Pre-election Leftwing Obama Critics

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I can vote for a Christian politician, no problem. I have even liked Obama's sense of vision (although it seems he's been a bit of a flop in execution.) His latest speech, though…



If a liberal Democratic politician wants to buy into the foolish idea that Christians can't accept evolution, that it's a good thing that more Americans believe in this insane nonsense about angels than in science, then he has lost my vote. I won't even get into the rest of his paean to the silly goblins of faith.

Perhaps Barack Obama really wants to make sure I won't vote for him. At least, that's how I'm interpreting his attempts to couple environmentalism and religion.

This is not an auspicious beginning. Guess who is going to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration? None other than the smilin' face of right-wing fundamentalism, Rick Warren.

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Obama had a chance to set a non-sectarian, progressive tone at this event, and he has chosen to kow-tow to the wretched evangelical movement.

The world is a somewhat more hopeful place today than it was yesterday, but let's get real.

Obama is a conservative/centrist Democrat who will at best implement a small shift in American policies — he hasn't promised any strong change in Iraq, and his health care plans are an incremental improvement over the existing situation. And the opposition is shrieking "socialist!" at every suggestion, so don't expect an easy road to accomplishing even the centrist plans of President Obama…especially since he's inheriting the wreckage of 8 years of Bush misrule.

He still has to work with a self-interested, triangulating congress made up of many of the same Democrats and Republicans who have collaborated with Bush in screwing over America for the last eight years.

We're still afflicted with the curse of religiosity as a political prerequisite, and Obama has strengthened it.

Insofar as the issues discussed during a presidential campaign are circumscribed by the taboos and pieties of the political and media establishments, they tend to be dispiriting for those of us on the left. Neither front-runner [Hillary Clinton or Obama] is calling for the nation to renounce its decades-old imperial posture or to end the prison-industrial complex; neither is saying that America's suburbs and car culture are not sustainable modes of living in an era of expensive oil and global warming or pointing out that the "war on drugs" has been a moral disaster and strategic failure, with casualties borne most violently and destructively by society's most marginalized and--a word you won't be hearing from either candidate--oppressed.

Obama’s big economy speech, last week:



“Back in the 90s?” Why not, “When a Democrat was president?” “Over the last several years?” Why not, “under Bush?”

A prominent Democratic Hillary supporter once told me that Obama gives him “post-partisan depression.” Indeed — his apparent unwillingness to take such clear shots is starting to seem bizarre.

Exhibit A:



Exhibit B:



One of these quotes is from President Bush, the other is the quote that is what you see when you view the Obama campaign’s “economy” page (or at least what you saw as of 8 PM Sunday.) Can you tell, without peeking, which is which?

I don’t really think Obama and Bush are identical in economic philosophy — but Obama sure hasn’t been doing a very good job of highlighting the difference.

Though Obama’s chief point was that Reagan in 1980 “put us on a fundamentally different path” – which may be historically undeniable – the Democratic presidential candidate went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of “all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability.”

While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse Reagan's conservative policies, the Illinois senator seemed to suggest that Reagan's 1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the U.S. government. In reality, however, accountability wasn’t part of Reagan’s medicine for America. Indeed, one could say the opposite.