Groups Work to Push Obama to the Left (COREY DADE, 11/03/08, Wall Street Journal)
A phalanx of liberal think tanks and interest groups -- anticipating a Democratic victory on Tuesday -- are mobilizing to push Sen. Barack Obama to the left of his campaign positions.In recent weeks, groups have held conferences, drafted policy papers and lobbied campaign advisers in the hope of influencing what they believe would be the most receptive administration to the political left since Jimmy Carter. The Obama campaign declined to comment about pressure from liberal policy groups.
Left-leaning activists are trying to replicate the surge of conservative interest groups under the Reagan administration that shaped Republican politics for the next three decades, staking out positions well to the left of how Sen. Obama has tried to define himself near the political center. For their part, conservatives likewise are preparing for a McCain victory.
A number of the economic and social prescriptions being pushed on Obama advisers would require greater spending that almost certainly depend on raising taxes -- threatening Sen. Obama's campaign promise to cut taxes.
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Barack the bargainer a blank slate for dreams: an interview with Shelby Steele (The Australian, November 03, 2008)
Doogue: There's a marvellous quote from him: "I am new enough on the national political stage to serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them."Steele: Yes, he is a blank screen, he's mastered that. But again, that makes my point. As a sort of nice black fellow, well-spoken, articulate, clearly intelligent, but yet undefined. No one really knows who he is, no one knows what his deep convictions are, what his passions are. No one knows what direction he'll really go in when power comes to him. As I say, he's guaranteed to disappoint people.
Doogue: So what do you think Obama has given up in this quest to control himself so comprehensively - that's what you suggest - and clearly you're drawing on your own experience, that there's this utter, complete discipline required, which of course could be the most marvellous predisposition for a good president, couldn't it?
Steele: We'll see. I think what he's given up is an individual identity, he's given up himself. There is no authentic Obama voice yet.
Doogue: Nevertheless, does he represent an advance of the American dream?
Steele: No, I don't think so.
Doogue: Really?
Steele: You have to remember that America has been ready and willing to elect a black president probably for 25 years at least, and had Colin Powell (nominated) back in '96, he would easily have beaten a very weak Bill Clinton at that time. In other words, what I'm saying is that the society has already changed. It changed a long time ago. It's a much better world than it was 40 years ago. So Obama is not change, he is just documentation of change that's already happened.
Blacks are free today to do and become anything they want in this society. It is wide open. If anything, the only discrimination they will encounter will be in their favour, rather than against it. So the idea that he's going to bring in change is I think a misnomer; that change has already been here.
Don't know whether it was a national or NH buy, but they just ran the Reverend Wright ad in the 4th Quarter.
Poll: Gregoire 50, Rossi 48 (Strange Bedfellows, November 2, 2008)
The Washington Poll has released a survey that shows Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire leading her Republican challenger 50 percent to 48 percent. Gregoire's lead is well within the survey's margin of error of 5 percent.
Obama Leads McCain 52% to 46% in Campaign's Final Days (Pew Research, 11/02/08)
Barack Obama holds a significant lead over John McCain in the final days of Campaign 2008. The Pew Research Center’s final pre-election poll of 2,587 likely voters, conducted Oct. 29-Nov. 1, finds 49% supporting or leaning to Obama, compared with 42% for McCain; minor party candidates draw 2%, and 7% are undecided. [...]Pew’s final survey indicates that the remaining undecided vote breaks slightly in McCain’s favor. When both turnout and the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken into account in Pew’s final estimate, Obama holds a 52% to 46% advantage, with 1% each going to Ralph Nader and Bob Barr.
Obama/Biden 50%
McCain/Palin 45%
Undec 5%Today's Diageo/Hotline tracking poll, conducted 10/30-11/1 by FD, surveyed 882 LVs and has a margin of error of +/- 3.3%. Party ID Breakdown for the sample is 42%D, 36%R, 18%I.
Pew's final survey suggests that the remaining undecided vote may break only slightly in Kerry's favor. When both turnout and the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken into account in Pew's final estimate, Bush holds a slight 51%-48% margin.
Was McCain's "Wright" Strategy Wrong? (David Brody, November 2, 2008, CBN)
Jeremiah Wright has been Obama’s biggest hurdle in this entire Election. Why the McCain campaign didn’t bring him up early and pound it day after day is beyond me. I know some wanted to do this but it never happened. In essence, they let him off the hook and they could pay dearly. The campaign had an opportunity to roll Wright, Ayers, Rezko and any other past Obama associations into a character and judgment issue. They didn’t.John McCain talks about running an honorable campaign but he’s already been saddled with the reputation that he’s run a very negative campaign. If he thinks he’s going to get brownie points for not running ads against Wright, I think history will judge it differently. It may have been a big campaign blunder.
WaPo-ABC Tracking: Nine Divided by 56 is... (Jennifer Agiesta, November 1, 2008, Washinton Post)
Obama McCain
Men 51 45
Here, BTW, is the breakdown since 1980. Note that the high is Bill Clinton at 43% in 1996.
The Dehumanizing Impact of Modern Thought: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Their Followers (Richard Weikart, July 18, 2008, Discovery Institute)
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, "If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted," Frankl continued, "with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment--or, as the Nazi liked to say, of 'Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."As a Christian undergraduate in the 1970s, I was drawn to the study of modern European intellectual history in part by the realization that much modern thought had debased humanity, as Frankl suggested. My concerns were originally stimulated by reading C. S. Lewis, especially The Abolition of Man, and several of Francis Schaeffer's works, but they were reinforced by courses I took in intellectual history and the history of philosophy. In my own private studies, I was dismayed by the vision of humanity sketched out in B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which it seemed to me would lead to dystopias, such as the fictional ones in 1984 and Brave New World or the real one described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his novels and in The Gulag Archipelago.
A few modern thinkers specifically criticized the "anthropocentric" view that humans are special, made in the image of God. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the famous German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, for example, blasted Christianity for advancing an "anthropocentric" and dualistic view of humanity. Today the famous bioethicist Peter Singer, along with the atheistic Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins, argue that based on the Darwinian understanding of human origins, we need to desanctify human life, divesting ourselves of any notion that humans are created in the image of God and thus uniquely valuable. An evolutionary ecologist at the University of Texas, Eric Pianka, fights overtly against anthropocentrism, even expressing the wish that 90% of the human population will be extinguished, perhaps by a pandemic.
Often, however, modern thinkers have masked the dehumanizing impact of their ideas by calling their philosophy "humanism" of one form or another, implying that their views exalt humanity. However, most attempts at exalting humanity have ironically resulted in diminishing humanity, demonstrating the biblical truth: "He who exalts himself will be abased."
It has been said by some one that "the proper study of mankind is man." I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God's elect is God; the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead. The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his Father. There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can compass and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with the thought, "Behold I am wise." But when we come to this master-science, finding that our plumb-line cannot sound its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought, that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass's colt; and with the solemn exclamation, "I am but of yesterday, and know nothing." No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God. We shall be obliged to feel—"Great God, how infinite art thou,
What worthless worms are we!"But while the subject humbles the mind it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe. He may be a naturalist, boasting of his ability to dissect a beetle, anatomize a fly, or arrange insects and animals in classes with well nigh unutterable names; he may be a geologist, able to discourse of the megatherium and the plesiosaurus, and all kinds of extinct animals; he may imagine that his science, whatever it is, ennobles and enlarges his mind. I dare say it does, but after all, the most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.
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The danger of seeking heaven on earth (David Warren, November 01, 2008, The Ottawa Citizen
A Christian view of politics, or the religious view more generally, is therefore different in kind from the "agnostic" or "atheist" or "secular liberal" view. To this day the great majority of people living on this continent take a religious view, at least in the moments when they are fully honest and candid with themselves. These moments may only occur as a by-product of stress or grief: when our illusions are stripped away by events, and we are left facing the emptiness out of which all illusions are summoned. It is not true that "there are no atheists in the trenches"; only true that the trenches are where the atheists despair.In the religious view, which is sometimes indistinguishable from what we now call the "conservative" view (though with a very small "c") politics are merely of this world. We must live in this world, and make the best of it, and we may take considerable latitude in arguing about the best that is achievable.
But for the irreligious -- the people for whom this world is all there is -- politics can easily become everything.
Top Obama Advisor Has Long Ties to Neocons (Michael Flynn, 11/02/08, IPS)
Because of Obama's relative inexperience on foreign policy, it is this part of his team that is getting much of the attention, and one adviser in particular -- Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's Mideast envoy whose record includes supporting the pro-Iraq War advocacy campaigns of the Project for the New American Century and serving as a consultant to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a bastion of Israel-centric policy thinking in Washington.Generally regarded as a political moderate who has the ear and respect of both Republicans and Democrats, Ross, a former Soviet specialist, reportedly has told friends and foreign officials that he hopes to nab a very senior post in an Obama administration, one that at least covers Iran policy, if not the entire Greater Middle East.
But Ross's record as a Mideast peacemaker during the Clinton years, longtime association with hawkish political factions, and track record promoting a hard line vis-à-vis Israel's Arab neighbours have spurred concern that he would be a less-than-ideal pick for a Middle East portfolio in an Obama administration, which many presume he will be offered.
As one Clinton official, asked about Ross's role in the Obama campaign, told Time magazine earlier this year, "If Obama wants to embody something new that can actually succeed, it's not just a break from [George W. Bush] Bush that he's going to need, but a break from Clinton."
BE STILTED, MY BEATING HEART (Mark Steyn, 02 November 2008, National Review)
It’s a bit late in the day to say what I’m looking for in a candidate. So let me say what I’m looking for in a voter. It was nicely summed up by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic Monthly, contrasting McCain and Obama back at the end of primary season as they clinched their respective nominations:The enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.
And God bless ‘em: Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them. Alas, we stingy stilted cheerers are a dying breed, and, if present polls are any indication, on November 4th Americans will be looking for a leader they can exalt with more full-throated hosannas. Two and a third centuries after the Declaration of Independence, the monarchical strain in American politics is stronger than ever: Not for us a citizen-executive promising a chicken in every pot; we seek a benign sovereign promising hope in every pot – presumably a specialty item hand-crafted by some Vermonty artisan type.
Democratic era coming? Possibly not (Dick Polman, 11/02/08, Philadelphia Inquirer)
Stan Greenberg, a prominent Democratic pollster, suggested the other day that voters are interested in Obama "because of his steadiness," and not because of his progressive agenda. That sounds about right.Swing voters - the folks in the middle of the electorate - checked out Obama during the three presidential debates, and judged him to be of keen intellect and good temperament, at a crisis moment when both traits are required. In terms of intellect, Obama is widely viewed as the antithesis of Bush; in terms of temperament, he is widely viewed as the antithesis of John McCain.
But just because Americans want something different, that doesn't mean that the nation is trending leftward; indeed, as top Obama strategist David Axelrod remarked in Newsweek the other day, "I think right now people are in a pragmatic mood, not an ideological mood." In other words, Obama is well-positioned to win not because of his liberal profile, but in spite of it.
Democrats have won only three of the last 10 presidential elections, and the winners (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton) were moderate Southerners who often warred with the liberals in their own party. Clinton won reelection in 1996 because he moved to the center and stole a number of Republican issues, notably welfare reform.
And Obama - mindful that contemporary America is actually slightly right of center - has been talking up tax cuts, invoking God and traditional values, and voicing his determination to kill terrorists. Meanwhile, he sidesteps the traditional liberal issues. He tries not to utter the phrases gun control or gay marriage. He defends abortion rights when asked to do so, but stresses his desire to reduce the number of abortions. He defends capital punishment. And he steers clear of the liberal camp's concerns about post-9/11 government surveillance.
Obama's caution suggests that he is attuned to the dangers of overreaching, that he and Axelrod are keen not to mistake a solid win for a sweeping ideological agenda. Victory would present Obama with an opportunity, not a mandate. Swing voters would be entrusting him to govern competently, using good ideas from both sides of the aisle. No longer would he be judged favorably in contrast to McCain or Bush; that's the easy part. Within a year or two, Obama (and the Democratic Congress) would be judged solely on the size of the gap between promise and performance.
Faith for a Lenten Age (Whittaker Chambers, 03/08/1948, TIME)
To the mass of untheological Christians, God has become, at best, a rather unfairly furtive presence, a lurking luminosity, a cozy thought. At worst, He is conversationally embarrassing. There is scarcely any danger that a member of the neighborhood church will, like Job, hear God speak out of the whirlwind (whirlwinds are dangerous), or that he will be moved to dash down the center aisle, crying, like Isaiah: "Howl, ye ships of Tarshish!"Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more & more to be the measure of all things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed.
And yet, as 20th Century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more & more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man's marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th Century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies at the hands of living men. Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world.
Yet liberal Protestants could do little more than chant with Lord Tennyson:
O, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood...
It was a good deal easier to see that Tennyson was silly than to see that the attitude itself was silly. That was the blind impasse of optimistic liberalism. At the open end of that impasse stood a forbidding and impressive figure. To Protestantism's easy conscience and easy optimism that figure was saying, with every muscle of its being: No.
His name was Reinhold Niebuhr. [...]
Niebuhr's overarching theme is the paradox of faith—in St. Paul's words: "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit—the paradoxic sadness of "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief," and the paradoxic triumph of Tertullian's "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe because it is impossible).
To the rigorously secular mind the total paradox must, like its parts, be "unto the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness." It is not irrational, but it is not the logic of two & two makes four. Theologically, it is the dialectical logic of that trinitarian oneness whose triunity is as much a necessity to the understanding of Godhead as higher mathematics is to the measurement of motion. Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son. "Why do you weep," asked a friend, "since it cannot help?" Said Solon: "That is why I weep—because it cannot help."
But basic to Niebuhr's doctrine is another paradox—the lever of his cosmic argument and that part of his teaching which is most arresting and ruffling to liberal Protestantism's cozy conscience. It is the paradox of sin. Sin arises from man's precarious position in the creation.
Man, says Dr. Niebuhr, has always been his own greatest problem child—the creature who continually asks: "What am I?" Sometimes he puts the question modestly: "Am I a child of nature who should not pretend to be different from the other brutes?" But if man asks this question sincerely, he quickly realizes that, were he like the other brutes, he would not ask the question at all.
In more exalted moods, man puts the question differently: "Am I not, indeed, the paragon of the creation, distinctive, unique, set apart and above it by my faculty of reason?" But man has only to observe himself in his dining, bath and bed rooms to feel a stabbing sense of his kinship with the animals.
This paradox is related to another. Sometimes man boasts: "I am essentially good, and all the evils of human life are due to social and historical causes (capitalism, communism, underprivilege, overprivilege)." But a closer look shows man that these things are consequences, not causes. They would not be there if man had not produced them.
If, in a chastened mood, man says, "I am essentially evil," he is baffled by another question, "Then how can I be good enough to know that I am bad?"
"The obvious fact," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic forms. . . . The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world." Man is, in fact, the creature who continually transcends nature and reason—and in this transcendence lies man's presentiment of God.
Man's world is not evil, for God, who is good, created the world. Man is not evil, because God created man. Why, then, does man sin?
"Anxiety," says Reinhold Niebuhr, "is the internal precondition of sin"—the inevitable spiritual state of man, in the paradox of his freedom and his finiteness. Anxiety is not sin because there is always the ideal possibility that faith might purge anxiety of the tendency toward sin. The ideal possibility is that faith in God's love would overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history. Hence Christian orthodoxy has consistently defined unbelief as the root of sin. Anxiety is the state of temptation—that anxiety which Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom."
Man seeks to escape from the insecurity of freedom and finiteness by asserting his power beyond the limits of his nature. Limited by his finiteness, he pretends that he is not limited. Sensing his transcendence, man "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride.. . . The religious dimension of sin," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is man's rebellion against God. . . . The moral and social dimension of sin is injustice."
But man does not always sin by denying his finiteness. Sometimes, instead, he denies his freedom. He seeks to lose himself "in some aspect of the world's vitalities." This is sensual sin.
The paradox of man's freedom and finiteness is common to all great religions. But the Christian approach to the problem is unique, for it asserts that the crux of the problem is not man's finiteness—the qualities that make him one with the brute creation—but man's sin. It is not from the paradox that Christianity seeks to redeem man; it is from, the sin that arises from the paradox. It is man who seeks to redeem himself from the paradox. His efforts are the stuff of history. Hence history, despite man's goals of goodness, proliferates sin.
For man stands at the juncture of nature and spirit. Like the animals, he is involved in the necessities and contingencies of nature. Unlike the animals, "he sees this situation and anticipates its perils." As man tries to protect himself against the vicissitudes of nature, he falls into the sin of seeking security at the expense of other life. "The perils of nature are thereby transmuted into the more grievous perils of human history."
There are other perils—a dissolving perspective of paradox. Man's knowledge is limited, but not completely limited, since he has some sense of the limits—and, to that degree, transcends them. And, as he transcends them, he seeks to understand his immediate situation in terms of a total situation—i.e., God's will. But man is unable to understand the total situation except in the finite terms of his immediate situation. "The realization of the relativity of his knowledge subjects him to the peril of skepticism. The abyss of meaninglessness yawns on the brink of all his mighty spiritual endeavors. Therefore man is tempted to deny the limited character of his knowledge, and the finiteness of his perspectives. He pretends to have achieved a degree of knowledge which is beyond the limit of finite life. This is the 'ideological taint' in which all human knowledge is involved and which is always something more than mere human ignorance. It is always partly an effort to hide that ignorance by pretension." This is pre-eminently the sin of the 20th Century.
But man's sin is more than a simple sin of pride under the guise of pretension. Man's anxiety is also the source of "all human creativity." Man is anxious because his life is limited and he senses his limitations. But "he is also anxious because he does not know the limits of his possibilities."
He achieves, but he knows no peace, because higher possibilities are revealed in each achievement. In all his anxious acts man faces the temptation of illimitable possibility. "There is therefore no limit of achievement in any sphere of activity in which human history can rest with equanimity." History cannot pause. Its evil and its good are inextricably interwoven. Says Niebuhr: the creative and the destructive elements in anxiety are so mixed that to purge even moral achievement of sin is not so easy as moralists imagine.
This grand but somewhat anxious survey of man's fate Dr. Niebuhr clinches with a doctrine of original sin in which he leans heavily upon an insight of Kierkegaard's: "Sin presupposes sin." That is, sin need not inevitably arise from man's anxiety if sin were not already in the world. Niebuhr finds the agent of this prehistoric sin in the Devil, a fallen angel who "fell because [like man] he sought to lift himself above his measure, and who in turn insinuates temptation into human life." Thus, "the sin of each individual is preceded by Adam's sin; but even this first sin of history is not the first sin. One may, in other words, go farther back than human history and still not escape the paradoxical conclusion that the situation of finiteness and freedom would not lead to sin if sin were not already introduced into the situation."
This original sin, infecting the paradox in which man asserts his freedom against his finiteness, and complicating with a fatality of evil a destiny which man senses to be divine, is the tissue of history. It explains why man's history, even at its highest moments, is not a success story. It yawns, like a bottomless crater, across the broad and easy avenue of optimism. It would be intolerable without faith, without hope, without love.
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Campaign Shows that Obama Can Lead (David Broder, 11/02/08, Real Clear Politics)
When Barack Obama began his candidacy for the White House 20 months ago, most Americans knew next to nothing about the young senator from Illinois, barely two years into his first term in federal office. [...]The most basic question about him -- or anyone seeking the presidency -- is whether he has the capacity to lead the country and manage the government. Nothing in Obama's history -- lawyer, community organizer, state legislator and back-bench senator -- had demonstrated extraordinary remarkable skills. The proof had to come from the campaign itself. [...]
Of course, running a good campaign is not a guarantee of success as president. Jimmy Carter figured out brilliantly how to move from Plains, Ga., to the White House, a journey almost as implausible as Obama's, but he didn't know how to govern once he got there.
Obama has been Carteresque in the extravagance -- and vagueness -- of his promises to change Washington. But he is not afflicted with Carter's intellectual-moral contempt for other politicians, the trait that wrecked Carter's relationship with a Democratic Congress. On the contrary, Obama moves well among the political insiders, even while presenting an outsider's visage to the public.
What we have learned of Obama's programs puts him squarely in the liberal tradition of the party. Unlike Bill Clinton, he has not tried to spell out -- during the campaign -- the ways in which he would propose to rewrite Democratic foreign or domestic policy. As a result, we can only guess what his real priorities -- in a time of severe budget constraints and a backlog of accumulated needs -- would be. One can imagine serious debates within an Obama administration and between his White House and Congress. [...]
Obama is not, any more than other politicians, a paragon. He reneged on his promise to use public funds for his general election campaign, driving a stake in the heart of the post-Watergate effort to reform the campaign finance system. He rejected McCain's invitation to joint town hall meetings -- opening the door to the kind of tawdry exchange of charges that we have seen. In both instances, he put his personal goals ahead of the public good -- a worrisome precedent.
DAVID IGNATIUS TRIES TO CONVINCE HIMSELF...:
The Presidential 'X Factor' (David Ignatius, 11/02/08, Real Clear Politics)
A charismatic but inexperienced young candidate sweeps toward the White House, propelled by idealistic supporters and an adulatory press corps. Up to Election Day, his advisers worry that people may not vote for him, regardless of what the polls say, because of deep-seated prejudice. But in the end, he wins. And then the troubles begin.I am referring to John F. Kennedy, the man who defied anti-Catholic bigotry and was elected president in 1960 at the tender age of 43. Barack Obama's supporters normally like the comparison. But on the eve of the election, let's ponder it a bit more closely and consider what lies on the other side of Tuesday's vote.
Looking through the gauzy veil of history, we tend to forget what a mess JFK made of his first year in office.
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In the ’08 Horse Race, the Cart Pulls Ahead (CLARK HOYT, 11/02/08, NY Times)
The Times and other news media got burned once before this year, in the New Hampshire primary. The coverage, reflecting respected polls and what reporters thought they saw on the ground, strongly suggested that Obama, fresh from victory in the Iowa caucuses, was going to defeat Hillary Clinton. The Times published a front-page article on the day of the voting that reported on a possible shake-up in the Clinton campaign staff and quoted an unnamed supporter as saying, “We’re all resolved to the probability that she’s not going to win New Hampshire, and the mood has turned very despondent — fatalistic, probably.” Two days later, the newspaper was asking how pollsters and news organizations failed to see the Clinton victory coming.Now, Times editors and reporters say they are well aware of the danger of getting too far in front of events. Still, I think the coverage over time has created a strong expectation of an Obama victory and a Democratic sweep in Congress. If it does not happen, The Times and many other news organizations will have a lot of explaining to do.