John Edwards was my choice before he dropped out. He seems like he had the best chance to win the nomination. But Dennis Kucinich was more progressive though he was not viable and a vote for Dennis would have been wasted - as wasted as my write-in votes for Gus Hall have been in the past.
Dennis also promised to file Articles of Impeachment against Bush but as committed as Dennis Kucinich was he was also under pressure to retain his congressional seat and never had the support of the congressional leadership.
Edwards had a plan for health care reform that was universal coverage and Hillary Clinton's plan is also mandatory so everyone would be covered. Those who can't afford the premiums would receive assistance, a fact conveniently overlooked by Barack Obama. Obama's health plan is not mandated for everyone and leaves millions uninsured.
"Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) on an episode of the "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" ...announced a proposal that would provide an additional $300 million in annual federal funds for breast cancer research - AP/Contra Costa Times
Any health plan must be universal, should eventually be single payer, and must be mandatory or it just doesn't work. At least Edwards and Clinton offered a band-aid that works and could lead to better insurance down the road. Obama's plan doesn't work at all. I'm not suggesting that his wife's special interest as a high salaried ($273,618 a year from the University of Chicago Hospitals) position in health management has anything to do with his plan.
You decide if you think it does.
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Edwards said he would remove 50,000 troops immediately and get the rest out in 9 months. Obama will get them out maybe but even if he does it is not immediate and it will be very slow and subject to a lot of changes. He isn't serious. Most of what he says is crafted to fit the audience. Bill Clinton was right to call his rhetoric a "fairy tale." Hillary says she will remove all of the troops beginning in 90 days but she will not risk the safety of the military by extracting them all at once (even if it could be done, which it can't).
The mood in the country seems to be shifting and with less news from Iraq and economic concerns becoming paramount it might not matter what he or she says about when or how to get the troops out, unless it means more jobs and job security at home and the polls are reflecting this change in mood.
Edwards had the best energy plans for carbon emission reduction and supports a moratorium on nuclear and coal. Edwards is opposed to NAFTA. Obama supports NAFTA and nuclear energy. Hillary favors green energy.
I admit to being annoyed when someone in Clinton's audience yells out to Hillary, "Do my laundry." It took women 50 more years to get the vote than Blacks and there is still gender bigotry as demonstrated by that heckler.
"Obama and his supporters brusquely dismiss the drawing of sensible inferences from these gestures of admiration as guilt by association.” In point of fact, though, the Obamas didn’t just associate with Wright. They subsidized him to the tune of over $20,000 — not exactly chump change from a couple without great means or any history of philanthropy to speak of. And until recent public attention to the pastor’s noxious rants threatened to derail his White House bid, Sen. Obama kept Wright officially on board as part of his campaign’s “African American Religious Leadership Committee." (National Review)
(Obama) "flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at ground zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?" (Charles Krauthammer, Columbia Daily Tribune - April 1, 2008)
Charles Krauthammer says this about Obama's racism speech: "This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination." (Krauthammer)
"Barack Obama's latest book reveals the presidential aspirant to be a rank racial accommodationist and political opportunist. The Illinois Senator urges empathy for those in power, labels critics on the Left cranks and zealots, and whitewashes America's past and present crimes. In the final analysis, Obama is an `authoritarian corporate imperial insider' - a front-running candidate for betrayal. `Obama's book (The Audacity of Hope...) is the product of a relentless ideological triangulator, a clever racial accommodator and political opportunist.'" (from author and activist Paul Street)
"The American people, Obama argues, harbor only modest expectations of their government (p.7), reflecting little concern (by Obama's account) with traditional left goals of social justice and equality. There's no room in Obama's downsized image of popular `hopes' for the citizenry's widespread disgust at savage socioeconomic inequity in the United States. In Obama's brand of `progressivism,' serious concern over the nation's harsh disparities is consigned to leftist `cranks' and other assorted `unreasonable zealots' - people walking in the "absolutist" footsteps of Marx, the New Left, and (though Obama would never acknowledge this) the democratic socialist Martin Luther King, Jr." (Street)
While Obama is criticizing Clinton for her remarks which were true enough that Johnson was responsible for the legislation which provided for civil rights, he would never admit that the great, late MLK was a socialist. Nor of course is it politically correct to mention MLK's sexual indiscretions - though I expect the indiscretions of Bill Clinton will be thrown in front of Hillary so she can explain why she forgave him - if not by Obama, then surely by the Republicans.
Obama also minimizes the crimes of Bush and Cheney in his book as author, journalist, activist Paul Street points out. He says,
"..[T]here's the section where Obama claims that the monumental war criminal, arch-authoritarian and hyper-plutocrat George W. Bush `and the people around him' - a reference that would especially include the filthy rich crypto-fascist Dick Cheney - `to be pretty much like everyone else.' The Bush-Cheney gang-bangers are `possessed,' Obama says, `of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries as the rest of us.' It would be interesting to ask some long-injured Vietnam or Iraq war veterans if they share the same perspective on the Vietnam-War-supporting but draft-dodging Bush and Cheney, who had `other priorities' than `serving' in Indochina during the 1960s and 1970s.'" (Street)
"Such veterans shouldn't harbor bitterness towards their war-evading superiors, Obama says. He argues that "those who are struggling - or those who claim to speak for those who are struggling" are not `freed from trying to understand the perspectives those who are better off.' The duty to feel `empathy,' he feels, is shared by the `the powerless' and `the oppressed' as well as `the powerful' and `the oppressor' (p. 68)." (Street)
"Obama is impressively committed to whitewashing the American past in accord with dominant national doctrine. He cites early Americans' purported faith in `self-reliance,' `hard work,' and `free will' (p. 54)as the source of the early Republic's `free market' development, ignoring slavery's role in (a) violating the nation's proclaimed republican virtues and (b) laying critical capital-accumulationist foundation for the early expansion of the American `free market' empire. He writes warmly of the `grand compromise' (p.75) found in the Constitutional bargain between the Northern and the Southern states - the one that approved and empowered black chattel slavery as the core, defining and federally protected political-economic institution of the U.S. South. He deftly inserts `property rights' (p. 86) into his list of the great `individual liberties' guaranteed by the Founders, deleting a critical conflict that shaped the early republic: that between human rights and property rights, the latter referring to the special, structurally super-empowered citizenship rights granted to the relatively small part of the population that owned large amounts of property." (Street)
"Obama falsely conflates `democracy' with `the republican form of government' that the Founders preferred as an effective barrier to their ultimate nightmare - popular democracy. He appears not to understand that the nation's constitutional fathers saw republican governance as a bulwark against democracy and a more reliable protector of `property rights' and class privilege than monarchical absolutism. He misses and misrepresents the main reason that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and other Founders argued for a geographically extensive nation-state: to more effectively preserve the tyranny of the propertied few and keep the threat of popular democracy at bay (pp. 87-94)." (Street)
There is a lot that could be said here, like why didn't Obama leave his church during the 20 years he went there? Why did he subject his children to listen to that hate speech? But, we already know the answer.
And he is condescending. Does he really think the only reason people "cling" to their guns is because of bitterness? I have my guns because the Constitution gives me the right to have them and protect my family in good times and in bad times. His remarks suggest he does not appreciate the extent to which Americans will go to keep their guns or why they believe they should have them. -- It is not so they can knock over a gas station. The only reasonable conclusion anyone should take from this is Obama is reflecting a feeling that he has and some Blacks may have about "clinging" to guns and it has little to do with the Second Amendment. He never mentioned hunting because it isn't about hunting, it is about hurting people. It is about taking what they want and think they deserve. And that is why some of the rest of us keep guns, not because we're bitter, but because someone may try to harm our families and take what is ours.
He also insults Americans in "small towns" and elsewhere, who may "cling to religion." Does this tell us something about his own attitude toward religion? It raises and unmasks the question on a lot of people's minds. Is he really a Christian or did some of the Islam taught to him as a child by his father (and stepfather), during his most formidable years influence his current religious views?
And it raises another question. Does he really think people are anti-immigrant only because they are bitter about the economy or concerned more about undocumented immigrants having access to resources denied to "small town Americans," as well as all naturalized and born Americans, unfairly?
Obama has made misstatements which he is now defending. He says he knows why people are bitter. I'm annoyed at his elitism and his condescension and skewed dysfunctional understanding about Americans because the media has never adequately vetted him. Now the truth is being revealed quite by accident and it may be too late. If Obama becomes the nominee, we will all be in a lot of trouble. The real Obama has an anti-progressive-regressive-admiration for Republican governance and an elitist and privileged perspective which is not shared with most Americans. It is true Obama would be transformative - though the transformation would be in the wrong direction.
Others are judged by the company they keep.
Why not Obama?
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