How does Obama inspire you?

[Scott Dolan]

I keep reading this over and over. Not just here, mind you. But even the Grinch Abbey said something recently about Obama being inspiring.

I guess I just don't get it.

So, exactly what is it about his message that inspires you? Is it just the way he delivers it? Because I'm not really hearing much of a difference between his "vision" for the country and Hillary's.

I like the cat, and will vote for him just to bring this bizarre Clinton/Bush dual dynasty to a close, but I'm afraid I don't really find him anymore inspiring than any other politician.

[Jon Abbey]

he seems like a real person, and not a carefully constructed robot designed to win the Presidency.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

I don't think he's really that different than the others. In fact, I'd say he's the best skilled person left in the race when it comes to talking for an hour without actually saying anything.

[jesus marion joseph]

Sad to say, but *not* being a Bush or a Clinton is enough to qualify someone for my vote this year.

BTW, you should catch his wife speaking sometime, Scott. She's an even better speaker than he is.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

I like the cat, and will vote for him . . .

Would that be today, Super Tuesday? Do me a favor, Scott, and let us know if and when you do. As you know, I'm dying to hear that you made it to the polls for a presidential contest and voted for anybody.

When I hear or read what Obama says or writes, I find the finest values of "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" being articulated--despite his tendency to be what he calls "postpartisan." No speechwriter or campaign manager can make a candidate articulate those values so strongly, so eloquently, so consistently over time; they have to be in a candidate's heart. They have to underlie, animate, and drive the candidate's campaign. When that's the case, it's unmistakable.

When I hear or read what Clinton says or writes, I do not find that.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

I keep reading this over and over. Not just here, mind you. But even the Grinch Abbey said something recently about Obama being inspiring.

I guess I just don't get it.

So, exactly what is it about his message that inspires you? Is it just the way he delivers it? Because I'm not really hearing much of a difference between his "vision" for the country and Hillary's.

I like the cat, and will vote for him just to bring this bizarre Clinton/Bush dual dynasty to a close, but I'm afraid I don't really find him anymore inspiring than any other politician.

I am with you, Scottie. Obama is a cipher, and deliberately so. He wants people to find in him what they are looking for. It seems to be working.

He is stealing from both Reagan's and Bill Clinton's playbook.

The "Hope" ("Morning in America") part comes from Reagan.

The "triangulation" comes from Clinton, in which he tries to parse the political mood and tack right down the middle. You can see that in his health care program, which would be unlikely to draw much fire from the medical community.

Just like Bill Clinton ran as the "center" alternative to left wing Mario Cuomo (who didn't run as anticipated). Obama is running as the non-Clinton -- someone who would be less likely to spark partisan entrenchment and thus more likely to get through a moderate agenda.

As for his oratory, I don't hear much -- just mostly pablum.

That said, I don't think he is as disengenuous as Clinton; I like most of his policy positions (excepting his health care proposal), and I will vote for him today as well.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by jesus marion joseph

BTW, you should catch his wife speaking sometime, Scott. She's an even better speaker than he is.

I have. She's very engaging.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by rollhead

I am with you, Scottie. Obama is a cipher, and deliberately so. He wants people to find in him what they are looking for. It seems to be working.

He is stealing from both Reagan's and Bill Clinton's playbook.

The "Morning in America," part comes from Reagan.

The "triangulation" comes from Clinton, in which he tries to parse the political mood and tack right down the middle. You can see that in his health care program, which would be unlikely to draw much fire from the medical community.

Just like Bill Clinton ran as the "center" alternative to left wing Mario Cuomo (who didn't run as anticipated). Obama is running as the non-Clinton -- someone who would be less likely to spark partisan entrenchment and thus more likely to get through a moderate agenda.

As for his oratory, I don't hear much -- just mostly pablum.

That said, I don't think he is as disengenuous as Clinton; I like most of his policy positions (excepting his health care proposal), and I will vote or him today as well.

Well said.

[steve(thelil)]

I worked in government for many years and the brightest, most effective civil servant I ever worked with (Rollie...I'm talking about J. McMan....) made what I thought was a great observation about elected officials: Even the brightest, most honest and most capable politicians focus on appealing to and/or helping the people they perceive to be their constituency rather than trying to get people to support what is for the greater common good.


To me, Obama's campaign doesn't appear to be targeting a specific constituency by saying what they want to hear. I may be projecting my hopes on him to a certain extent, but he seems to be trying to appeal to people's intelligence and their more honorable values, rather than appealing to their fears and ignorance.

In a country that has never had a Black, Jewish or female president, there is also something inspirational about a black man with a foreign sounding name being able to make a strong showing in the presidential race.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by rollhead

As for his oratory, I don't hear much -- just mostly pablum.

You can't have heard or read much of it, then! If anyone else's oratory has ever moved you, some of his would as well.

[walto]

I agree with Rollie, thelil, and bluenoter. The U.S. presidency is to a large extent a ceremonial office. Sometimes it's more important to inspire. He's very good at that--much better than HRC. As good as Reagan, I think.

Again, though, I think there's a bit of Eddie Haskell in there. He's pretty clever: not not as innocent as you might at first think.

[steve(thelil)]

Originally Posted by walto

I agree with Rollie, thelil, and bluenoter. The U.S. presidency is to a large extent a ceremonial office. Sometimes it's more important to inspire. He's very good at that--much better than HRC. As good as Reagan, I think.

Again, though, I think there's a bit of Eddie Haskell in there. He's pretty clever: not not as innocent as you might at first think.

I would vote for Eddie. And by the way Walto, you look lovely today in that outfit.

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by steve(thelil)

In a country that has never had a Black, Jewish or female president, there is also something inspirational about a black man with a foreign sounding name being able to make a strong showing in the presidential race.

I wonder how much this plays into the general mindset of America.

What I mean is, does it just somehow seem "cool" that we could elect our first black President? I wonder how much it clouds the senses, if it does at all.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

What I mean is, does it just somehow seem "cool" that we could elect our first black President?

Jackson, Sharpton & Co. wouldn't think it was cool. Kind of hard to convince people that blacks can't get a seat at the table when sitting at the head of the table is a black man.

[steve(thelil)]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

I wonder how much this plays into the general mindset of America.

What I mean is, does it just somehow seem "cool" that we could elect our first black President? I wonder how much it clouds the senses, if it does at all.

If it does happen, I think it means more than just "seeming cool". I think it would demonstrate both the growth of the populace and Obama's appeal and achievement.

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Conservatives who purport to dislike liberal whites for insincerity regarding the status of minorities really dislike them for advocating on behalf of minorities. This should transparent to all, even to the most insincere of narrow minded douchebags who think they're unusually clever for narrow minded douchebags.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by rollhead

The "Hope" ("Morning in America") part comes from Reagan.

Ronald Reagan did not invent "hope." Why not look to FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK, Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, or whomever else you like?

Originally Posted by rollhead

The "triangulation" comes from Clinton, in which he tries to parse the political mood and tack right down the middle.

Obama: Most Liberal Senator In 2007

By Brian Friel, Richard E. Cohen and Kirk Victor, National Journal (authoritative, nonpartisan, and not to be confused with the National Review)
Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.

In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10. "The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter," said Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist.

But differences define campaigns. The yeas and nays matter. And in a Senate in which party-line votes are the rule, the rare exceptions help to show how two senators who seemed like ideological twins in 2007 were not actually identical. Obama and Clinton were more like fraternal policy twins, NJ's vote ratings show. . . .

http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by bluenoter

You can't have heard or read much of it, then! If anyone else's oratory has ever moved you, some of his would as well.

[Uli]

Originally Posted by bluenoter

Obama: Most Liberal Senator In 2007



Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

That's inspiring for me.

What's more important is that he seems to inspire the young people.

[rollhead]

Well, it is interesting that on one of the most important issues to me, it is Obama who is taking the "conservative" position:

February 4, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Clinton, Obama, Insurance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The principal policy division between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama involves health care. It’s a division that can seem technical and obscure — and I’ve read many assertions that only the most wonkish care about the fine print of their proposals.

But as I’ve tried to explain in previous columns, there really is a big difference between the candidates’ approaches. And new research, just released, confirms what I’ve been saying: the difference between the plans could well be the difference between achieving universal health coverage — a key progressive goal — and falling far short.

Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.

Let’s talk about how the plans compare.

Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.

And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.

An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?

To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness.

And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.

Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.

But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

[clinthopson]

I'm longing for a New Deal Democrat and Obama is the closest thing in this election.

[walto]

I mostly agree with Krugman, but I think you also have to factor in that if Clinton gets the nomination, the Repubs are more likely to win the general. (If that's actually true.) Then, you don't get any health care improvements.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Obama's voice has the ring of authenticity to me, a man speaking his mind rather than his crafted positions, and I base this on having read his first book as well as keeping up with his current campaign. I like that his conservative colleagues on the Harvard Law Review admired his ability to reconcile opposing positions, and I see him employing those skills now. And so I voted for him two weeks ago (over 50% of Sonoma County voters use absentee ballots!), the first primary I've voted in for many years, not counting a couple of write-ins for Louis Jordan.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by walto

I mostly agree with Krugman, but I think you also have to factor in that if Clinton gets the nomination, the Repubs are more likely to win the general. (If that's actually true.) Then, you don't get any health care improvements.

Thank you, walto. I needed that. Like I said, this is a HARD decision.

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

not counting a couple of write-ins for Louis Jordan.

Nice option to consider!

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Obama says his focus is on reducing health care costs, and he doesn't want people to be put in the position of being fined for not getting health care they can't afford, a situation he says already exists in Massachusetts.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/pol...erts.obama.cnn

[groover]

If Bush was the candidate most people would rather have a beer with, then Obama is the candidate most people would want to smoke an O-bomber with. At least he doesn't hedge on his history with illegal drugs.

Actually, Bush would probably be a riot to see stoned, also.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Obama doesn't inspire me. But that might be because I'm a middle aged cynic.

As rollhead said, he's a cipher.

Saying all of that I'd like to see him win because he would surmount the greatest hurdle a person can have, in this country, to become president. It would make me feel for the first time that me, and people like myself are Americans.

[crawjo]

Obama is a fantastic speaker, and he seems like a thoughtful human being. That he is able to inspire people is extremely important right now, given the level of disillusionment.

I don't buy at all the idea that Obama lacks substance himself. I think the substance gets overshadowed by the rhetoric because his rhetoric is so good. He's not as comfortable talking about the nuts and bolts of policies as Clinton is, but I don't think that's particularly important. The Democrats have been losing elections with their stunning ability to bore everyone with a barrage of policy details. Obama has found, I think, the right balance in the way he presents himself and his candidacy.

Also if Hillary wins the nomination the Republicans will maintain control of the White House. Book it.

[Surfer]

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

And so I voted for him two weeks ago (over 50% of Sonoma County voters use absentee ballots!),

I voted for Obama two weeks ago too. Absentee is the way to go, I dont ever think I'll go to another polling station again.

[Surfer]

Originally Posted by groover

Actually, Bush would probably be a riot to see stoned, also.

I have, and he is.

[walto]

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

Obama says his focus is on reducing health care costs, and he doesn't want people to be put in the position of being fined for not getting health care they can't afford, a situation he says already exists in Massachusetts.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/pol...erts.obama.cnn

Yeah, as I said before, it's a mostly imaginary plan, with big adverse selection problems. It's pretty simple: You can't have universal health care unless you have universal health care.