OBewildered

[richardf8]

President-elect Obama is making appointments. I congratulate myself on having correctly guessed Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. Many seem to think she's too hawkish, or that Larry Summers is too politically incorrect for the role he will be taking on, or that the Obama Cabinet is looking too much like the Clinton cabinet and there seems to be some disappointment there.

I think too many people voted for the man that the Republicans were running against. The socialist redistributor of wealth who would negotiate with terrorists. Thing is, that man wasn't in the race, Obama was.

I did not go to the Caucuses because I could not see any material difference between Obama and Hillary. Then I saw Hillary do something somewhat foolish on Energy and had a momentary preference for Obama, then Obama did something similarly foolish, and it was back to 6 of one, half-dozen of the other.

Obama's a centrist. So was McCain.

The difference is that we didn't need to tie a lunatic fringe albatross around our centrist's neck to make him palatable to the base - the threats in the Republican ads evoked from me a response of "you say that like it's a bad thing."

But Obama is NOT the man the Republicans ran against. He'll do less harm than McCain would have, might even do a bit of good, but FDR he is not.

Deal.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

He will fail to do significant active harm.

After the past eight years, that, in itself, is a dream come true.

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

I think about it basically the same as you do. Any senator the Republicans are running against is always "the most liberal senator" because that's the only meme that know re that. Obama is a straight down the middle centrist, which is fine with me, but I believe, and I think Obama believes that the actual center is pretty far to the left of where the average Republican thinks it is. That said, a lot of actual left-leaning people are going to be disappointed.

The bottom line is I would have voted for whichever Dem got the nod, as long as he/she didn't turn out to be a raging nutcase.

I didn't vote for either Obama or Clinton in the primaries, and I wouldn't have voted for Obama then, because six months ago I wouldn't have believed a black guy could get elected President in my lifetime. I really wanted the Republicans thrown out, and I wanted a Dem who could actually win. Of course I voted for him in the general election and I'm still floored that he did win.

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

As a centrist myself, I'm rather happy to see him turning out this way. It makes me want to tell all the panicky Republicans I know, "See? You overreacted." I also agree that McCain isn't much further to the right -- but Palin is, and she was threatening to be as big an influence as Cheney. (Biden's pretty muted, no?)