- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
- This discussion is closed: you can't post new comments.
Quote of the day
“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
”
User login
Support openDemocracy today
This week's editor
Postcards from the future
Tahrir Square meme: Event
openAwakening in conjunction with the University of East London is organizing a three-part event series on ‘The Tahrir Square Meme’ to be held at UEL's Dockland Campus.
Our first event is Rap and the Arab Spring.
The Long Revolution
The Long and the Quick of revolution Anthony Barnett
We live in revolutionary times... but what does this mean? Anthony Barnett
The precariat: why it needs deliberative democracy Guy Standing
The Long Revolution Raymond Williams
For England's Sake!
From Our Sections
Most Popular
Popular Threads
Our Authors
Jim Gabour Sunday Comics
James Warner Standing Perpendicular, as books do
Markha Valenta Inter Alia: religion, politics, culture
Paul Rogers on Global security
Li Datong on China from the inside
Mary Kaldor on Human security
Daniele Archibugi on Cosmopolitan democracy















While I agree McCain is less likable, I don't base my vote on how likable a candidate is--only how well he could potentially do the job for which he is considered.
McCain is having the same problem? Yes...but not to the same degree because he has a significant track record and with a few exceptions, his message has been pretty consistent with his history. He's more trustworthy and ultimately, THAT will be Obama's undoing.
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/
• After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.
• Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.
• Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
• Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn’t mean it.
• From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.
• For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.
• Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.
• During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers - but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.
• After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.
Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.
As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.
Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue - oil drilling - exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.
The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.
Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change.
Republicans can drive a truck through the gap between this elite opinion and the need for ordinary people to afford the journey to work in the morning. And, with a 16-state media buy, the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are doing precisely that.
If Obama softens his aversion to drilling, it may be the final straw for some of his liberal supporters. Where would they go? Nader is still a possibility. But McCain can attract liberal votes. He doesn’t need to bleed Obama only from the right. His own stands against drilling in Alaska and torture of terror suspects and for immigration reform make him suspect on the right, but quite acceptable to the left. If moderate liberals are disgusted by Obama’s obvious attempts at chicanery and repositioning, they might just cross the aisle.