georgeob1 wrote:Asking questions that have no answer and as insisting on specific answers to them, even after the contradiction has been noted, is not rational behavior. Doing so loudly and with self-important fanfare is .... well, stupid.
Oh, poppycock. Enough already. Diest asked a fairly straightforward question, and the way you weave together high-minded generalities with repeated personal insults of the guy in your answers reflects badly on you.
Barack Obama, in spite of all your protestations, is not some kind of blank slate. He's no man of mystery. He's written two books, in which he digs rather deep into his personal motivations and his political vision. He's spent years working on political causes, up from grassroots community work through state senate work to being a US Senator.
Yes, it is never possible to fully predict what will happen when a man becomes President, simply because there is no other job like it, and he will face challenges that nobody else ever faces. Of course. And yes, the grind of Congressional congestion and compromise means that few of a candidate's policy proposals will see the say as law exactly as they were written. But that doesnt mean that we therefore have
nothing to go on.
A candidate's detailed layerwork of policy proposals, even if he wont be able to realise them point by point in practice, serve as roadmap to his political vision and perspective. And in spite of your protestations, Obama's policy proposals are a factor of x more detailed than McCain's. Yet even so, even if you look at John McCain's proposals, his health care proposal for example or his vision of a lasting US presence in Iraq, the fact that in practice, of course, he will have to compromise on health care and who knows what will happen in Iraq, does not make those plans of his any less illustrative of his politics and vision. They are very illustrative, and make it immediately clear what corner of the political landscape he will be governing from: harnessed interventionism and small-government ideology.
Same with Hillary. Her populist gas tax holiday proposal, to take a random example, is rationally speaking insane, and no, I dont believe for a second she would push it through in reality. But the fact that she proposes it anyway says something about her politics - both in the intense attention her administration will pay to populist pandering and in the modus operandi she will apply in terms of tactics.
Obama has laid out both what goals he wants to achieve and which ones are most important to him, and a political philosophy in terms of how he aims to achieve as much as possible of those goals. While the goals themselves are solidly progressive enough, specific proposals such as his plans for education and his health insurance plan show that he will deviate from liberal orthodoxy whenever he considers it necessary or preferable. His philosophy of how he wants to achieve them, combining a willingness to reach across the aisle and talk and work with everyone and a cultivation of civic pressure groups of motivated volunteers to counter the institutional influence of lobbyists, marks him as a principled pragmatist.
And no, his past as a politician is not some unknown blank slate. Both regarding his work in the US Senate and in more depth in the Illinois state Senate, there are concrete examples of how he forged unlikely alliances to achieve pragmatic goals. These have been laid out in specifics here by Soz, Butrflynet and FreeDuck, repeatedly.
So yes, aside from the basic given that any new President presents a set of unknowns to some extent, there is plenty we know about Obama, about what he has done, what he aims to do, how he has worked as a politician so far and how he aims to work as President. This whole conceit that Diest's question is by definition unanswerable because we dont really know anything about the man anyway is a dud.
Which brings us back to the very simple question Diest asked here. We know a lot about Obama - or we could know a lot about him if we happened to read up. All these insinuations about how significant Obama's connection with Wright is, not just in terms of his personal judgement about people but in terms of
what kind of President he will be - is there anything specific and concrete you think Obama will do as President that will be inspired or influenced by Rev. Wright? Have you seen a Wright-like black militant influence in anything whatsoever Obama has done or written so far?
My spelling is usually OK, so maybe me restating the question gives you the opportunity to answer without lacing in haughty putdowns about the questioner's spelling and writing. (Hell yes, I'm fed up.
Werent you the one blaming Obama for elitism the other day? Cant you hear the way you sound yourself?)
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Oh, and:
Finn dAbuzz wrote:In fact when I had the temerity to post that my black friends would never accept him as their spokesman, let alone their spiritual mentor, I was chided by nimh and others as either being a closet rascist with my friends, or lying about having black friends.
BS.
)