AND INDEPENDENTS WONDER WHY NO ONE TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY?:

President Obama: We Still Don’t Know Who He Really Is (Mort Kondracke, 10/30/08, Real Clear Politics)

After 22 months that he’s been campaigning, after thousands of speeches, dozens of debates and reams of position papers, it’s still not clear if he is a pragmatic post-partisan unifier or a populist liberal ideologue.

Some conservatives think he’s further out than that — a dangerous radical who really is a pal of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers and a disciple of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — but the evidence for that from his campaign behavior is next to nonexistent.

But as Obama delivered his “closing argument” this week, beginning Monday in Canton, Ohio, it remained impossible to tell how far left Obama will tilt on economics or how energetically he will reach out to Republicans.

Obama’s appeal to independents (like me) has always been in lines like this one from Canton: “Understand, if we want to get through this [economic] crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right.

“We don’t need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government — a more competent government, a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.”

It’s pretty clear that, under Obama, the size of government will grow.

The fact that utter pabulum like that, which Mortimer knows isn't even true, appeals to his sort is just embarrassing. But it is the case that to the extent the Unicorn Rider has been able to stay a blank he's allowed people to fill in the person they wish he was.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 30, 2008 12:58 PM