A conservative who likes Obama

bz2010 · February 9, 2008, 2:56pm

Bay - WHAT ideas??

Oh that’s right - “Change!”… and “Hope!”. 
I like those ideas too!

But what will he DO??
What are his PLANS??

Given that he is considered the MOST Liberal Senator, I’m almost afraid to hear the answers to those questions! (If there ARE any!).

Bay · February 9, 2008, 3:07pm

bz2010,

Read my lips: I care less about campaign “promises” than I do about a candidate’s ability to intelligently solve big problems. Obama strikes me as brilliant in this regard.

patient · February 9, 2008, 3:18pm

Bay–so true. Clinton talks a good talk, but anyone can say that they are going to provide universal health care (look how well she performed on that issue the first time she tried to get hold of it), fix the mortgage mess, get troops out of Iraq, etc.etc. etc. But the President has to be the kind of leader who creates consensus to get things done. Saying you’re going to do it is meaningless. If you watch Obama and then you watch Clinton–their faces, their body language, and consider their history of building consensus versus sowing discord, I just don’t think there is any question that Obama is more likely to be able to achieve objectives that they both, for the most part, share.

vicariousparent · February 9, 2008, 4:49pm

Bay- Thank you for your points. I agree.

bz2010: I don’t dispute Obama’s voting record, but the “most liberal” label is just a title awarded by a very conservative organization.

You have to also realize that most of his tenure in the Senate was during the most extremely conservative and partisan time in its history.

If a Republican nominee with a very conservative voting record were to come forward with this message of reconciliation and a willingness to see things not in black and white but in shades of grey, then I would be equally excited. Unfortunately, the Republicans have had a long run of extreme right-wing ideology controlling their party.

bz2010 · February 9, 2008, 9:42pm

vicarious - “fired up” for McCain yet? :)

vicariousparent · February 9, 2008, 9:47pm

I have been fired up for McCain for a long time. I am ecstatic that he is the GOP nominee. I just think Obama is more compelling as of today. Lets see what happens by November.

I would have voted for McCain over John Kerry. Perhaps also over Al Gore.

emeraldkity4 · February 10, 2008, 12:29am

I wouldn’t say Obama is most liberal senator- what was that organization again that came up with that?

But looking at the start of this year’s list (the Journal released only partial results; the full list will be out in March), we can’t help thinking of that other big annual ranking, U.S. News & World Report’s college list. And we can’t help wondering whether the National Journal’s list is just as capricious – and even, dare we say it, inaccurate – as that one.

That’s because the big finding the Journal is trumpeting this time around is that the Senate’s most liberal member in 2007 was Sen. Barack Obama. That puts him ahead of, for example, Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. Oh, and it also puts him ahead of an actual socialist, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. And then there’s the man at No. 3, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, hardly known as a raging lefty. Biden comes in ahead of both Feingold and Sanders as well. (Sen. John Kerry was ranked as the most liberal in 2003, another distinction that seems dubious and became a campaign issue.)

If you’re wondering, Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, is ranked 16th. That raises another question: Just how far apart are Obama and Clinton, really? The article the National Journal printed explaining its results suggests that, despite the disparity in their rankings, Obama’s and Clinton’s records were not that different for 2007. “In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10,” the authors write before going on to quote Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist, as saying, “The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter.” The Journal qualifies these caveats by saying, “In a Senate in which party-line votes are the rule, the rare exceptions help to show how two senators who seemed like ideological twins in 2007 were not actually identical. Obama and Clinton were more like fraternal policy twins.”

bz2010 · February 10, 2008, 10:24am

ek4 - not sure it matters who actually compiles the data - the record is the record. The ranking appears to be based on objective data, not subjective interpretation.

A conservative who likes Obama

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