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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (42573)	8/29/2008 12:38:38 AM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 224704

Obama votes cast him left of his own party Jerry Seper and Joseph Curl Thursday, August 28, 2008 Sen. Barack Obama will portray himself Thursday night as an agent of change for mainstream America, but his eight-year voting record in the Illinois Senate shows the Democrat was on occasion an agent of isolation who took stands - particularly on anti-crime legislation - that put him to the left of his own party. Mr. Obama was the only member of the state Senate to vote against a bill to prohibit the early release of convicted criminal sexual abusers; was among only four who voted against bills to toughen criminal sentences and to increase penalties for "gangbangers" and dealers of Ecstasy; and voted "present" on a bill making it harder for abusive parents to regain custody of their children, a Washington Times review of Illinois legislative records shows. "On the one hand, I give him credit for being true to his beliefs. But certainly with concerns that there were, even for his own party in Illinois, he would be to the left on some of those key votes," said Illinois state Sen. Dave Syverson, a conservative Republican. The pattern has continued since Mr. Obama joined the U.S. Senate, according to National Journal magazine. Its respected legislative scorecard rated the Illinois Democrat, based on his 2007 voting record, as the most liberal member of the Senate, even more liberal than Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, a self-described "democratic socialist." Mr. Obama ranked No. 16 and No. 10 in the previous two years. His running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, ranked third in the 2007 National Journal survey, with only Sen. Edward M. Kennedy between him and Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama's left-leaning pedigree has concerned some of his party's moderate and conservative members. Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma has publicly refused to endorse Mr. Obama, describing the presumptive presidential nominee as the "most liberal senator" on Capitol Hill.

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (42573)	8/29/2008 12:39:07 AM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224704

Carter is irrelevant.................

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (42573)	8/29/2008 5:45:28 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224704

A Shooting Liberal Star August 29, 2008; Page A16 Americans last night got their closest look yet at Barack Obama, the shooting star bidding to be our next President. His speech before 85,000 at Invesco Field was as much coronation as nomination. Yet for someone who is so close to being the most powerful man in the world, the remarkable fact is that Americans still know very little about either his political philosophy or what he wants to accomplish. This is not unusual for the modern Democratic Party. As we've often noted, the party has tended to nominate relative unknowns ever since its animating liberalism fell out of public favor in the 1970s. Sometimes the voters have gone along with the leap of faith (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and sometimes they haven't (Michael Dukakis). But in either case the voters learned sooner or later that they were sold something more than the "change" they imagined. Yet as the fall campaign is joined, Americans will want to know more concretely what kind of change Mr. Obama is proposing. So far his campaign, like his political persona, has been marked by contradiction. In his rhetoric, Mr. Obama is a centrist, stressing a theme of post-ideological, bipartisan political transformation. There is no "red" or "blue" in his "one America." Yet look closely at his policy agenda and you see that he has by far the most liberal program of any Democratic nominee since George McGovern in 1972. In his (two) autobiographies and convention presentation this week, he is a conciliator who brought unique skills to transcend old political disputes. But as journalists have unveiled his record, we have learned that he also advanced by more than innocence through Chicago politics, and that he dissembled about his 20 years in the pews of a black liberation church. He used the Reverend Jeremiah Wright when belonging to that church served his purposes as a state politician, but he denied his pastor when that association might have hurt his national campaign. This speaks not merely to his past but to his present political character. A similar disconnect applies to his agenda, which is nothing if not ambitious. Most conspicuously, he is proposing a steeper tax increase than any recent candidate, yet he is selling it as a net tax cut. He justifies this by asserting that his eight "refundable" tax credit proposals for people who pay no income tax are "tax cuts." But such tax credits are really a government cash transfer from one taxpayer to a nontaxpayer. Mr. Obama is disguising the kind of pure income distribution that Mr. McGovern failed to sell as a $1,000 "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's packaging is post-ideological but his package is from the Great Society. In this and in other policy areas, Mr. Obama is different from Bill Clinton and the New Democrats of 1992 and 1996. Mr. Clinton made real concessions to conservative policy goals -- welfare reform, a balanced budget -- in the hope that this would give him the political running room to pursue other liberal goals. Mr. Obama's concessions are nearly all rhetorical, a nod that Ronald Reagan had some good ideas or that the free market does some things well. But his policy instincts and political program always seem to turn left. He has shown he can tack right when he is politically forced to, as on wiretapping of al Qaeda abroad, but he has done so only after his liberal options have turned into dead ends. This will also be a Commander in Chief election amid a war on terror, and Mr. Obama's national security profile is especially indistinct. He has made much of his 2002 opposition to the Iraq war, though he took that stand from the political safety of the Illinois legislature. In his time as a Presidential candidate, the most consequential security debate concerned President Bush's 2007 Iraq surge. Mr. Obama opposed it, and we now know the U.S. would have been defeated in Iraq without it. Voters will have to decide if they believe that his capacity to learn on the job will trump his instinct that negotiations can tame almost any enemy. For activist Democrats of a certain age, their expectation and hope is that 2008 is their version of 1980, when Reagan ushered in the modern conservative era. But the Gipper had been a two-term Governor of California, had nearly won his party's nomination four years earlier, and had a philosophy that he had broadcast for a generation on radio and TV. His challenge was persuading the country that his philosophy was the right one for that political moment -- as it turned out to be. * * * The Obama Democrats seem to believe that the country is now ready to turn the page on the Reagan era, ushering in another "progressive" age of activist and expanding government. Perhaps the unpopular Bush Presidency has created that opening, especially among young people who have no memory of the 1970s, or even of 1993-94. In Mr. Obama, Democrats hope they have found a liberal with Reagan's likability and communications skills. The Illinois Senator has even compared his own ambitions to Reagan's as a potentially transformative President, angering Mr. Clinton in the process. The coming campaign ought to be a test of whether the country really wants that kind of change. We have our doubts, and Mr. Obama may have doubts himself -- which probably explains the audacity of his rhetorical, postpartisan disguise. We've been disappointed by shooting stars before. See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.