You are completely right. The traditional liberal platform on abortion has always included reduction, and would have had more success in this respect if it were not for mouth-breathing troglodytes who oppose contraception, family planning, and the very mention of sex. To suggest otherwise is to give credence to the idea that those evil far-left liberals just love abortion for the hell of it because they enjoy killing babies and feasting on their remains (see http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33680 and http://www.theonion.com/content/node/32930).

So all that the Democrats' "new approach" seems to amount to is pandering to the right-wingers' knee-jerk emotional attitudes by going out of their way to tsk-tsk abortion a bit more and punctuate every discussion of it with an extra mention of how sad and awful it is. On a logical level, I wouldn't mind this if it was enough to shut up some of the opposition and didn't involve an actual change in policy. But then again, I'm not a woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. And if this attitude becomes the prevalent one in abortion discourse, then it's easy to imagine that many women will feel cowed into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term by the stigma coming from both sides, even the pro-choice crowd.

Good words, as usual. However, in your praise of compromise, you ignore one of its drawbacks. The fact that a lot of people hold a certain view does not in itself make the view valuable, viable, or worthy of compromising with. What a lot of people seem to forget is that we are a constitutional democracy rather than a brute tyranny of the majority. What this means is that those views that directly contradict the principles of the Constitution must be challenged and defended against rather than met halfway. This is the most disappointing thing about the FISA capitulation, and there are other issues on which compromise is simply not an option.

Compromise is only part of the equation. It is an important means for achieving incremental positive results in the short term. But a political candidate is useless if he cannot combine this with a long-term project of redefining the debate on his own terms, staying true to the ideals of those who elected him, and winning people over to his side, as Bush unfortunately proved rather capable of doing for at least four years. We should certainly expect nothing less of a skilled orator like Obama, who should be using his skill to show people why progressive positions and policies are better for them and for the country.

A politician governed purely by pragmatism is a worthless weather vane. I do still hold out the hope that beneath his talk of compromise, Obama maintains an agenda of eventually pushing the country in a more progressive direction. But I can understand the skepticism of others. Only time will tell.

Why would you even bother replying to someone who begins his post with "Barack Hussein Obama" and insists on using that formulation throughout? You really think someone like that is interested in rational debate or has an honest opinion? It's pretty obviously the work of a Republican tool working for some obscure 527 and getting paid by the hour to troll websites with these poorly crafted "concerned citizen" posts.

News Flash: The "Hussein" thing is so 2007. You guys really need to get your act together if you want to run a decent swiftboat.

Glenn, this always strikes me when reading your posts: on the one hand, it seems obvious that the majority of Americans want to get out of Iraq and think it was a bad idea. But on the other hand, if this were simply the case, then why would it matter what the media says and how they frame the issue? If the "American people" were really so against the war, wouldn't they just ignore all this tripe and vote Obama overwhelmingly? But then you have the fact that McCain is still doing relatively well in matchup polls, and the polls that say a majority of Americans 'trust' McCain to 'handle' the war and national security better than Obama. What do you make of this? What it suggests to me is an electorate where the majority are not sure of their own opinions, hold self-contradictory views, and can be easily swayed simply by the wording of an issue. But I'd like to hear your analysis.

I could swear I read about this over a year ago, and I had actually assumed that I read it in Broadsheet.