I took today off to get some work done on my car - blech - it was more work than I had expected.  How long are rotors supposed to last anyway?  It seems I replace them every other year!!

At any rate, I was at Firestone for 4 frigging hours.  I was outside, moping around, when another customer walked up to me and started talking to me.  He was an elderly gentleman, I would say in his late 70's.  Very nice man - he also got hit with more repairs than he had expected and we were complaining about the high cost of parts.  Which led to gas prices, which led to who is to blame.  

He blamed Bush for a lack of energy program.  He mentioned JFK and how when JFK stated we would put a man on the moon in 10 years, damn it, the US did it.  He stated why didn't Bush make a statement about energy independence and spurring the growth in research and development sectors.

I mentioned Reagan, telling him about the solar panels that Carter had installed in the WH and how Reagan tore them out.  He hadn't heard that story before and asked rhetorically "Why did Reagan take them out?"  We talked about global warming and how it would be a cultural mindset change in the United States, as everywhere you go, everything seems to be bottled, packaged, wrapped, and shipped in plastic.  

This nice man began talking about Obama - he was scared of him.  He felt that Obama was a very intelligent man whose claim to fame was his really wonderful speeches, but was scared of and didn't buy into all of the "change" and "yes, we can" speeches.

I looked him in the eye and stated "you know, I voted for Hillary in the primaries."  He responded "I did as well".  And I went on stating that we talked about the cultural mindset change about habits with oil and plastic products.  I mentioned that I didn't buy into all of the rhetoric, but Obama did inspire a lot of people.  He retorted by stating "By justing stating the word change?"  I replied, well, Obama is more than just words - sure, it started out like that to me, but I have read up on his plans, and although I may not agree with some of them, he does have ideas.  And just as JFK inspired people, I reminded him of his words earlier to me, Obama inspires a lot of folks as well, and that hopefully, will enact the mindset of changing our culture.

He nodded and stated, yes, Obama was a hell of a lot better than McCain, and if Obama tries to push something that is unpopular, the Congress will push back.  And I grinned and stated that is the beauty of our system.  Checks and balances.  

We chatted some more and I felt good about talking to this man - a person who voted like me in the primaries, has some doubts, a little nervous, but in the end, we both felt good about the democratic nominee - even if he wasn't our first choice.

I am not the best spokesperson for Senator Obama, as I stated I am an unenthusiastic supporter.  However, I think this was a plus today.  I was not an eager beaver, not spouting talking points, expressing my disappointment over Hillary's loss, but I was able to bond with this man because of that.  I know that both he & I will vote for Obama this fall.  

The point of this story?  Perhaps the way to reach people like him is to have people like me share my story with him.   Sometimes, really enthusiastic supporters can turn off a person with doubts and the way to reach them is to have someone who has the same backstory and can provide the empathy and bond over the loss and to bond together in our support for the democratic nominee and to win in the General Election.

Cross Posted from Dailykos

I'm sure most of you are on Barack Obama's email list (yes, that includes you Scarlett Johansson). If you're not, you need to go to his website and sign up.

I have to admit, I just delete a lot of the emails I receive. But this time I'm glad I chose to open it. For those of you who haven't here it is in a nutshell.

More great news on the polling front--it appears our 50 state strategy is working. A new poll out today from Rasmussen Reports details this strikingly--for the first time in a long time, we will have a Presidential canidate who is competititve in the Deep South. We've heard about Georgia already, but now Mississippi is well within range for Senator Obama, with news out from the first post-primary poll of the state:

(after the flap)

The answer is yes.  However, in the last ten days, Barack Obama has taken public positions on four issues - campaign finance, FISA, the death penalty, and gun control - that, while not necessarily conservative, are certainly at odds with current liberal orthodoxy.    

Politically speaking, I fully understand and appreciate why Obama is using such moderate-sounding rhetoric - he is running ahead, playing it safe, and (amazingly, already) trying to run out the clock.  I don't believe for a second that, outside of the context of this presidential campaign, that Obama would made the same declarations - though I do think the campaign may have miscalculated the political costs and benefits of not embracing the progressive position on some of those issues.

Nevertheles, Obama will not pay an immediate political cost for anything that happened this week.  Mike Lux has what I think is a brilliant diary over at OpenLeft about the difficulties of holding a presidential candidate accountable during the general election campaign.  The desire that we all have for Obama to win (and for McCain to lose!) is almost certainly going to override any specific disagreements we have with him on policy.  And so a lot of the angst that his lurch to the "center" has caused will soon be forgiven, if not forgotten.

What these last ten days bring into question is how often President Obama will choose political pragmatism over policy progressivism.  (And before you say it, yes, I realize they are not mutually exclusive; still, there will be times when taking the progressive position comes with a political cost.)  Campaigning is about building political capital, and governing is about spending it.  So on which issues will President Obama be willing to spend his enormous political capital?  On which issues will the progressive blogosphere force him to do so?

With a Democratic victory looking more and more likely by the day, now is the time to think about how best to unleash Barack's inner progressive starting no later than noon on January 20, 2009.

Woke up this morning to read on the BBC that 30+ people were killed by bombs yesterday in Iraq.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7 475143.stm

So, is the surge working?  Clearly this is too small a sample size.  But such news is slightly complicated for dems.  Of course, we should not be rooting against the surge if its failure means escalating body counts, civilian and military alike, and destruction of critical infrastructure.  And this is exactly the position the McCain campaign and the republican party wants to put us in once again.  They want to position us as rooting against the troops, against the democratization of Iraq, against freedom, against peace, against goodness, God, and motherhood.

This is exactly why we must not let the surge be the central argument regarding Iraq.  As long as that is the policy in play, we should be hopeful skeptics, with an emphasis on the hope part.    Many of us have read David Brooks' latest and most absurd polemic "The Bush Paradox" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/opinio n/24brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slo gin.  He basically argues here that the same obtuse and stubborn myopia that informed Bush's drive toward war also enabled the surge.  And while the former was bad, the latter was good.  

Here's an analogy:

X is a devoted research scientist.  His neighbor's kid has a chronic disease.  He takes it upon himself to unilaterally attempt an experimental and untested cure that puts the kid in the hospital.  Then he secretly doubles the dosage which seems to stabilize the kid, though it also leads to the amputation of his arm.  This episode harms his reputation and his grant money dries up, so his own kids now face staggering loans to pay for college.  

Who among us is willing to give X a Nobel prize?

Whether the surge is working or not is beside the point.  Bad news from Iraq is bad news.  We can and must structure the argument so that it does not function as good political news.  To do so, the democratic party must out cheer the republicans with regard to our troops, and it should not be hard to do so with utmost sincerity, even as we question strategy.  All focus should be on the irresponsible way in which this war was sold and prosecuted.  If McCain wants to take credit for the therapy that SEEMS to be stabilizing a patient he helped make sicker, and at the cost of crippling the patient and impoverishing his own family, we should highlight his role putting the kid in the hospital in the first place.

Democrats must be emphatically pro troops, pro Iraq, and pro responsibility in government.  This may seem obvious.  But we are not vocal enough about it yet.  We can frame this argument, not only with regard to our partisan goals, but with regard to logic, truth, and moral courage.

[Cross-posted on my blog.]

I was digging through the new Bloomberg/LA Times poll today and had an interesting thought based on the following observation in the story:

On a four-man ballot including independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr, voters chose Obama over McCain ... 48% to 33%.

Nader ... and Barr ... both appear to siphon more votes from McCain than they do from Obama. When Nader and Barr are added to the ballot, they draw most of their support from voters who said they would otherwise vote for the Republican.

Now, factor this in to the following with respect to the head-to-head match-up between McCain and Obama:

The great majority of Clinton voters have transferred their allegiance to Obama, the poll found. Only 11% of Clinton voters have defected to McCain.

Based on these numbers, I wonder if the addition of Nader to the mix is siphoning off a large chunk of the 11% of angry Clinton voters that might otherwise choose to support McCain as a second choice in a protest vote resulting from Clinton not getting the nomination.

After all, you'd hope that those 11% would be rational enough to realize that McCain would be disastrous for most of the policy positions that Hillary Clinton supports and that Nader would be much closer to Clinton that McCain would be (at least on most issues).

Could it be possible that in this kind of calculus, Nader could actually be worse for McCain than for Obama?

Hmm...

Funny how the world changes but the feckless Republican leadership stays the same...

When Reagan went to Moscow in the 80s to discuss arms reductions with Mikhail Gorbachev (which ultimately paved the way for the dissolution of the USSR), the Conservative Caucus (with cheerleader Newt Gingrich) called Reagan an appeaser and likened his summit to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s.

Sounds just like recent events, doesn't it, with Bush, McCain and the conservatives calling Obama an appeaser for pledging to meet with hostile leaders?

If you like this diary, please recommend it!

There's a lot of people pissing and moaning about the alleged flip-flop on the part of Senator Barack Obama regarding his opting out of public funds for the General Election.

Now, I am all for holding Obama's feet to the fire when the criticism is warranted (such as in the case of Telco Immunity), but the amount of concern trolling going on in certain circles is simply astounding. With all the hand-wringing going on you'd think that Obama just announced that he was going to take Joe Lieberman as his running mate and run on a platform of expanding the Patriot Act for another 20 years.

I think most people are smart enough to figure out what these people's motives are, but just in case anyone here is actually buying into the faux outrage being expressed by a small but vocal group of community members here at MyDD, I will attempt to set the record straight....