YOU GONNA BELIEVE MY RECORD OR ME?:

For Obama, bipartisan aims, party-line votes: A desire to build cross-party consensus in Senate rubs up against political perils of compromise. (Ariel Sabar, 4/17/08, The Christian Science Monitor )

As Obama moved from Chicago to the Illinois statehouse and then Capitol Hill, his early idealism became more pragmatic and calculating. While his message of unity has changed little – if anything, he has refined and enlarged it – his voting record in recent years has been decidedly partisan. [...]

"To judge from his voting, he's still pretty partisan," says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University in New Jersey. In a polarized Senate, he says, "it's hard to be bipartisan. That said, that's the challenge he's going to face as president. If his record doesn't match what his promise is, can he achieve the promise, even if it's genuine?"

Is there a shred of evidence that it's genuine, or is pretending that it is just a sort of soft bigotry of low expectations?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2008 4:51 PM