Obama:

Voted for increased defense spending (not surprising, but he's no courageous progressive here)

Voted to kill an amendment that would have limited credit card interest rates at 30% (!) and he gets more bank money than most in the Senate (why would they give him that money? they like his charisma?).

Voted for the industry loving 2005 energy bill

These bills had major ramifications. He has also voted for a lot of feel-good bills that don't change much. If we don't distinguish between meaningful votes and votes that are only good for campaigning, then we are cheerleaders, not participants in our own policy.

I'm not here to bash Obama. Like I said, I'll vote for him. But he is not a progressive champion (Hillary is no better -- her votes on important matters are often bad, while her ones on fluff look better). He has largely run away from his progressive tendencies in Illinois in order to get corporate funding and "fit in" in the U.S. Senate. Perhaps he's just doing what he needs to do in order to win, but I think it's a loss for this nation not to be able to cast an informed vote for a progressive.

My main point is that we -- liberals -- need to work harder to make our politicians better. We can't just call our party better and assume that our politicians are intrinsically good. That's transparently naive.

I think we disagree here, though I'm open to persuasion.

Looking through the votes you and others have cited, I don't see a lot of important stuff. I see easy votes; not one of them risks political capital -- grandstanding against Iran and "deceptive practices" at voting locations? Sticking up for families who have wounded soldiers? Not that these are bad sentiments, but he could have fought more vocally for much more substantive measures related to these issues (guaranteed medical care w/funding for soldiers, or campaign finance reform when it comes to elections). As it is, these are votes that do more good on the campaign trail than in the real world.

I guess I'm a little jaded seeing this kind of stuff all the time: good-sounding votes that run around the edges of our nation's major moral vacuums. I just think we should expect more -- especially out of our great hopes, like Obama.

Will he fight back against the charges that he is liberal by pointing out how friendly to industry he is, or will he embrace the label and point out what it means?

There are suggestions he might do the latter. Let's hope so, because it is the only way to keep the terrorists from winning.

You wrote:

I see an opening for change with Obama that doesn't come along with the high negatives of Clinton.

I agree with you absolutely here. And I am holding out hope that once he gets in there he will use his mandate for change to do more than anyone expects.

...McCain deserves it.

He is the farthest thing from a straight talker -- he just plays one on TV. On issue after issue, whether process or policy related, he is all over the map. He is a corrupt bag man for industry and has no integrity.

The statement from his campaign is laughable. Because he claims the high road, he should not get bad press -- even if true? It's not like the facts at issue in the story don't bear directly on his campaign: doing favors for money contradicts his avowed raison d'etre and the likely philandering is clearly fair game for the party that impeached a president for a blow job.

Not only does McCain lie big, but I think he actually believes his own lies, which lends credibility to the suggestion that he was sleeping with this lobbyist.

If you listen to his denial that he has ever done anything to disgrace his office, you get the sense that he believes it as he says it -- as if the Keating scandal never happened, and was not widely reported. He is fucked in the head.

And he lies all the time, about everything, and reporters don't call him on it because he's John McCain. Let's hope that changes today.

(One of my favorite McCain whoppers is when he defends his opposition to Bush's tax cuts by saying they weren't paid for, like Reagan's. Of course it is a matter of public record that Reagan more than quadrupled our debt with his tax cuts, which he was forced to undo in his second term. Too bad everyone let's McCain get away with the lie.)

Let me preface by saying that I think McCain is a dangerous, trigger-happy prevaricator. And I'll add that you, Glenn, hit my priorities out of the park more than any other blogger.

In this post, you contrast McCain's argument to keep on the table the bombing of nations the U.S. opposes (rightly or wrongly) with Obama's claim that he would bomb a nation with which the U.S. is allied. Those are two different things.

Personally, I think the distinctions are meaningless, but if you're making charges of hypocrisy then what matters is whether McCain thinks those distinctions have meaning.

I think you let your partisan emotions chip away at the logical consistency you usually deploy, Glenn. If McCain is a hypocrite here, you haven't provided the evidence. And McCain is big fucking hypocrite in a million other ways.

I am also a little disappointed about your calling anyone "the 9/11 attackers" in the context of extrajudicial killings. As a lawyer, you shouldn't gloss over the murder of people George Bush claims are guilty without a trial, regardless of whose political interests the bloodlust serves.