Obama supporters: where do you differ from your candidate?

I mean, under Reagan and Bush Sr. the tax rate that the top income earners paid on regular income was slashed from 70%/50% to just 32%. The richest people just got a windfall of money gifted to them, even as programs benefiting working class families and the poor were slashed.

Now that rate is 35%. Reverting Bush's tax cuts would put it back at around 40%, and make it cover a somewhat larger slice of payers. That's still just tinkering compared to what it was before the radical conservative revolution of the 80s.

Obama has the right priorities when it comes to filling the gaps in defense spending, tackling the areas where current Pentagon spending falls short.

...

Proper medical care for veterans: "reversing the 2003 ban on enrolling modest-income veterans [into VA medical care], which has denied care to a million veterans". Add the Democratic-sponsored military bill that McCain opposed, which would have improved the prospects for after-military life, by increasing soldiers' schooling opportunities for example.

Why not just cut the ridiculous defense budget?

VA funding has nothing to do with the Pentagon.

The Dept. of Veterans Affairs is completely seperate from the Dept. of Defense. - their bedgets are entirely seperate so you can't just move money "within the Pentagon" to resolve funding issues.

Promising discussion...

Health care is my main disagreement now. I'd be for a single-payer system, but I realise that this is politically unfeasible right now. But Obama's proposal, which lacks even mandates, seems to me the weakest of the solutions offered by the main Democratic primary candidates.

I stepped off yesterday, following the FISA capitulation.

Shredding the 4th Amendment is a deal-killer for me. A constitutional law professor voting for this bill is just abominable. Taking an oath to uphold the Constitution and then voting for this bill is a violation. What's the penalty for that?

In a sense Obama's no worse than all the rest of the Democratic jellyfish and corporate shills on both sides of the aisle -- and in the House -- who voted aye. But as presidential nominee and titular head of the party, he could have killed this bill had he so chosen.

And the really pathetic thing is he would have lost nothing by voting for it. It was going down anyway. In that respect it was tailor-made for a Senator to simply to vote their conscience. He was afraid to be painted "soft on terror" in the general; that's the only reason. Frankly I'm sick of this chickenshit response on the part of any Democrat every time someone points and yells "cut-and run"!

Undervoting the presidential contest in Texas -- electoral red as a baboon's ass no matter what -- frees up my conscience as well as my time, energy, and money for downballot races. (I would've done this anyway if Mrs. Clinton had been the nominee; I was for Obama only "to block", as they say on Hollywood Squares).

It's the same reason why I'm canceling my landline with AT&T and my cell service with Cingular. You gotta send a message somehow.

Have any of you been able to identify the people Obama is consulting before he makes some of his broad statements? Right now I know he's casting for votes in the Fall.. How do you separate his vote casting from his gut level beliefs? Can you recommend some speeches or articles?

Not articles or speeches; but I can recommend looking at his voting record and his book The Audacity of Hope.

If you don't want to look at his record vote-by-vote, there are many organizations that gauge candidates' voting records. Unfortunately, most of them are partisan organizations with an axe to grind. (The conservative organizations, in particular, somehow always manage to determine that the current Democratic candidate votes on the far left of the Democratic voting bell curve.) There is one noteable exeption, and that's the one I recommend. It's called voteview.com, is run by Keith pole at the University of California in San Diego, and uses an objective, peer-reviewed method based on roll call votes. Voteview finds that Obama's voting record was about average for a Democratic senator. He doesn't belong to the right wing among his Democratic peers, but neither does he belong to the left wing.

As for Audacity of Hope, it may be more reading than than you're willing to do, but it was worth it for me. It's a fairly clear window into how he thinks, and will let you assess both the strength and the limits of his approach to politics. And with that, I'll refrain from further comment and just let you read it yourself.

"The idea that the U.S. can "solve" - permanently and decisively - the terrorism problem is an illusion ingrained, perhaps, in the American psyche, which is fond of applying metaphors like "get the job done" to complex realities barely comprehensible to the Western mind. It's as if the making of foreign policy were like plumbing, and it's merely a matter of "fixing" things that somehow got broken. That our own policies caused this breakage in the first place, often directly, is almost never acknowledged, and when it is, the proposed "solution" is guaranteed to worsen rather than alleviate the original problem.

The mistakes of the past cannot be undone, but if we learn from them we can minimize the amount of "blowback" that continues to come at us from all directions. Alas, it appears that, no matter who wins the White House this November, a foreign policy made by those who have learned nothing and regret nothing will remain in place."

~ Justin Raimondo