All he's done is talk

[Bucky]

What we need is experience.

[islandmkl]

1. yes...forget any new ideas or thoughts of change...

where would we be without these voices behind us? Hard to imagine, but it would be worse than we could imagine.

[Mz Pip]

2. Damn you, talkers!

Just shut up. We don't need no stinking ideas. :rofl:

Mz Pip
:dem:

[sniffa]

3. "We shall overcome?"

What the fuck does that even mean!? WHAT EXACTLY is he going to overcome? I'm sorry, some of us our looking for more than cheap words in an empty suit for our Civil Rights leaders.

[Bucky]

5. Better than a skinny one-term Congressman from Illinois with ties to corporate America

He lacks experience. I'm not impressed with his opposition to the war years ago. This election is about the future.

[MethuenProgressive]

4. Obama's speeches match their deeds? Hogwash

You evidently know less about history than you do about the junior Senator from Illinois.

[stillcool]

15. words matching deeds...

Obama is the only candidate of either party with significant civil rights activism and grassroots organizing experience. His time in civil rights activism exceeds the amount of time he has spent as a national politician. Obama is also the only viable presidential candidate in my memory to have taught constitutional law professionally, for more than a decade, before running for president. Although Obama tends to be a fairly mainstream Democrat on most issues, and his positions on campaign reform and gun rights will be a significant and understandable concern to many, his overall platform is among the strongest of the top-tier candidates in both parties. He is by no means a perfect civil liberties candidate, but he is a much stronger civil liberties candidate than any of his remaining opponents

http://civilliberty.about.com/od/ussenators/p/barack_obama.htm

Judge Him by His Laws

By Charles PetersFriday, January 4, 2008; Page A21
Judge Him by His Laws

By Charles PetersFriday, January 4, 2008; Page A21

People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.

Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously
---------------------------------
Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.
Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.
------------------------------
Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

Obama didn't stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state's first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois "one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure"). Obama's commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle" contributions for them.

Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a "unique" ability "to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people." In other words, Obama's campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303_pf.html

Paul B. Hertneky: Let's compare the public accomplishments of Clinton and Obama
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Paul+B.+Hertneky%3a+Let%27s+compare+the+public+accomplishments+of+Clinton+and+Obama&articleId=11dc4bb6-bc19-4f73-97a4-400fbd3dad27
By PAUL B. HERTNEKY

Monday, Dec. 24, 2007

After graduating from Columbia, Obama went to work with churches that organized job training and other programs for residents of a massive housing project in Chicago. He persuaded the city to provide summer jobs, remove asbestos, repair toilets, pipes and ceilings. He went door to door, offering help for three years, then went to Harvard Law School.

Upon graduating from Wellesley, Hillary Rodham made a commencement speech that moved her audience. She went immediately to Yale Law School.

Obama returned to Chicago to lead Project Vote, which signed up about 150,000 new African-American voters. He also joined a big law firm.

Following Yale, and a year in Washington, Rodham moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton. She taught at the University of Arkansas and joined a big law firm.

Clinton established a legal aid clinic at the university, where she taught for two years. Obama began teaching at the University of Chicago, where he would continue to lecture for 11 years. I mention teaching because I consider it an accomplishment in the service of others.

During her time as an attorney in Arkansas, Clinton gave birth to Chelsea. Her husband ran unsuccessfully for Congress, successfully for attorney general, and governor. During Obama's time as an attorney in Chicago, he became a husband and father of two daughters. He entered the Illinois Senate in 1994.

As a member of the minority party of the Senate for six of his eight years there, Obama wrote a health insurance law that covered an additional 20,000 children, a welfare reform law, an earned-income-tax-credit law for working-poor families, and death penalty reform that passed unanimously. During his last two years in the majority, he sponsored 780 bills, 280 of which became law.

As first lady of Arkansas, and of the United States, Clinton served on many boards. She chaired only one: the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which failed, accomplishing only political traction for Republicans and a setback for her husband.

She fended off prosecution involving the White House Travel Office and her investments with Whitewater. Although these are personal accomplishments, they also served constituents by protecting her husband.

A year after Clinton became a senator, she secured $20 billion for New York City in the wake of 9/11. Among other funding measures she directed toward her state, she prevented the closing of a military base there. Although she is considered to be one of the most influential Democrats in the Senate, most of her sponsored legislation has been symbolic -- naming two post offices, two courthouses, honoring and congratulating sports teams and historic figures from New York.

Paul B. Hertneky is a freelance writer who teaches at Antioch University New England in Keene.

Barack Star
Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama's got green cred
By Amanda Griscom
04 Aug 2004
http://grist.org/news/muck/2004/08/04/griscom-obama/index.html
Obama's environmental activism stretches back to his undergrad days at Columbia University, during which he did a three-month stint with a Ralph Nader offshoot organization trying to convince minority students at City College in Harlem to recycle. Later, when he worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, he fought for lead abatement in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood.

After getting a law degree from Harvard, Obama became a civil-rights lawyer and then in 1996 was elected to the Illinois state senate, representing the 13th district on Chicago's South Side, where he distinguished himself as a leader on environmental and public-health issues. In 2003, Obama was one of six state senators to receive a 100 Percent Environmental Voting Record Award from the Illinois Environmental Council.

His efforts on behalf of the environment have been so consistent and comprehensive, in fact, that LCV and the Sierra Club endorsed Obama in his bid for Congress this year over half a dozen other Democrats competing in the primary. Last month, the LCV named him a 2004 Environmental Champion, one of 18 sitting and prospective members of Congress to receive the award.

Obama is "by far one of the most compelling and knowledgeable politicians on the environment I've ever sat in a room with," Mark Longabaugh, senior vice president for political affairs at LCV, told Muckraker. "I've been playing national politics for more than 20 years and I quite literally can't remember one person I've met -- even on a national level -- who was more in command of facts, more eloquent, and more passionate on these issues than Sen. Obama.""
---------------------------------------------
This year, Obama made an aggressive move to stem the tide of pollution from Illinois' coal plants -- which produce nearly 50 percent of the state's electricity -- by introducing a bill that would in effect block the Bush administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act's new-source review rules from being carried out in his state. "This is a very complex issue, but Obama took it by storm," Urbaszewski told Muckraker. "He dove headfirst into all the complexities and wouldn't quit until he had a solution."

According to Jack Darin, who, as director of the Sierra Club's Illinois chapter, has worked with Obama closely on these issues, "He's an incredibly quick study. He's not a scientist, but remarkably adept at analyzing the details of complex environmental issues, asking the right questions, and ultimately making the right policy decision for public interest."

......read more....
http://grist.org/news/muck/2004/08/04/griscom-obama/ind...

[ExtraGriz]

6. good god..

how in the world can you even compare obama to any of these people....lets keep it in perspective!!

[Bucky]

8. Welcome to DU

My point, for anyone willing to accept it for what it is, isn't that Obama is the equal of Jonathan Edwards or Seymore Hersch or William Jennings Bryan. I wanted people to think about what words can do, what they can mean. Each of the people I posted there earned their place in American history by the heft of their words.

Unifying words have the power to rally people, to call them to action, to propel a vision of what could be into their hearts. Unifying words, by their nature, are a little vague, a little out of focus. They leaves room in people's vision to find the truth that they themselves can bring to the moment in a community's life.

Before he helped organize the Republican Party in the mid 1850s, Lincoln was not all that exceptional. He was a tax lawyer for the railroads, helping large corporations avoid paying their fair share of taxes. But he had the gift of words and the gift of vision. What entitled him to be the standard bearer of such a large movement? He was hardly the leading light of the free soil movement. He'd been kicked out of Congress after just one term. The nomination should have gone to William Seward, who had the experience and the stature and the track record of fighting against the singular evil of their day.

Is Obama a Lincoln? Oh, probably not. But the power to motivate people by his words, the ability to convey a vision and give it the guidance it needs to succeed... that's a rare talent. Two years from now I suspect you'll be reluctantly conceding this point.

[Faygo Kid]

14. You are exactly right. Thanks for your post.

Words matter. The ability to inspire matters. Hillary, by denying it, is choosing a losing strategy. Here's some other Americans whose words inspired and made a difference.

[davsand]

7. We had this "experience" and don't need it anyplace near the White House again.

[Bucky]

11. stop it

Bill Clinton is the best president in our lifetimes (so far). He slipped and let his human weaknesses open him and our party up to vile attacks by unworthy opponents. But he's a good man and our party's debate deserves better arguments than validating the slime that the Republicans assaulted the Constitution with.

[davsand]

13. Yep, Bill is just a man. He's a man we don't need anyplace near the White House.

Do you HONESTLY think we will not see this same lame crap again if Hil is in the White House?

Will anyone ever believe either of the Clintons if it ever does come up again and they issue a denial? All it will take is ONE bimbo eruption during the race to the General Election, and the DNC is screwn right along with the rest of our country, and "President McCain" is warming up in the wings. We don't NEED this again--EVER.

[jlake]

9. You've flipped your cookie.

[Unsane]

10. Great pic of WJB

[Bucky]

12. No mic, no teleprompter, no sound stage, not even a prepared text.

Yep, we don't write 'em like that anymore.

[rug]

16. You left out Pericles.

[VolcanoJen]

17. "Ask Not." "Fear Itself." "I Have A Dream."

Funny, isn't it? Aren't great speeches an enormous part of American history, and who we are as Americans?

It's utterly depressing to hear so many Democrats being so dismissive of the power of speech and its motivational effect.