[George_1950]

From Charleston, SC: Barack paying homage to John Kerry for being a near traitor. And then the best description of "change" is take Washington back from the lobbyists and having students sell their freedom for a $4,000 tuition tax credit? What the hell is that? This guy is an empty suit selling snake oil.

[twinkiedooter]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. It seems this year we have a wonderful bunch of candidates to choose from and he's one of the more outstanding ones from what I've seen. His mob connections in Chicago are more than enough to have sold me on not wanting this guy even as the local dog catcher. I sure hope he doesn't run for President and somehow they manipulate the ballots and electorial collage and we end up with this guy. At least with Hillary we've already seen what for swell damage her Billy boy did to the country and other counties around the world while he was playing his saxophone and snorting coke so we should have enough sense not to elect them again. But this Barak is bad news and a lot of people seem to be falling for his song and dance which I find most unfortunate. I guess he's going to have Oprah as his VP.

[oneguyinohio]

I'm still hoping for some sort of Independent to jump in... the candidates I've heard about make me shake my head in disbelief... What are people thinking? How can citizens hope to isolate ourselves from the outcome from such candidates if they are successful??

[twinkiedooter]

I do like Ron Paul but it seems he's not playing ball with big business so big business will be sure he's not elected. It's a shame as he has a lot of good ideas that I can see on a lot of very important issues.

[oneguyinohio]

What do you guys think of John Edwards?

[twinkiedooter]

Not my idea of Presidential material. He'd be better off in Hollywood in the movies.

[George_1950]

He has his own version of snake oil and sells it to juries.

[speechlesstx]

Krauthammer just did a piece on Obama:

A Sneer, a Tear, a Comeback

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 11, 2008; Page A17

Was it the tears in the New Hampshire coffee shop? Whenever there is a political upset, everyone looks for the unscripted incident, the I-paid-for-this-microphone moment that can account for it. Hillary Clinton's improbable victory in New Hampshire is being widely attributed to her rare display of emotion when asked how she was holding up. This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.

It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."

At which point, Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.

Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.

It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chávez in English).

One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Obama's pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Obama gets a free pass from the press.

It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming. Or that Obama's media acolytes wax poetic that his soaring rhetoric and personal biography will abolish the ideological divide of the 1960s -- as if the division between left and right, between welfare statism and free markets, between internationalism and unilateralism, between social libertarianism and moral traditionalism are residues of Sgt. Pepper and the March on Washington. The baby boomers in their endless solipsism now think they invented left and right -- the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies that dates back to the seating arrangements of the Estates-General in 1789.

The freest of all passes to Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy: The bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat.

He doesn't offer even a modest deviation from orthodoxy. When the Gang of 14, seven Republican and seven Democratic senators, agreed to restore order and a modicum of bipartisanship to the judicial selection process, Obama refused to join lest he anger the liberal base.

Special interests? Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.

On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's required of Democratic candidates. But he further claims that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda and joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections.

Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha two months earlier. Obama has yet to be asked why any Sunni would choose to join up with the American invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted and killed when their patrons were gone. That's suicide.

Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias, obliterate thought. The New Hampshire surprise has at least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.

I personally haven't seen or heard much substance from any of the Dems, it's just as Krauthammer said, you can vote for "hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chávez in English)." Change what? I don't know, but Obama sure has the media in a swoon. This was by Ezra Klein of The American Prospect:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

At least he admits his speeches don't inform...

[George_1950]

Thanks for the insightful journalism. My view is that the voters didn't want to tell the pollsters they would not vote for a black man over a white woman. The Wildman effect, or whatever. Makes more sense to me.

[twinkiedooter]

I'm very disappointed we actually don't have many good for real candidates to chose from. I'm beginning to think that they threw Obama in there to make us think that to keep him out vote for Hillary.

[Dark_crow]

Soooooooothe Democrats in NH are racist makes more sense to you than a bag of wind who believes a smirk, if it was one changed the tide.

[George_1950]

That's right.

[letmetellu]

They all talk about "Change" just what are they talking about and what are they going to change and how are they going to do it.?

[twinkiedooter]

Basically they are not going to change anything. Sounds good so they keep saying it over and over. Look at past presidential races. Nothing changes. It won't. They can keep saying change all they want but it won't wash with me.

Just read about Ron Paul claiming that 9-11 was not an "inside job". You can take me off his "I like Ron" bandwagon.

[George_1950]

They all talk about "Change" just what are they talking about and what are they going to change and how are they going to do it.????

The change advocated by Democrats is higher taxes, more government, and more dependency. You will not hear one word from a Dem about freedom or individual responsibility; it is what "I can do for you" to make you more dependent on government and the Democrat Party. In foreign affairs, it means America is the reason whatever goes wrong in the world is America's fault. Want some evidence? Look at mainstream Time Magazine and its man of the year: statist Putin. Look at Pulitzer Prize winners, Gore and Carter. More government, bigger government; that is the Democrat Party. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Repubs the same way, but not the majority. On illegal aliens, let 'em all in and have a party, and by the way, vote Democrat.