nimh wrote:Following up on Walter's post... My beef with Obama - that he is so eager to unify and rise above that he seems less than capable of making clear or bold choices - appears to be on display in this story.
I think there are two levels of "rising above the partisan bickering" to consider. One level is to keep it down on personal attacks. I'm all for that, and Obama has done this, and so have his competitors, as far as I can make out.
The other level is taking a stand on contentious issues such as how high taxes should be, how generous government services should be, how important it is to keep the budget balanced, what the right standard of evidence is for going to war, and many others. On this level, I'm all for partisanship. There are conflicts of interest, opinion, and even about the nature of reality. In my view, the responsiblity of politicians is to bring these conflicts into the open and argue them out. I feel uncomfortable with candidates who instead aspire to rise above those conflicts. We would probably all flinch if we heard that in a trial, the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, and the judge decided to rise above the partisan bickering, sat together in harmony over a good dinner, and decided without the jury that the accused was half-guilty of the murder. I flinch just as much when politicians do this.
That said, Obama isn't the candidate who caused me the most flinching in this campaign. That honor goes to Hillary Clinton, her triangulating, her lack of a principled stand on anything, and her avoidance of specifics on her
"issues" pages.
