Barack Obama is facing a rebellion from the liberal blogosphere that helped him lock up the Democratic presidential nomination.
In recent days, Obama has criticized the Supreme Court for saying that child rapists cannot be executed and refused to oppose a decision knocking down a handgun ban. He announced a plan to support faith-based social work and said he would vote for a bill giving immunity to telephone companies that allowed warrantless wiretapping of their customers.
Those centrist positions may help woo swing voters, but they infuriated some of Obama's core supporters. Nearly 12,000 of them have formed an online group on Obama's presidential campaign website, urging him to vote against the domestic wiretapping bill.
You'd think that after the Joe Lieberman fiasco, the MoveOn.org wing would realize that they're not quite as powerful or important as they think they are.
They're apparently not as bright as they think they are, either. Can anyone explain this bit of genius to me?
"When a candidate decides to move to the center, he shouldn't move away from us," said Mike Stark, a University of Virginia law student who started the online mutiny.
Law student. Great.
4 comments:
It's not a matter of intelligence; there are plenty of smart people on the left. It's a matter of assumptions.
Lefties all assume a fitness to rule.
Dictating to people less moral, less intelligent and less sane then themselves is so obviously proper, so beyond discussion, that disagreement is evidence of stupidity, insanity or moral defect.
With that in mind, MoveOn.org, and the constituency it represents, has few options. They can try to whip their sudden saint back into line, to pressure Senator Obama to return to the fold. They can desert him in disgust now that his feet of clay lay revealed.
Or, hardest of all, they can accept that they won't get what they want even though it's plain to the leftie that what they want is an expression of lofty ideals and impeccable virtues.
That's why the debacle of the Connecticut primary that knocked Senator Lieberman off the Democratic ticket made no impression. From the point of view of lefties it was the right thing to do. Senator Lieberman had to be punished and the only way open to the lefties was to knock him out of the primary. If there were any repercussions from that action well, to bad. Knocking Lieberman out was the right thing to do.
From my point of view it was a wonderful occurence.
Not only did the uber-left demonstrate their rigidity and worse, unreasonableness but they didn't get what they were, ultimately, aiming for: supplanting Senator Lieberman. So they've demonstrated that a) you can't do business with them and they b) turned out to be ineffective. If they didn't have a pile of money on their side, in the form of George Soros and Andrew McKelvey.
This isn't surprising. The DNC and the folks at Moveon.org have had a great deal of success in controlling the message via mainstream media. They think they are calling the shots-especially sites like The Daily Kos. So it's probably pretty alarming for them to find out that they may have their own maverick candidate to deal with. It will be interesting to see if the DNC demands that he follow along or if he chooses to go to the middle and risk getting nominated. Lord knows that the DNC doesn't have much recent experience with putting candidates in office. But payback down the line, could be a problem. I still say he's going to have a great deal of political baggage in terms of expected outcome after the election. And when those folks don't get their due, there will be a price to pay. Remember what happened to LBJ. They eat their own.
I don't plan on voting for Obama, but I have to admit that he seems to have a pretty sensible strategy going for getting elected. If you're a Dem, the far left of your party will win you the nomination; but the center-right will win you the general election. So you pander to the far left until you sew up the nomination, then back off and pander to the center-right until November. You lose the Far Left in the general election, but so what? There's not enough of them to counter the influx of center-right votes you pick up. Or, maybe you don't lose the Far Left because there is not a trace of humility or sense in them, and they'll never admit that they got snookered by Obama, and they'll vote for Obama anyway just to save face.
Not a bad strategy, assuming it's intentional and not just random flip-flopping that happens by sheer luck to work to Obama's advantage.
Pandering, as you've described it, is another word for lying, and I can't stomach that.
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