants to fight for. She and other Democratic politicians will compromise on some issues, and "act like pols", but they always bear in mind the need to achieve more basic goals. While different politicians reckon the consequences differently, the basic calculation is typically: what do we have to do politically to attain what we most value in terms of policy?

But in Obama, I see nothing like this. Everything appears to be expendable. Political consequences drive every decision. He'll compromise if that would seem to make him more popular. He'll hold firm if that would seem to make him more popular.

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I  suspect that all this worries Mr Obama not at all. The louder the Left complains, the deeper the satisfaction at Obama headquarters.

Can you remember a time in, say the past 100 years, when the American people have rejected a presidential candidate because they thought that he was insufficiently left-wing? As for conservatives, they should be cheering Mr Obama, not complaining.

The Left had hoped that 2008 would be a watershed election, a long-awaited counterblast to the Reagan Revolution of 1980 and Newt Gingrich's Contract with America in 1994. And if there were ever a time when the country seemed ready to move left this was surely it. Democrats have a 20-percentage-point lead in opinion polls; those same polls show that almost fourfifths of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. The Republican Party today has all the appeal of a communicable disease.

And yet, on the issues, as Mr Obama understands, people are not so radical. On domestic prosecution of the War on Terror, on cultural issues such as guns and the death penalty, on religion's role in public life, perhaps even on trade and free markets, there is little evidence that Americans are ready to abandon their beliefs.

This is another example of how smart the Obama campaign is. They understand that the biggest impediment to an Obama presidency is lingering doubt about whether their man is a straight-down-the-middle American. Despite having a couple of bestsellers to his name, he is still something of a blank page to most voters, one on which his opponents are trying to doodle all kinds of unflattering portraits of an extremist.

So he is spending these dog days of summer reassuring interested but nervous voters that he is as American as the Fourth of July. And he is doing something else besides - looking ahead to his possible presidency.

HOWEVER, I don't see ANYTHING new about catering to the fascist defined 'middle', 'bipartisan', 'independent', 'swing' and 'center' ...

BTD has hit upon something many in blog-o-topia have been saying (in my words )

Dems NEED to Fight For Dem values, NOT quiver and snivel and whimper towards a fake ass 'center' defined by the fascists, for the fascists, of the fascists.  

Haven't we had enough of that 'strategy' since 1980?

Obama has too often been, for me, someone whose name I'll check off and NOTHING more. (HRC and Richardson and Edwards ... too)

I've got better things to do than spend money and time on someone selling me out with the promise that they'll take everything off the table once elected ...

oops? did I screw that up?

Where's Howard?

1. Everyone makes a huge deal about Clinton's political success.  But should we really buy that.  He won in 1992 because of the Perot vote and one of his political failures was his inability to secure the Perot populist sentiments for the Democratic party.  I don't think that this was accidental--Clinton was, after all, one of the founders of the DLC and it was the DLC that agitated for far more corporate friendly policies at the risk of losses for working people.  That Clinton showed a remarkable capacity to express empathy (something Obama could do with learning) is one thing.  That his policies or political instincts led that way is another.  From another vantage point, I think that it is undeniable that by the end of his presidency the Democratic party was weaker by most important metrics than it had been at the start of his presidency.  The party had fewer governors, fewer senators, fewer representatives, and I think, fewer mayors.  Why we should look back on this as a golden age I am not sure.  True, had the election not been stolen in 2000 Gore might have been able to recoup this (although having raised Lieberman to the Vice-Presidency would have had its own dangers) but that would have been because of Gore not Clinton.  Nor has there been any evidence that the Clintons' political instincts have changed--as evidenced by Hillary Clinton's vote not only for the war in Iraq but for Lieberman's Iran bill (fool me once...)  The late campaign populism was one thing but why should we take it as more than a temporary strategy.

2. You can of course argue that the weakness of the Party was due to the well-organized republican attack machine of the 90s.  That again is certainly true.  But that the republicans were so well positioned to do so was a result of the only period where Clinton actually governed--1992-1994.  The rest of the time he was trying to prevent the Republicans from governing as they wanted to.  And what did 1992-1994 give us in terms of accomplishments?  Health Care...well, no.  Much else?

3. In fact, it is hard to see what the great accomplishments of the Clinton administration were.  The economy was doing well given the boost from the end of the Cold War and the relatively easy money policies of the Fed.  But there were bubbles and hints of big bubbles to come, inequality was rising I think, financial deregulation proceeded apace, NAFTA was forced down the democrats throats without the necessary labor and environmental protections, and the 1996 Death Penalty and anti-terrrorism act provided a platform for what later became the PATRIOT act.  The ending of "welfare as we know it" was politically popular but pretty punitive on the poor.  There was the balancing of the budget but it was tied to an ideology that made any deficit spending suspect--but clearly some sort of deficit spending (for true public works) is not a bad thing.  Did Rubinomics help the majority of the American people?  But the Dems are now tied into a knot by Clinton ideology.

4. Again part of the argument for calling for Obama to be more like Bill Clinton is that criticizing the Clinton years can look like you are making no distinction with the Bush years.  But that doesn't necessarily follow.  And treating Clinton as a success because of Bush is like treating Warren Burger as a great Chief Justice because he wasn't Rhenquist.

5.  Again, if the comparison is with Bush that is one thing.  But even in foreign affairs the Clinton record isn't so great.  The Bosnia affair looks like it is unraveling,  He was awfully slow on Russia, nor did they ever have a real vision for what the world might look like in a post-Cold war world.

A more apt comparison would have involved a Dem standing strong in the campaign for a principle even in the face of advisors telling him it would hurt politically.

One that comes to mind is Kennedy's decision late in the fall of 60 to phone Mrs King to offer his support and assistance in the effort to get MLK released from that dangerous jail sentence.  He heard the voices telling him it would destroy his chances for winning southern states, but Kennedy went ahead, and his team managed to quietly arrange for flyers to be printed and handed out outside of many black southern churches noting Kennedy's assistance to King. JFK/LBJ also managed to carry enough southern states in the fall to prevail.

Secondly, Clinton was up against a not very popular or well-liked and highly partisan pol in the bomb-throwing Gingrich who was recognized about that time by Bill as his best possible opponent.  The outcome there was easily foreseeable, imo.

It's talk. All talk.

BTD, I can't understand why you appear to refuse to acknowledge the double standard US corporate media applies all the time in virtually every area:

if playing to the base is good for the republican, its bad for the democrat

if flip-flopping is no big deal for the republican, its a major story against the democrat

if going after an opponent's military service is no big deal for the republican, its a major faux pas and completely unacceptable for a democrat.