Obama is Renewing the American Sense of Identity. Unbelievable to Watch

[Driven1]

the very best thing for the true conservative cause is for Obama to win the Presidency - and then for him to stick to his campaign promise to pull out of Iraq immediately.  the ensuing chaos in that region and its affect on oil/energy prices would haunt he and his party for generations to come. 

come 2012, this country would be audibly yearning for a center-right, true conservative President with real leadership experience.  heck, this could even open the door for Ron Paul. 

i say give him 4 years to hang himself.  i think he'll do it within one (if he keeps his campaign promise).  it's just unfortunate that we would have to suffer through the remaining 3 years.

[Driven1]

I am all for having a woman or man, black or white, yellow, green or purple as the next president. Unfortunately, the black man and the white woman currently running doesn't appear to be the best choice in my opinion. Please, call me a racist and sexist because of that.

ok...as much as i strongly dislike the thought of a woman or a black man as President, that PALES IN COMPARISON to the thought of having a purple or green person as President.  that is just unfathomable.  call me a bigot (again...please), but that is just over the top.  we would go from being the most respected nation in the world to being the laughing stock of the universe.

ps - you are racist.

[Jimmy]

i say give him 4 years to hang himself.  i think he'll do it within one (if he keeps his campaign promise).  it's just unfortunate that we would have to suffer through the remaining 3 years.

The real suffering has been the last 7 and and a half years.  Ugh!

But on Obama... I think we all know the difference between campaign rhetoric and actual governing.  His Presidency could turn out to be a pleasant surprise for all of you nay-sayers with such visceral buy's remorse over your current guy.

[Driven1]

i don't have buyer's remorse.  i think i did for a while.  the worst i regret is Bush's incessant spending and how he did raise taxes on the wealthy to higher than they were before when Clinton left office.  that was to pay for the war though.  we went to war for the wrong reason, but, based on the evidence, I don't feel Bush did it purposefully.  we are there now and the situation has been handled as best as possible IMO.  there have been mistakes, but show me a human endeavor that has not one.  and he has presided over a generally healthy economy until Oct of last year.  two things though that I think a President really has very little control over - the capitalist economic cycle and spending.  I've come to realize that regardless of party, they are going to keep spending more and more and more.  Part of it is inflation and part of it is the nature of the beast.  There may be a year or two here and there that are the exceptions to this rule, but that is just what they are.

All in all, I think 20 years from now that historians will look back at GWB's Presidency with a sense of pride.  The level of current popularity definitely does not equate to the level of leadership in current government.

If nothing else, one thing is for certain.  At least he did restore integrity (no cigars or dresses, etc...) to the Office.

[vicupstate]

Obama has never said he would pull out of Iraq immediately. That is Fox News spin. 

At least Obama was smart enough and brave enough to say the Iraq War was a mistake from the very beginning, which it was.   For anyone to say the Democrats will 'disable' the military after what W has done to it is laughable. 

Nothing Obama has done has led to the needless loss of 4,000 of America's bravest and finest men and
women.

As for Health Care, will any Republican EVER admit that it is a PROBLEM that Health care costs have risen three times the rate of inflation for decades now?  I'm not sure what the answer is, but the GOP shot down Clinton's plans, offered none of their own, and ain't done shit about it, except take HMO campaign contributions.

I don't see the US going to Canadian style Health care, even if Obama wins.  Some sort of compromise will be worked out that is a cross betweeen their system and ours.  If McCain wins, we will likely get eight more years of the same.  How many more people have to get priced out of the system before something is done?  I guess as long as Congress has great Health Care, the answer is never. 

Can somebody please tell me why a 'group' of uninsured individuals can't form their own 'group', to get 'group' insurance rates?   What do co-workers have in common other than their employer?  Does the fact that they work for the same company mean they are less likely to get sick? 

Lastly,  YOU COULD PAY FOR EVERYTHING OBAMA IS PROMISING AND STILL SPEND LESS THAN HAS BEEN SPENT ON THE IRAQ WAR.  And at least it would have been spent in THIS country, on OUR roads, OUR mass transit, OUR military and scholarships for OUR citizens.  This country went from substantial surpluses to historic deficit under a GOP President and Congress.  Sorry, GOPers, you lost all credibility on spending, sell that story somewhers else,  cause I ain't buyin' it.       


         

[willydenn]

No doubt, the GOP made a nice mess and they will pay in the upcoming election.  Sadly, the Dems will show that they are even LESS capable.  I think (and hope) that many pissed off GOP'ers will move to the Libertarian party. 

[Jimmy]

No doubt, the GOP made a nice mess and they will pay in the upcoming election.  Sadly, the Dems will show that they are even LESS capable.  I think (and hope) that many pissed off GOP'ers will move to the Libertarian party. 

I hope so too!  I wish everyone conservative who's dissatisfied with the GOP would vote for Bob Barr.  Go, Bob, go!!!!!!

[vicupstate]

Viral e-mails attack Obama’s life story
By: Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin
May 22, 2008 07:27 AM EST

The main obstacle standing between Barack Obama and the White House was distilled into five words by a local television correspondent in South Charleston, W.Va., earlier this month.

Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: “They think you are un-American,” he said.

Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.

What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America.

The spread of these e-mails has forced Obama to embark on a campaign to Americanize his image and his biography. Pivoting away from his pitch to a primary election audience uninterested in flag-waving and nationalism, he’s returning to the message that first brought him to the national spotlight in 2004: the idea that his is the quintessential American story.

He’s also drawing the campaign into partisan combat, blaming Republicans for the smears even though they have not been traced back to GOP sources. “The Republicans, they’re trying to make [it] ‘this is not about you; it’s about me.’ They’re trying to say, ‘Well, Obama, we don’t know him that well, he hasn’t been around that long, he’s got a funny name; maybe he’s a Muslim,’” Obama said Monday in Montana. “They want to make people worry about me.”

Ironically, the smear campaign represents the dark side of the Internet’s emerging dominance in American politics â€" a phenomenon that has driven Obama’s unparalleled grass-roots and financial campaigns. After harnessing the Web to great advantage, Obama is now struggling to beat back the viral threat from the same uncontrollable medium.

“In the old days, communication was more centralized,” notes veteran GOP ad man Alex Castellanos, the father of Jesse Helms’ famous affirmative action ad. “If you were attacked in one venue, you dealt with it there. A TV problem was dealt with on TV, a radio problem on radio. It was top-down and it was manageable.”

The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.

One features a made-up quote in which Obama “explains” why he purportedly doesn’t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.

“There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression,” the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. “And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message.”

Obama has never said such a thing.

Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.

He took the oath on the Bible.

Then there is perhaps the least subtle e-mail, “The Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama in Pictures,” which includes numerous pictures of the candidate’s dark-complexioned relatives on his father’s side in native African garb.

The e-mailers aren’t troubled by the dissonance between two lines of attack â€" the assertion that he’s a Muslim and the claim that he belongs to a radical black Christian church â€" though one goes as far as to try to reconcile the apparent conflict by arguing that Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ is covertly Muslim, something that would come as a surprise to its parishioners.

Smear campaigns have a rich history in politics. Many Americans believe that President Bill Clinton had an aide murdered or that President Bush had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers.

And this one would be a shameful but largely irrelevant mark on this historic election but for one thing: Voters widely and repeatedly cite information that has been gleaned directly or indirectly from the e-mails to explain why they won’t support Obama.

A Pew survey found that one in 10 Americans think Obama is Muslim, a misperception that crosses party lines.

A focus group conducted with 12 independent voters for NBC and The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in Charlottesville, Va., found that fully half said “no” when asked point-blank if they thought of Obama as an American. Two believed he is a Muslim and another mentioned the Quran fabrication.

“They have no sense of his roots,” explained Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster who conducted the survey. “They just are confused, uninitiated and uncertain about who he is and what his background is.”

An eye-opening video shot by the online Real News Network earlier this month in West Virginia drove that point home.

One voter concludes that, “The United States of America should be run by somebody from the United States of America.” When reminded by the reporter capturing the footage that Obama is, in fact, American, the voter responded: “He’s Muslim.”

Nearly every day of the primary, newspaper stories in places from the Pacific Northwest to Pennsylvania have been filled with similar anecdotes.

So, as he pivots from wooing left-of-center primary voters to winning over the broader American electorate, chief among Obama’s priorities will be dispelling the notion that he is somehow not fully American.

Obama’s campaign has built a pioneering Web-based apparatus to debunk the myths, but the candidate himself has also begun to fight back against the smear in symbolic and substantive ways, following the same model used on the original Muslim claims.

When confronted with the Muslim e-mails, Obama last year began talking more openly about his Christianity and using most campaign Sundays to attend church services. His campaign reinforced the point with a less-than-subtle mail piece showing the candidate in a pulpit, a gold cross shimmering in the background. It was mailed out in South Carolina and was revived for the Kentucky primary.

Now Obama is taking steps to incorporate a patriotism rebuttal to go with his faith pushback.

After scoffing last year at the need to wear a flag pin on his lapel â€" grounds for one of the e-mail attacks â€" Obama has begun to affix the stars and stripes to his suit coat.

And he’s begun to talk about the side of his family that more Americans can relate to.

In the Democratic primary, his unique and unlikely life story was part of what many cosmopolitan voters found compelling about him.


“Here’s a guy who could get us right with the world again” is how Al Cross, a veteran political reporter and the head of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, characterized the perception among some Democrats. “His entire persona is globalized, and his name lends credibility with people who we need credibility with. What better change agent could there be?”

And in the early going, Obama embraced that distinctiveness.

Targeting Hispanic voters in Nevada, he even stressed the foreign element of his story, with a narrator of his radio advertisement describing him as “the son of a foreign father who came to this country in search of a better life.”

But while his first book was called “Dreams From My Father,” it’s his late mother and her white family who have come to take center stage as Obama confronts not just challenges among blue-collar voters but also fundamental questions about who he is.

He’s made pilgrimages to middle America â€" to his mother’s hometown in Kansas and to an ancestral property on his maternal side in Indiana â€" and featured images of both his mother and her parents in TV ads.

And he’s increasingly laced his stump speech with references to his grandfather’s World War II service, noting recently that Stanley Dunham was buried with an American flag around his casket.

Later this year, he’ll go to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where Dunham is buried, and pay homage.

He’s also hoping that allies â€" elected officials and labor unions â€" can tell his story to people who trust them.

Chuck Rocha, the political director of the United Steelworkers union, said that Obama’s Horatio Alger tale would make him an easier sell with white union members.

“Our members couldn’t relate with John Kerry because of his background, where he came from,” Rocha said. “Barack Obama comes from a lot of the same pasts that a lot of our members do â€" just growing up a regular kid.”

Rocha, whose union endorsed Obama, said union members will “trust us more than some thing they read on the Internet or some other trumped-up lies.”

“It’s going to be an education process,” said Mike Caputo, a United Mine Workers of America official in West Virginia, whose union endorsed Obama on Wednesday.

Obama’s challenge this summer will be to use his unprecedented political celebrity to get his story out.

“Most people don’t know much about Obama’s personal life,” said Vanderbilt University professor John G. Geer, explaining why some voters are susceptible to falsehoods. “He needs to talk about his values. Right now, people are filling in the narrative because he hasn’t filled it.”

And Geer had a candid assessment of why people are accepting falsehoods as truths.

“It’s easier to believe because his name is Barack Obama,” he said.

© 2007 Capitol News Company, LLC
   

[Charleston native]

No doubt, the GOP made a nice mess and they will pay in the upcoming election.  Sadly, the Dems will show that they are even LESS capable.  I think (and hope) that many pissed off GOP'ers will move to the Libertarian party. 

I hope so too!  I wish everyone conservative who's dissatisfied with the GOP would vote for Bob Barr.  Go, Bob, go!!!!!!

Jimmy, I'm quite very dissatisfied with the GOP, and I would love to vote for Bob Barr...but the only reservation I have with him is his foreign policy. I would definitely vote for him if the race were between McCain and Clinton, since I think they are practically the same thing, but that's starting to look like an impossibility. I begrudgingly will probably vote McCain if Obama is the nominee, primarily because his policies are derivative of Marxism.

What's really scary is the "phenomenon" that Stephen refers to...the almost mindless, zombie-like following of him, and even many intelligent people here on this forum are falling for him.

[vicupstate]

I begrudgingly will probably vote McCain if Obama is the nominee, primarily because his policies are derivative of Marxism.

What's really scary is the "phenomenon" that Stephen refers to...the almost mindless, zombie-like following of him, and even many intelligent people here on this forum are falling for him.

Can someone please explain how Obama is considered more Marxist than Hillary? His health care plan is markedly more dissimiliar to the European model than Hillary's?  The 'most liberal' tag that he was given was based on less than 20 votes out of thousands of votes a senator casts in a year.  Also, he only had that ranking for one of his three years in the senate. And Hillary only voted differently from him on 2 of those selected votes.

I never thought I would see conservatives actually hate someone more than the Clinton's but I guess there is always a new 'low' to stoop to. 

Please stop this nonsense about 'zombie like' following.  There are just as fervert 'ZOMBIES' that believe everything that Bush or Reagan ever said, as the Obama supporters are.  They were just as willing to overlooking their failings and weaknesses, and to never believe anything negative or contradictory that waas said about them.  A number of them post on this forum in fact.

You are so quick to condemn Obama, have you ever been to one of his events?   Was there any Kool-Aid distributed? Have you read his books?  Have you gotten any information about him from any source other than Fox News? 

[Driven1]

vic...i don't hate Obama.  i, like Charleston, just find it scary the zombie, sheep-like following that he has.  it is really weird.  many (you seem to be an exception) seem to not even know what he believes or care for that matter.  we get the feeling that feeling that everyone just wants to hop on the "change train" and he is the conductor.  what does that change mean?  not many can tell us.  and many of his followers don't seem to care about that. 

"change" is the impetus for every challenger in every election.  it has to be.  even if you are completely fed up with the Bush administration, it would behoove those who are "sheep" for Obama to at least stand back for a moment and ask what he really believes in and how experienced is he?

he hasn't really led anything, has he???  i mean was he even a chair of any Senate committees?  and how many years has he served in the Senate? 

at least Bush was the head of state of one of the largest states in the union for a while before becoming President.  I think this experience largely helped him succeed as President. 

[Downtown Dweller]

I have actually asked any Obama supporter to convince me to vote for him. I have outlined very specific issues I have and asked very pointed questions which have largely been ignored. Stephen posted Obama’s platform, but I had even more questions arise due to that. When I read the “zombie like following” I think about all the questions I have posted here, all the requests to convince me to vote Obama. The majority of the responses (if I even received one) have been something around “the Republicans suck”. I don’t care that the Republicans suck; I think both parties are not too great, and really this is not a very logical reason to vote for an unknown commodity (Obama). OK, prove there is no “zombie like following” by answering the questions posted, and convince me to vote Obama.

[Charleston native]

Vic, I think it is apparent that you've been drinking some serious Kool-Aid. I have often said that I disagree with many of Bush's policies. He is not a true conservative, and neither was his dad. Reagan was probably the truest conservative that presided in the modern era, but I disagreed with a few of his policies as well. I'm hardly a Kool-Aid drinker by any means. FYI, I haven't been watching Fox News at all lately, and I've become exhausted with that old, tired, cliched response.

I'm not going to spend my time regurgitating quotes from Obama and explaining why he really is more left than Hillary, because I really need to work. The information is out there for you to see. From what you already have read, you think that many of the criticisms against Obama are lies. Well, that in itself is a lie, but I can't help you there.

Misinformation from the media has been their SOP since Vietnam.

[thelakelander]

Driven1, maybe he's as smart as a whip?

Seriously though, I don't consider myself as being a sheep like follower of Barak.  I'm annoyed that most of the forum's recent discussion has been about a guy that probably hasn't even stepped foot in Jacksonville or knows any of our local issues.  The guy, like Billary and McCain, all have their issues they'll have to overcome.

However, since I would like to see Middle East tax dollars redirected back to the US, I'm totally against us being in Iraq long term, and I'd like to see the federal government begin to seriously back mass transit alternatives in urban areas.  So far it looks like my choices are pretty limited.  For a person in my situation, why should I vote for someone who's core principles don't align with mine?  

[Downtown Dweller]

Here is what I DO like to see:

Cutting Taxes For The Middle Class:

John McCain Will Cut Taxes For Middle Class Families. John McCain will permanently repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax(AMT) â€" a tax that will be paid nearly exclusively by 25 million middle class families. Repealing this onerous tax will save middle class families nearly $60 billion in a single year. Under McCain's plan, a middle class family with children set to pay the AMT will save an average of over $2,700 â€" a real tax cut for working families.

John McCain Will Double The Personal Exemption For Dependents. John McCain believes the tax code should be less of a burden on those, whether they are mothers and fathers or single parents, who are trying to raise a family. He proposes to raise the personal exemption for each dependent from $3,500 to $7,000.

John McCain Will Make It Harder To Raise Taxes. John McCain believes it should require a 3/5 majority vote in Congress to raise taxes.

John McCain Will Act To Lower Medicare Premiums. Seniors face a growing threat from higher Medicare premiums that tax away their Social Security and retirement savings. John McCain has proposed comprehensive, pro-market health care and Medicare reforms to reduce health care costs and control increases in premiums â€" while delivering high-quality health care.

John McCain Will Propose An Alternative New And Simpler Tax System â€" And Give America A Real Choice. When this reform is enacted, all who wish to stay under the current system could still do so, but everyone else could choose a vastly less complicated system with two tax rates and a generous standard deduction. Americans do not resent paying their rightful share of taxes â€" what they do resent is being subjected to thousands of pages of needless and often irrational rules and demands from the IRS.

John McCain Proposes A One-Year Spending Pause To Evaluate Programs. He believes that outside of essential military and veterans programs there should be a one-year pause in discretionary spending growth that should be used for a top-to-bottom review of the effectiveness of federal programs.

Eliminate Broken Government Programs. The federal government itself admits that one in five programs do not perform.
Reform Our Civil Service System To Promote Accountability And Good Performance In Our Federal Workforce.
Eliminating Earmarks, Wasteful Subsidies And Pork-Barrel Spending.
Reform Procurement Programs And Cut Wasteful Spending In Defense And Non-Defense Programs.

Strict Constructionist Philosophy

"Our freedom is curtailed no less by an act of arbitrary judicial power as it is by an act of an arbitrary executive, or legislative, or state power. For that reason, a judge's decisions must rest on more than his subjective conviction that he is right, or his eagerness to address a perceived social ill."