[Xantar]

Well, not that anything I say will change your opinion on anything, but hell, we haven't done this in a long time.

Originally Posted by Professor S

This is why there is a % of disenfranchised Repuiblicans who support Obama, even though if you take the time to dig up his record, and you have to dig becuase no media outlet will challnge Obama on it, he disagrees with just about everything Republicans and even right leaning moderates believe in.

As you yourself have stated, Obama's positions on pretty much every issue are easy enough to find. Comparison charts between him and McCain (and with Hillary back in the day) are published regularly in magazines and newspapers. The reason he doesn't get into specific details about his policies when talking to a hundred thousand people is that you can't do it in front of such a big crowd. He does in fact get into a lot of detail when he's talking at small town halls, and reporters have even noted this. But the media finds that footage of him at a stadium draws bigger ratings than when he's in someone's living room (I have always said, by the way, that I think the media is not liberal so much as lazy and sensationalistic).

1) In state senate he voted that if a late term abortion fails, meaning the child is alive outside of the womb, the doctor can kill it. Honeslty, supporting late term abortion was bad enough. Obama stated that he voted against it because it called a phetus a child... well DUH, its alive outside of the womb, that is the very definition of a human. His vote stated that human life is based on whether or not we intended it to live, not whether or not the child is ALIVE.

Nothing I'm really going to respond to here. You either agree with his stance or you don't, and the thing to keep in mind is that the President isn't going to sway abortion policies all that much one way or the other. That stuff is now the province of state legislatures and the Supreme Court. In all his eight years, the only thing George W. Bush can claim to have done for pro-lifers is appointed enough Supreme Court Justices to ban intact dilation and extraction (what politicians call "partial birth abortion"). That may get a lot of people on both sides of the debate riled up, but the truth is that procedure only takes up a tenth of a percent of all abortions. The overall issue remains unchanged.

I will point out, by the way, that during the primaries, Obama got a lot of flack from pro-choice groups for his "present" votes on a lot of bills that would have restricted abortions (he was actually employing a parliamentary trick, but that's hard to explain).

2) Obama has refused to change is opinion on the troop surge in Iraq and its success, even though most objective observation and the death counts have proven it to be a success. Regardless of a change in policy, I do not trust someone who can not admit to facts.

We don't really know that the surge has worked. There are way too many factors to know that. The decrease in violence may have happened because of the Sunni Enlightenment or because every neighborhood in Iraq has been ethnically cleansed and there's just not much killing left to be done. Meantime, 40% of Iraqis still think that attacks on U.S. troops is acceptable and 60% want the troops to leave.

In any case, Obama didn't oppose the surge because he thought it wouldn't work militarily. He said at the time that the important thing was for political objectives to be met. It's highly debatable whether Iraq has made any political progress, and it's even more debatable whether that progress was due to the surge. Given that viewpoint, he would still oppose the surge because the facts he is concerned with haven't convinced him otherwise. Obama has also said that the cost of the war in Iraq is damaging our economy and that he doesn't believe it's worth it. Of course you may disagree with him, but that's a legitimate view held by a large segment of Americans.

3) On more than one occassion Obama has essentially repeated ideals strait from the Communist Manifesto. In a fundraiser(sp?) in San Fran he stated that some people who are disenfranchised cling to Religion and guns to fill the void, whixch is basically a rewording of the Marxist belief that Religion is the opiate of the masses and sole intent was to keep the poor from rising up.

If you actually read the quote, he was making the political observation that many voters believe the government isn't going to do anything for them economically, so they vote based on social issues because when it comes to their pocketbooks, both parties aren't going to make any difference. That's not Marxism. It's pretty mainstream, actually. The 2004 election depended on this idea. Obama himself is very devoutly religious — so much so that he's making a lot of liberals uncomfortable (you should have seen what was going on at DailyKos when he addressed a Christian forum). I suppose if you believe his faith is all an act then you can also believe that he really does have that much contempt for religion. I find that hard to believe given how fluently he quotes scripture and his stated support for church based organizations (also an issue that makes lefties squirm).

It's also worth noting that at the time, the vast majority of Americans polled said they agreed with Obama. This included most of the working-class people he was actually talking about.

At Wesleyan's graduation he stated that the individual cannot succeed without the collective, and talked about a belief in national service beyond the military and "asking citizens to serve", whatever that means, but Obama certainly won't tell you and no one will ask him to clarify.

He has said that he wants to expand the Peace Corps and the Foreign Service and that he will make college scholarships available to those who pledge to serve in those capacities.

4) Obamanomics - His tax policy would cripple small businesses and single-proprietor businesses, raising many of their tax burdens as much as 25% in cases, once ALL the taxes, increases in social security payments and other federally mandated employee benefits are raised. Sound all well and good, but Obama tends to view the world through the leftist view that actions don't have unintended results. When you hurt the small business owner, you hurt American because small businesses employ the vast majority of people in America. When taxes are raised on them, they don't pay the taxes, they hide the money in trusts and other shelters instead of putting money back into their business, and their employees, and growing the economy.

Unfortunately, we don't have much choice in the matter. Our national debt is so huge now that it's fueling inflation. The government essentially has to print more money in order to pay the interest on its debts (incidentally, the national debt isn't $1 trillion. It's more like $8 trillion). Either our economy is going to decline because foreign investors start calling in their debts or it's going to decline because of a tax hike. I prefer the latter because it does increase revenue (you once showed me some IRS numbers which back that up) and that money will at least be spent on the U.S.

Tax cuts do not pay for themselves. The Reagan years proved it and the Bush years proved it again. Even if both administrations hadn't drastically increased government spending, their tax cuts would have widened the budget deficit. McCain wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent (which is a reversal of his previous position, incidentally), thus guaranteeing even more debt for us (don't take my word for it. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said so). Given this, it's interesting that McCain is the one who has said he will balance the budget while Obama has said he can't make such a promise, even though Obama's economic plan is far more likely to make progress towards that goal (I think he's right to say the budget won't be balanced by the end of his first time, though).

5) Obama clims to be a uniter, but has proven to only want to unite those that do what he thinks. The National Journal (non-partisan) analyzed his voting record and showed it to be the most liberal in all of Congress, voting 97% the party line. But he tends in ignore his voting record in his speeches, and when he taks about his experience, he talks about being a community organizer on Chicago, whatever that means.

You ought to go out and meet some community organizers. They do a lot of good work, and they're not necessarily liberals. And they also work hard and don't make a lot of money. It really is worth noting the opportunities Obama gave up in order to do that work. He was a black man at the top of his law class and editor of the Harvard Law Review. I work in the legal field, and I know that a person like that would have been fighting off job offers for positions starting at $200,000 as soon as he graduated. Instead, he went to work as a community organizer and he only paid off his student loan debts a few years ago.

I personally don't think Obama is all that far to the left, especially compared to the other Democratic candidates he was running against at the time. Remember John Edwards, Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich? Anyway, Obama's claim to being a uniter is not that he hews to the political center but that he takes traditional Democratic positions and makes them less scary to independent and right-leaning voters. His stance on global warming is one example. He frames it as an issue not just of the environment but also of energy independence (we no longer have to bow to the whims of unstable Middle East regimes), national security (ditto) and the economy (the American economy does best when it is inventing new technologies, and since we're no longer the computer capital of the world, we need a new frontier). I am fully aware that John McCain supports a number of initiatives addressing global warming, too, but he doesn't frame it in the broad way that Obama does.

If you want to talk about an issue they really disagree on, let's take a look at taxes. Obama's insight is that most Americans don't really hate taxes that much. What they hate is wasted tax money. Obama was able to oppose the gas tax holiday and win people over to his side by showing that the gas tax is actually one of the better spent items in the government budget: it goes directly to road maintenance and cannot be spent on other items like a bridge to nowhere.

But what bugs me the most is that he looks like someone who is trying to get elected by pretending to support certain views, and once he is elected he can follow another agenda.

I'm surprised at your naivete. No presidential candidate does exactly what he promised in his campaign. We're lucky if he attempts to keep half of his promises. Reagan portrayed himself as a friend of fundamentalist Christians but ended up doing absolutely nothing to further their cause. Ditto for George W. Bush. As for Clinton...do we really need to get into how many campaign promises he broke?

I get irritated by all the studies showing that voters make their presidential choice at a gut level rather than actually examining political positions, but there is some rationality to their method. Presidential candidates are expected to promise the moon during their campaigns, and even Obama and McCain can't abstain from unrealistic promises. The political reality is that even if Obama means everything he says on every issue, he's not going to get it all. Neither is John McCain. And if they're as wise as I think they both are, they won't even try. Overreaching when you get into office leads to stuff like the Clintons' failed health care reform.

The character of a candidate and the way he approaches issues does matter. George W. Bush's biggest problem was not that he was a conservative (or neo-conservative) but that he based his hiring decisions on loyalty rather than competence (this is also why I eventually opposed Hillary) and was intellectually incurious. During this campaign, we find that Obama takes very nuanced positions that require paragraphs to explain and that his campaign machine runs like clockwork. He also surrounds himself with advisors from the academic world (I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing. I'm just saying that gives you a good idea of how he thinks). McCain has proven to be terrible at being a frontrunner and is only really strong when he's playing guerilla warfare. And given his reversals on the Bush tax cuts and immigration policy and his hugely deceptive ad blaming high gas prices on Obama (even conservative columnists thought that was false), I don't really hold McCain to be as much of a straight talker as he claims to be.

Anyway, I've talked long enough, and I know you've got a huge response to this post. To tell the truth, though, I'm too busy to get into a long debate with you. You can say whatever you want, and the chances are I'm not going to respond. All I wanted to do was lay out an argument for my side with more competence than I was seeing in this thread.