exactly!

Obama's team needs to make this so explicit every voter understands it.

Obama wants to bring our country together not only because this is a good in and of itself, but because our country needs to come together in order to solve the problems that have plagued us over the past 16 years. Health Care, the environment, energy, etc. As such, a dem voter may admire Clinton but vote Obama because he or she recognizes that if Hillary Clinton were to win in 2008 the clintons and republicans would immediately begin the bunker warfare that has plagued washington for 16 years and the serious issues our country faces would remain. That's Obama's argument, namely that we need to change our politics in order to change our policies.

Clinton thinks that we can only get progressive things done if we beat the other side down (edwards does too) while Obama thinks this will just perpetuate what we've had since '92, namely bickering and a failure to achieve anything substantial.

At any rate, the fact that people miss this point means to me that the Obama camp must be more aggressive in stressing this argument. Perhaps, this is why the "gap" Lizza talks about in GQ prevails. Dems like Obama because he's a good man, but they don't see how his argument for bringing the country together helps them get health care, save the environment etc. He needs to tell them.

Sawicky is correct. I can't believe Obama is arguing that he's going to unite the country. We need a Democrat to publicly say that he will be divisive. That's how you win general elections.

Max is overreacting. It is somewhat understandable given the way things have gone with the Democratic congress and the coronation of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. But there is a true DLC candidate in the race, and it ain't Obama.

Ironically, it was Ronnie the uniter who nearly swept the electoral map who did the most for Conservativism.

Indeed, the American Propsect just published a piece today online that argues the same thing: Obama could be the Dems Reagan. By poaching moderate Repubs with his high-minded rhetoric and religiosity, he'll be able to advance a much more liberal agenda than anyone else.

I mean, look at the mess the Republicans are in; we want to repeat their strategy? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

I've come to the conclusion that Obama is clueless.

Why, on earth, would he go to such pains to deride the Clinton presidency while venerating Reagan's in a Democratic primary?

Further, it reeks of hypocrisy for Obama to bemoan the horrors of reliving the the battles of the '90s while it is Obama himself who is beating that tired drum.

Ick!

Oh my god! An actual conversation, and a blog that isn't littered with republican trolls spouting bullshit talking points! Where have you been!

I've been on ThinkProgress and they prefer to let trolls than progressives talk - what a DLC piece of sh't site! It's so nice to see a blog that isn't completely overrun with the blatherings of GOP trolls and thread jackers that Think Progress seems to prefer!

Anyway, enough of my dumping!

My big beef with Obama is he comes across too religious, too conservative and too much of a triangulator. He's everything wrong with the DLC candidates. They are too mismash for me to really like!

think progress? i saw the clown from there on with shuster today. he was all iran-hysterical. never mentioned the far more lethal role of saudis in iraq. trash.

I can't even believe Obama's campaign and now apperntly this site are invoking Reagan to encourage support for Obama. It's an insult. Reagan was racially, economically and socially divisive. That's how he operated. Obama should draw a distinction with himself and Hillary on issues, not on his everloving personality.

Obama isn't saying he'll unite the country by offering a centrist policy agenda, or acting like he's ashamed to be a Democrat...

You obviously haven't seen his latest campaign ad, which I believe is running primarily in Iowa.

Nowhere does Obama say he's a Democrat. He never has.

Max is absolutely right. The Democratic nominee has represent the values and ideals of the Democratic party. Obama worships at the altar of bipartisanship.

The more charitable interpretation is that it's an extremely deft kind of political jujitsu that attempts to advance an agenda that some people won't like, without doing what George Bush and Karl Rove did, which is to make them hate you forever in the process.

Say what? This point is unintelligible.

It's completely understandable for those of us on the left to yearn for a candidate who will do to the right what they've been doing to us for the last seven years.

"Those of us"? And who would that be? I want the Democrats to win. In order for that to happen, voters need to understand the differences between the Democrats and the GOP. In order for that to happen, the eventual nominee has to be willing to make the contrast clear. Somehow I don't think we can rely on Obama to do that if he wins the nomination.

Think about it this way: Ronald Reagan always had a smile on his face and a kind word for his opponents.

The hell he did. He announced his campaign in Philadelphia, MS. He badmouthed Democrats whenever he could. How could you forget the welfare queens who drove Cadillacs? I'm over the age of 40 and even I remember Reagan's bullshit.

George W. Bush had a smirk on his face and a shiv ready to stick in his opponents. Who did more for conservatism, and more damage to the other side?

The correct answer is: both of them. However, Bush is now the worst president in history because his policies are crap, not because he "had a shiv ready to stick in his opponents."

Bush is now the worst president in history because his policies are crap, not because he "had a shiv ready to stick in his opponents."

I don't think this is right, and I don't think the above comments about saying Waldman is wrong to invoke Reagan are right either.

I remember the Reagan presidency, and he was called the teflon president for a reason: everyone with any sense hated his policies, but Ronnie almost always polled well and was seen as a uniting figure and leader by a great many Americans. The reason Ronnie's a god on the right isn't because of his keen wit or his principled beliefs, it's because he was able to unite the nation behind him and convince it to swallow his crap.

F'gods sake, Ronnie survived Iran-Contra with fairly good polularity, with his fingerprints all over it and barely a decade after Watergate. Clinton barely survived the revelation of his affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton had the biggest bunch of clowns you've ever seen gunning for him.

Most Americans don't understand the first thing about Bush's policies. I'm not completely convinced they hold his deliberate divisiveness against him - I think a lot of it is his cluelessness and the incompetence so graphically displayed in Iraq and in the Mississippi delta - but I think more people hold divisiveness against Dubya than, say, his pushing the evisceration of Social Security by transforming it into personal savings accounts, or whatever he said his plan was.

I agree that the Democratic nominee should represent the values of liberals and Democrats. Hillary Clinton, a hard right reactionary neoconservative who voted to kill 3,500 brave American servicemembers, continued to vociferously support the Iraq War in 2004-06 after it was clear that it was a bad idea, has never apologized for the vote she cast to kill those servicemembers, and wants to continuing killing brave American servicemembers indefinitely into the future with a continued occupation and war in Iraq throughout her presidency to support permanent military bases.

So if Sawicky's problem is that he doesn't want a candidate who is too much like the Republicans, he should aim his fire at the far-right Republican running in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton.

That you have to speculate about whether Obama is a centrist or is being "deft" I think makes the point. We don't freakin know. I'd like a little more commitment on substance and less on process.

Process is for goo-goos.

"When things began to go wrong, [Bush and Rove] found they had few friends left."

Right, Paul, and that's obviously put a huge cramp in the Bush-Cheney Administration's style. Sure, Rove's going. Sure, Democrats took both Houses last fall. Sure, Rumsfeld's gone.

But as long as Bush has thirty-four votes in the Senate, he doesn't need any other friends.

We can't get him to get us out of Iraq.

We can't get him to deal with climate change.

We can't get him to do anything constructive financially.

We can't get him to back off his anti-regulatory values, even when they get Americans killed, from natural disasters (Katrina), decay (infrastructure), and unsafe workplaces (the annual guys-trapped-in-a-mine story).

We can't get him to sign health coverage for sick kids.

We can't get him to treat the DOJ as anything but his own personal criminal defense firm... except when it goes on political *offense*.

We can't get him to stop illegal, unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping programs of electronic communication, including domestic surveillance, including for partisan political purposes; in fact, we're apparently on the verge of giving him a retroactive "Get Out Of Jail Free" card because we're so afraid of what he might *say* in future campaign appearances (really, do Reid and Pelosi *know* he's at 27%? They sure don't act like it) - or worse, perhaps, what he might *do*, like ignore more terrorism warnings, just to show Democrats that they better not deny him *anything* he wants.

And we can't even get him to refrain from saber-rattling with Iran, between taking impeachment off the table and having Congress refuse to require him to seek their *Constitutionally*-*mandated* approval for instigating a war with Iran.

But hey, some people are afraid we're going to copy Rove, so we'd better make sure we don't, by deciding to stop beating the horse while it's up and running around.

Because hey, that's the biggest problem we've got for the foreseeable future, now that Karl Rove has filed a change-of-address form.

Thank god our long national nightmare is over.

The American people were quite willing to support Bush for a long time despite all of his divisiveness. He began his slow slide into mega-unpopularity when he started his Social Security privatization push. Iraq didn't help him much, either, and his bubble was really burst after his Administration's poor response to Katrina.

If Bush's policies had worked out fine, Bush would still be popular.

the fact that people miss this point means to me that the Obama camp must be more aggressive in stressing this argument.

250,000+ contributors and an amazingly broad grassroots campaign says to me, at the very least, that a whole lot of people are not missing this point at all. They're getting it, and they like it.

If Hagel ends up jumping in, I may sit out the election altogether. The Democrats all spend too much time worrrying about their supposed weakness on defense, rather than leading, or even trying to. Bush and co lead the republicans and the country over a cliff. Democrats don't lead at all.
Hillary or O'bomba are more likely to start a war, and even you jackasses on this site are "worried" about Iran.
I'm worried about Israel and Saudi Arabia, and like most of the world I'm sick of both.

Obama models himself on Lincoln. Lincoln was adept at providing conservative reasons for doing progressive things. That's not the same thing as splitting the difference. More important, he was able to move a very divided coalition of radicals and border democrats to the left over time.

I'll line up with the performance/not personality crowd. Reagan was elected because the Carter administration was in free fall -- and even there he couldn't take a consistent poll lead until right before the election. The myth of Reagan's Manifest Greatness came about because 1) he won by a wider margin than expected (thanks to polling so poorly, probably because of his "Goldwater Redux" image); 2) his party made huge gains in Congress on Election Night; and 3) he achieved easy re-election, thanks to an economy that roared for a year leading up to the vote (and an opponent who was the only living person representing both of his favorite opponents: Hubert Humphrey Democrats AND Jimmy Carter).

But it was all really performance-related. Had the Iranian revolution not taken place -- had gas prices not soared, and Ted Kennedy not challenged a thus-hobbled president -- Reagans' "scary" image might well have been enough to defeat him in 1980. And had his re-election bid taken place in '82 rather than '84, while we were undergoing the deepest recession in 50 years, I don't think the word Teflon would ever have entered the political vocabulary.

This is also why I believe Dems fret too much over which candidate is "electable" next year -- the Bush administration has left whoever the GOP nominates with the worst set of election circumstances since Carter; only post-Wilson in '20 and Hoover in '32 faced a tougher hurdle (and given the rumbles in the economy, thing may get worse). Whether we need a smile or rapid-response is almost beside the point: the Dem is going to win.

So, we ought to be looking for the candidate who can have the best PRESIDENCY. Given my predilection for policy and performance, and my thought that Dems are poised at their Reagan moment (they've already captured the public mind on all sorts of issues, and have a chance to break through the "let's meet halfway" stalemate by assertive action), I opt for someone who's proud to be a Democrat but who'll never demonize his opponents on a personal basis.

I think Obama can do that better than triangulating Hillary (though I'd vote for either)...but Edwards is the guy I think would do it best.

What dilan and jimmy boy said.

I find it hilarious that Obam is getting all this fire from elements of the left when, as noted above, the front-runner in our party has a proven track record - of being a moderate Republican.

The argument that Obama is too conservative completely misses the overall context of his campaign. He is clearly (to me, anyway)attempting to be inclusive and gain, if not support from moderates, than at least defusing their irrational opposition to liberal policies.

But Max, JoeCHI (who is apparently on somebody's payroll, given his reliable appearance in, and only in, the Obama threads), go ahead and support the moderate Republican in the race, Hillary Clinton.

Campaigning as a uniter may be an effective way to win the election in '08 after 8 years of Bush, Cheney, & Rove, but it won't matter at all afterwards unless Democrats win 60 Senate seats.

"Obama models himself on Lincoln. Lincoln was adept at providing conservative reasons for doing progressive things. That's not the same thing as splitting the difference. More important, he was able to move a very divided coalition of radicals and border democrats to the left over time."

I'm all for giving conservative reasons for doing progressive things. I also think it's very effective in the US. But is that what Obama is actually saying and is that what he's trying to do?

Frankly, I think he plays on this progressive image, evolved out of his identity, and "splitting the difference" is about the best one can hope for, substantively, because that's where he's starting out.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. But, I can't view any of them outside the environment in which they have to function. I'm not convinced that even if 98% of the general population decided they were "progressive" that DC politicians could manage to enact a progressive agenda.

"When things began to go wrong, they found they had few friends left." I will really like to see some evidence for this. Not in the polls which obviously has the Administration in the gutter, but in actual exercise of power, executive or legislative. We are yet to see any elected senators or reps stand up to the admin on the issue they actually care about: the war, and disruption of any oversight. In fact, if anything, they have manage to corral the blue dog dems into doing their bidding on these issue. The administration may not be popular generally, but they do not lack friend where it matters.

"When things began to go wrong, they found they had few friends left." I will really like to see some evidence for this. Not in the polls which obviously has the Administration in the gutter, but in actual exercise of power, executive or legislative."

Well, we really, really haven't come even remotely to terms with how little what the public thinks actually matters. It would be good for a democrat "to win" so we can start coming face to face with it.

Lets recall that Bill Clinton, a moderate Dem, governed in a bipartisan manner and . And for that he was relentless slamed for his existance in what would best be called 'bullshit gates'.
Whoever wins from the dems will get the same treatment.