What Makes Obama Attractive?

[Dreadsox]

U2 Democrat, You are my hero! I hope my children grow up as open minded and determined to seek out the bullshit as you are.

Peace

 

[U2democrat]

Aww thanks


I'm just a zealous Obama supporter, that's all

 

[martha]

How fucked up is our country that the Dems are falling over each other to praise Reagan.

 

[Irvine511]

How fucked up is our country that the Dems are falling over each other to praise Reagan.

he's remembered well, the Republicans have done a very, very good job memorializing him because they need a hero. remember the freak out when CBS was going to show that "Reagans" miniseries?

everyone forgets the homelessness, crime, crack, and refusal to say the words "AIDS" in the 80s, and instead they focus on the end of the Soviet Union.

 

[martha]

everyone forgets the homelessness, crime, crack, and refusal to say the words "AIDS" in the 80s, and instead they focus on the end of the Soviet Union.

Reducing funding and releasing the mentally ill to wander the streets, kissing the ass of the apartheid government in South Africa...

WTF?

 

[U2democrat]

Don't get me wrong, Reagan did horrible things to the middle and working classes and especially the poor.

He DID create changes, he DID turn "liberal" into a bad word and created a culture of conservatism that as we see, the Democrats are still battling.

I wouldn't say the dems are falling over with "praise", they're just noting what he DID.

 

[martha]

But why are they even talking about him?

 

[Irvine511]

But why are they even talking about him?

Reagan Democrats and Independents.

they want 'em.

 

[martha]

Reagan Democrats

This never made sense to me either.

 

[Irvine511]

This never made sense to me either.

you're either with us, or you're with the commies.

 

[martha]

you're either with us, or you're with the commies.

Ahhhh. Now I see.

 

[U2democrat]

Yeah obviously I'd rather them be praising FDR as a transforming leader, but thinking toward the general it's an interesting strategy.

Unfortunately the last 20 years have really glossed over the damaging things Reagan did, and only us non "Reagan Democrats" think about that, and that's not enough to win the electoral college.

 

[deep]

On Clinton's website, she lists Reagan as one of her favorite Presidents.

So I went to the Hillary site

and I can't find it

perhaps you can help us out?


and a mention of Reagan somewhere buried in the many pages
(that I looked for and did not find)

is not the same thing as going on national T V and saying this:

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.
Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.
He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.

(you are a true-blue, Obama-girl -
but spinning this into a they all do it
does not seem to be correct)

 

[deep]

Bad Oppo Alert! Hillary Did Not List Ronald Reagan As Favorite President

In an effort to divert attention from Senator Obama’s comments about President Reagan and his assertion that the GOP has been the "party of ideas," the Obama campaign circulated an item this evening from the Salmon Press in New Hampshire that asserts that Senator Clinton listed the former President as one of her favorite presidents. In fact, Senator Clinton only complimented President Reagan’s communications skills – an attribute of his that has been widely praised by Americans of all ideological stripes – and did not list him as one of her favorite presidents. She also noted that she respected George H.W. Bush.

David Cutler, the co-owner of Salmon Press Newspapers, released the following statement:

The question posed was originally what portraits would you hang in the White House if you were President and as the dialogue progressed, who are the presidents you admire most?

She [Sen. Clinton] listed several presidents that she admired and mentioned she liked Reagan’s communication skills. She did not say Reagan was her favorite President. She didn’t say anything close to that.

 

[BonosSaint]

I suppose that U2 Democrat was referring to this from Clinton's website:

"But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks. As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list." (the site did not provide the clarification that Mr. Cutler did above).

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/release/view/?id=4674

(PS. I'm supporting Hillary)

 

[deep]

that is better than nothing


I have done some searches
and some archive searches

and still I am not finding it anywhere
than in blogs -
that say it is from her website.

blogs against her - are not that creditable to me


perhaps it is or was on her website?

do you have a link to her website

with that quote?

 

[BonosSaint]

Just edited it to link.

 

[deep]

Thanks for posting the link

it is an article

where the writer of the article says,

She is sincere and passionate about restoring fiscal responsibility, providing health care to all Americans, protecting the environment, keeping the tax burden off the middle class and earning the faith and trust of the American people.

But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks. As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list.

After all it was during his administration - eight years of peace and prosperity - that Hillary was able to observe, learn and contribute, all at the same time. And though she possesses traits similar to the former president, a great communicator chief among them - the voters of New York State have overwhelmingly validated her abilities - twice.

Sen. Clinton told us she doesn’t want our vote just because she’s a "woman." She wants our vote because she’s the "best." On the Democratic side we agree that she is.

and then we have this from the owner of the newspaper that published the article

David Cutler, the co-owner of Salmon Press Newspapers, released the following statement:

The question posed was originally what portraits would you hang in the White House if you were President and as the dialogue progressed, who are the presidents you admire most?

She [Sen. Clinton] listed several presidents that she admired and mentioned she liked Reagan’s communication skills. She did not say Reagan was her favorite President. She didn’t say anything close to that.

 

[BonosSaint]

Agreed. That's why I noted the site didn't clarify it. Cutler's clarification makes sense. However, it's always good to know what's on your website before somebody else points it out.
Otherwise it gives the appearance of backtracking, whether it is or isn't.

But like you noted, it's a mention in a long list of names, not a ringing endorsement.

 

[ntalwar]

After all it was during his administration - eight years of peace and prosperity - that Hillary was able to observe, learn and contribute, all at the same time.

If they want to take credit for prosperity, they should also take some blame for the credit crunch the economy is in now.
In 1999, Clinton repealed portions of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was enacted after the Great Depression. The number of subprime loans increased dramatically after that, and we are seeing the fallout now - record foreclosures and banks on shaky gound. And now many economists think we are headed for another depression.

 

[Vincent Vega]

And the groundwork was done by Reagan liberalising the financial markets.

It was very short-sighted by both of them.

 

[Dreadsox]

I believe Obama is referring to the 1980 Election. The centrists in the democratic party moved to Reagan.

I think Obama's tactics are EXCELLENT - He needs to move to the center. If he is painted as just the ANTI War candidate it hurts his long term chances.

It cracks me up to see him get ripped to shreds for making a tremendously obvious point.

Reagan changed the political landscape. He set the stage POLITICALLY - not policy wise - but politically for almost the last thirty years.

1980-1992 - Republican Presidency
2000-2008 - Republican Presidency

20 0f the last 28 years - If you throw in the congress over the course of the 90's until now. I think it is fair to say, that political opponents can admire this POLITICAL legacy.

You can recognize this political achievement without agreeing with the policy.

And many of the REAGAN democrats, were the older generation of first generation immigrants who's parents immigrated from eastern europe and russia. Thier relatives suffered at the hands of the communists. They were not polictical leftists. They moved to Reagan because he made a commitment to defeat communism. And that generation, had close ties to the effects of it on their relatives lives.

 

[Dreadsox]

And let me think for a moment. I believe Reagan was a Democrat at the start of his career.

 

[ntalwar]

Another short-sighted Clinton economic decision was NAFTA and WTO agreements with China. After that, over a million jobs went overseas.

 

[deep]

And let me think for a moment. I believe Reagan was a Democrat at the start of his career.

yes,
I believe he flipped

with the McCarthy era

he may have even cooperated

I think he intervened on behalf of this young, attractive actress, Nancy Davis, that had some past associations with questionable people

 

[martha]

Who has been ripping anyone to shreds here?

 

[U2DMfan]

Reagan changed the political landscape. He set the stage POLITICALLY - not policy wise - but politically for almost the last thirty years.

1980-1992 - Republican Presidency
2000-2008 - Republican Presidency

20 0f the last 28 years - If you throw in the congress over the course of the 90's until now. I think it is fair to say, that political opponents can admire this POLITICAL legacy.

You can recognize this political achievement without agreeing with the policy.

Fair enough and good points. It just burned me a little bit and I'll admit to not taking in the full context.

What bothered me is when he gets the endorsement of a HUGE union days after (or before, I don't know the exact timeline) making remarks about how Ronald "Union Busting" Reagan was a force to be reckoned with, I guess he's factually correct. Just didn't sit well. That's all.

My contention with Reagan is that he sold a lot of the country into voting against their own self-interest and pretty much created the brand of "all dems are liberals and liberals are bad, mmkay?!?!?!" that we suffer from today and the same thing that Obama says he wants to change.

 

[deep]

Who has been ripping anyone to shreds here?

This guy is

Obama's misuse of history
Despite the candidate's claims, Lincoln and Kennedy were seasoned politicians before they became president.

By Sean Wilentz

January 26, 2008



'God alone knows the future," Ambrose Bierce reputedly wrote, "but only an historian can alter the past." Although Bierce was undoubtedly right about historians, he should perhaps have added politicians and their ardent supporters as well.

In recent weeks, some of the presidential candidates and their surrogates have been evoking history more insistently than ever. Not surprisingly, those evocations often have been flimsy and faulty.

On the Republican side, the misuse of history has mostly centered on the presidency of Ronald Reagan; indeed, the GOP contest has at times looked like an "American Idol"-style competition over who can deliver the most convincing imitation of Reagan. At the Fox News debate on Jan. 5, the GOP candidates invoked the former president's name 34 times -- yet, on closer inspection, their evocations have more to do with nostalgia for a happier time for conservatives than with historical accuracy.

The more grievous abuses of history, though, have come from the Democrats, and particularly from the Barack Obama side, including his many avid supporters in the media and the academy. (Perhaps this is a good place to note that I am on record as a supporter of Hillary Clinton.)

Few will disagree that it is very rare for a candidate with as little experience in politics and government as Obama to capture the imagination of so many influential Americans. One way for a candidate like this to minimize his lack of experience is to pluck from the past the names of great presidents who also, supposedly, lacked experience. Early in the campaign, Obama's backers likened him to the supposed neophyte John F. Kennedy. More recently, some have pointed out (as did New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, among others) that Abraham Lincoln served only one "undistinguished" term in the House before he was elected president in 1860.

These comparisons distort the past beyond recognition. By the time he ran for president, JFK had served three terms in the House and twice won election to the Senate, where he was an active member of the Foreign Relations Committee. In total, he had held elective office in Washington for 14 years. Before that, he was, of course, a decorated veteran of World War II, having fought with valor in the South Pacific. Kennedy, the son of a U.S. ambassador to Britain, had closely studied foreign affairs, which led to his first book, "Why England Slept," as well as to a postwar stint in journalism.

This record is not comparable to Obama's eight years in the Illinois Legislature, his work as a community organizer and his single election to the Senate in 2004 -- an election he won against a late entrant, right-wing Republican Alan Keyes, in a state where the GOP was in severe disarray.

The Lincoln comparison is equally tortured. Yes, Lincoln spent only two years in the House after winning election in 1846. Yet his deep involvement in state and national politics began in 1832, the same year he was elected a captain in the Illinois militia -- and 28 years before he ran for president. He then served as leader of the Illinois Whig Party and served his far-from-undistinguished term in Congress courageously leading opposition to the Mexican War.

After returning home, he became one of the leading railroad lawyers in the country, emerged as an outspoken antislavery leader of Illinois' Republican Party -- and then, in 1858, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and engaged with Stephen A. Douglas in the nation's most important debates over slavery before the Civil War. It behooves the champions of any candidate to think carefully when citing similarities to Lincoln's record. In this case, the comparison is absurd.

But on to the founding fathers. The historian Joseph Ellis, writing in the Los Angeles Times, likened Obama to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in a hazy way, as an advocate of nonpartisan politics. Yet Ellis had to sidestep what even he admitted is a large, inconvenient fact: Jefferson and Madison were not nonpartisan -- they actually founded what has evolved into the Democratic Party. Through highly selective and misleading quotations, Ellis then described them as nonpartisan at heart, ignoring Madison's recognition, in 1792, that "in every political society, parties are unavoidable," or Jefferson's pledge, as president, to sink the Federalist Party "into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it."

Returning to more recent history: The Obama campaign, in asserting a supposedly innovative post-partisan politics, has endorsed a partisan Republican account of the post-Reagan years that is at odds with the facts. Obama has asserted that the GOP has been the "party of ideas" over the last 10 to 15 years -- that is, since 1993 or so. In other words: the old (and long discredited) right-wing bromides repackaged as the "Contract with America" in 1994, the Republican attack on Medicare that led to the government shutdown a year later, the endless recycling of supply-side economics (especially ironic, given the current meltdown), and the other ideological agendas pushed by Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, have made the GOP the party of intellectual daring and innovation.

Historians cannot expect all politicians and their supporters to know as much about American history as, say, John F. Kennedy, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a work of history. But it is reasonable to expect respect for the basic facts -- and not contribute to cheapening the historical currency.

Spreading bad history is no way to make history.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author of "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln," among other books.

 

[VintagePunk]

Michelle Obama seems very, very likable.

http://www.thestar.com/News/USElection/article/297631

 

[melon]

Historians cannot expect all politicians and their supporters to know as much about American history as, say, John F. Kennedy, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a work of history. But it is reasonable to expect respect for the basic facts -- and not contribute to cheapening the historical currency.

Amen.