Obama, Again

In the department of not living up to his rhetoric, Barack Obama can imagine ANY options being on the table to reform social security, except privatization. Again, he's not really interested in compromise. He's interested in building support for a "progressive" agenda. Real compromise would involve raising the payroll cap, raising the retirement age, raising benefits, and allowing partial privatization.

So, I read this article, which reaffirmed part of what I have been thinking about:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120398899374792349.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

In different points, Obama has faced a few lines of criticism.


1. He is a lightweight with little experience.
2. He is overly liberal.
3. His speeches are short on substance.
4. He is a Muslim.

I would like to address each of these points, briefly.

1. Obama is no lightweight. This is an intelligent, contemplative person who is running for national office with a strong plan and a firm ideology, not just someone who accidentally found himself running for president. There is no doubt in my mind that Obama has the mental skills and capacity to be president. Watch him in the debates, or read his writing. This is not a stupid, incompetent person; this is a constitutional law expert with a strong academic background
2. Obama is a quintessential modern American liberal. Whether you think that is a good or a bad thing is entirely up to you. His record belies any attempts to classify him as anything else: he believes in wealth redistribution, and he is ultimately skeptical about modern America, its inequalities, and its practices. He also happens to believe in open government, which is a liberal position that happens to be more popular with the mainstream than most. Again, I am not making a judgment here. "Liberal" should not be the dirty word it is (Well, I'd like to retake liberal and recast it in its 19th-century definition, but...). It is just a representation of an ideology.
3. His speeches are short on substance, for the most part. Still, there is substance in the campaign and the candidacy. You just have to dig for it a bit, I think. He has not laid out anything in specific, but his ideology and his intelligence is well documented.
4. This is ludicrous criticism that should not matter at all. Of course, it does. If this is what sinks the Obama campaign in October and November, I will be infuriated with the Republican Party and its PACs.

Some of his plans (his health care plan, for one) seem a little short on substance, but make no mistake: minute specifics are largely irrelevant once Congress gets its hands on a proposal. We know what Obama would like to do as president, and we know what his general ideas are. On many issues, we have more specifics; you can just surf around his website for that sort of thing.

So, who is Barack Obama? He is an intelligent, articulate, liberal American who has run an utterly fantastic campaign and who has become stronger in the "debates" as the campaign has progressed. He is a formidable candidate.

But that doesn't mean you have to agree with him, or that you have to vote for him.