Barack Obama: NOT The Candidate His Supporters Believe Him To Be

[draft_mario_cuomo]

This is a good post that touches on some key points. Obama supporters tend to oppose the DLC and HRC because she epitomizes the DLC. They also believe Obama is the antithesis to the DLC and the anti-Clinton. A classic example was the controversy over outsourcing. HRC was crucified as being a pro-corporate, pro-outsourcing DLC shill while Obama was implicitly hailed as fighting against those very things. In reality, Obama has an identical position to HRC on outsourcing and trade. Obama supporters, caught up in the marketing and personality, apparently were unaware of this. Once you look through the blue smoke and mirrors Obama is identical to HRC on the issues. If HRC is so bad then so is Obama when he stands for the same things. We have met the enemy. It is us.

==This post was written by Red State Donkey on 19 June, 2007 (07:42) | All News, US Politics, Blogosphere News, 2008 Election Coverage 653 Views

I like Barrack Obama and wouldn’t have a problem voting for him in the general election if he won the Democratic nomination. But after spending a great deal of time on various “progressive” blogs and websites where his support runs deep, it has become obvious Obama is not the man the left believes him to be.

Cavorting With The Enemy

If one entity has been the adversary of the modern “progressive” movement, it’s the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, the think tank that got Bill Clinton elected. This may surprise many people who might think the Republican party is the left’s enemy, but consider this: “Progressives” view the DLC as a barrier to them taking power. In their minds, if the DLC disappeared there would be nothing hindering a glorious leftwing revolution in the United States. Given a choice between themselves and the Republicans, they believe, Americans would pick “progressives” over conservatives every time. They just have to eliminate that pesky centrist think tank!

The reason the left despises the “Bill Clinton wing” of the Democratic party is because of their embrace of free market capitalism, competition, and entrepreneurship. The DLC is shunned because they believe many New Deal and Great Society social programs no longer work as they were designed to and should be reworked or shelved completely. The DLC is labeled “Republican lite” by the left because they take corporate and lobbyist money to compete with Republicans, and they believe in a strong military.

But what really gets the left’s goat in regards to the DLC is their willingness to work across the aisle, to compromise with the opposition party, in the spirit of progress. After all, that is the true definition of politics. And the left hates it! So who does the left turn to to lead their charge? Barack Obama.

Not Who You Think He Is

Obama is the left’s “great white hope,” except he’s black. He’s the “progressive” being tapped to be the Hillary slayer of 2008. But there are problems buried deep in the pages of his book “Audacity of Hope,” a secret that threatens to rip away the image the left blogosphere has given him: He’s the enemy.

Starting on page 10 of Audacity of Hope, Obama proudly proclaims he believes “in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised….”

Just like the DLC!

He states, “I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military.”

Just like the DLC.

Several pages later, Obama laments the polarization of our political system, calling it the “smallness of our politics.” He states, in an obvious slam to the very faction of the Democratic party who supports him, “In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal…. A government that truly represents these Americans (those “who are going about their business every day”)—that truly serves these Americans—will require a different kind of politics.”

Say it with me… just like the DLC!

Obama also criticizes the Democratic party for being weak on moral values, he speaks of the naivety of the 60s “progressive” movement, he endorses the death penalty, and, what may be the most lethal stab to the heart of his netroots base, declares “a lot of liberal rhetoric… value(s) rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities…. Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster.”

Ouch! While the DLC certainly is on board with those concepts, they wouldn’t go so far as to pile adoration onto Ronald Reagan!

If you think you’re seeing some very definitive third-way thinking with Obama, you are correct. But it doesn’t end with the utterances in his book. During first quarter fundraising, Obama declared he’d take no lobbyist or corporate money. It was later revealed he had. Finally, during the first Democratic debate in South Carolina this year, Obama gave an answer on the topic of abortion straight out of the DLC’s “safe, rare, and legal” playbook.

Does all this mean Obama is bad candidate? Absolutely not. Most of this would make me more likely to vote for him. What it reveals, though, is a certain hypocrisy on the left. The candidate they’ve latched onto, who is taking policy advice from Colin Powell as a matter of fact, is the mirror image of what they claim to despise.==

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