the outpouring of sympathy to senator kennedy is expected, and shared by me.

however, the lubricating bodily fluids being exuded, well, the contrast to the comments and behavior of the strongly obama favoring liberal blogoshpere as opposed to the venom and vileness directed at the clintons, and in part to those of us who supported hillary, it is striking.

ted kennedy was and is a lion for liberal causes...he is representative of an elite family....ok, fine....God bless him.

Some Obama supporters are a new breed and they are driving a lot of voters away.  They are abusive and then they say ,"You can't leave; you got no place else to  go!"   Most women  learn about abusive men before they are even old enough to vote.  And by then many have a heightened awareness of abuse of power and injustice.

Some men learn these lessons early, too.  Whatever we thought of Obama in the beginning, we came to be very disturbed about the changing behavior of people at the great orange, all the way to the top.  Often they were people we had read and interacted with for a long time, maybe admired.  Some had been in gatherings together in person.  We became alarmed when comments started being abusive.  I don't mean this hyper-thin-skinned, persecuted overreacting, whining, knee-jerking cry of "foul" (or "racism")that is a regular feature of the Obama campaign now.

I don't mean the nothing stuff Obama supporters call abusive.  I mean real abuse.  Bullying taken to frightening extents.  Ganging up to beat down the writer.  Angry, destructive language, constant berating.  Diary hijacking that was instant and automatic and so thorough that the diarist would leave before anyone who had actually read the diary made a comment.  The harsh cruelty of the gang behavior was astonishing and very threatening

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

From deep inside the tears that I'm forced to cry
From deep inside the pain that I chose to hide

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes
For me it cries

IMO, street money may have caused Sen. Obama to lose the PA primary by double digits. In a comment in one of the dairies, I posited that when new politics meet old politics there need to be a compromise. Philly is an old machine town with ward leaders who will ferociously assist their candidate to get out the votes, but they need what is called "street money" to help defray costs for lunch, gas and other incidental expenses.

While watching the Chris Matthews show, which I do very infrequently these days, there were two radio talk show hosts, one black and one white who agreed that street money could have helped Sen. Obama win the primary or at least held Hillary's win to a smaller margin. My sense is that Sen. Clinton paid "street money" although it was not explicitly stated.

Sen. Obama refused to pay street money in South Carolina and it did not hurt him there, but Philly is a different city. Obama earned 65% of the vote in the city, but although turnout was good there, it was not a record. The pundits said Obama needed at least 70% of the black vote, plus he needed to win the Philly suburbs, but he also failed to do that.

Reading Populism2008's diary Obama's vision is not a consensus got me thinking again about articulating what Obama means by a new kind of politics.  Too much confusion has been caused by the labels of 'post-political' or 'post-partisan' that have been attached to Obama --- in some cases by well-meaning and otherwise insightful accounts such as in the New Yorker.  Obama would certainly reject these labels himself.

These misplaced 'post-partisan' labels create a number of worries among progressives: first, Obama would be too willing to compromise, because his vision is for an America in which everyone just gets along; second, Obama is naive in believing that our politics could ever be changed; third, like Bill Clinton's presidency, Obama's movement would be focused solely on his own personality and election.  

The argument in some cases seems to be that Obama is a centrist posing as a progressive posing as a centrist, a theory which is rendered implausible by the sheer number of contortions it would entail.

I want to dissect Obama's rhetoric about politics by using the example of one of his speeches, in this case his speech at the Take Back America Conference back in June.  I also want to make reference to his previous 2006 Take Back America speech to make the point that Obama's rhetoric has been consistent.

Al Franken announced his candidacy for the Senate today and he came out of the gate strong, with the "look straight into the camera, no stirring strings, post it on YouTube" announcement that is fast-becoming the accepted way to launch a candidacy. Republican/George Galloway punching bag Senator Norm Coleman had better watch out, because Franken's announcement was good, damn good, and his mastery of this new format bodes well for his ability to run a 21st century campaign.

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