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stephanie
12-12-2008, 07:43 PM
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 12, 2008; Page A27

Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right -- and has highly irritated the left -- with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure. Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about -- his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.

As Obama revealingly said just last week, "This painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission. Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.


read the rest and comments..
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121102951.html

Yurt
12-12-2008, 08:03 PM
as time goes on, i am beginning to believe that obama's presidency will change the landscape of politics in america. not only is his skin of darker pigment, but he is a democrat arising at a time when the GOP was at an all time low. the media even recognized that this election was the dems to lose.

many conservatives have lost interest in the GOP, save that many hope the GOP will return to its roots. OCA wanted obama to win so the GOP would be spanked hard and forced back to its roots, so much so, that OCA rooted for obama in order to quash the plague. as i said in response to him a couple of months ago, he has a point. right or wrong is irrelevant, he had a point and i hope now that his point rings true.

voting libertarian is not necessarily a boon to the libertarian party. unless the libertarian party can capture those GOP dissenters that want nothing to do with politics as usual. while the libertarain party has many good points, unless the party can get a leader to go national, it will always be a third party. it is not solely about money, if it is, then we are screwed as a country.

we now have obama, the promised one, the promised change. he is not even in office and he has shown nothing but more of the same. people will remember this for a long time. obama changed nothing. the time is ripe for a true change.

Psychoblues
12-12-2008, 08:27 PM
That is a pure opinion piece about the attitudes of the left written by one that admits to not really knowing or appreciating much about the Democratic Party or leftists in general.

I don't share his thoughts and I know of no other lefty that does either. I think he meant the piece for the entertainment of a relatively small niche' group of seriously underinformed dumbos and that seems to be his usual target.

Can I get you a Cape Cods?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!

:beer::cheers2::beer:

Psychoblues