If Obama is merely pandering, that's bad enough. If he's sincere, that's worse. His stance on FISA along is excellent reason to not vote for him, though of course not reason to vote McCain.

Yes, Obama's policies seem less offensive than McCain's, but then how do we know what Obama's policies really are? I don't know? Do you? Are you sure?

I live in Democratic-safe California, so he doesn't need my vote (and his recent behavior suggests he doesn't want it), but I pity those in swing states who have to vote for him as the lesser of evils. He knows that, too, which is why he can pander his ass off and know he still gets the votes he needs - those voters have no one else to turn to. This is cynical politics at its worst.

I've always taken offense at his sophism about the '60s. If not for the '60s, he wouldn't be the Democratic nominee, plain and simple. He would have grown up the victim of a much more racist culture. He may not have been able to go to Harvard. He wouldn't have the degree of free speech he has now. He would not have absorbed the importance of and right to dissent. He would not have understood the need to avoid pointless war (I'm still not sure he does...). He may not have even been able to listen to the kind of music he likes. He would not have been able to benefit from the struggles and victories of feminism and the civil rights movement and environmentalism.

All these things show how rigid American society was before the '60s and just how drastically the youth of the '60s changed life in America, building on both the guarantees in our liberal Constitution and the successes of those who fought the same battles before them, through the centuries, to essentially break the bonds of a conformity that suppressed basic liberties.

Yet when he speaks of these times, he labels them "divisive," barely acknowledging the importance of dissent. When he says the debate about patriotism "remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s" he ignores the fact that it is the conservatives who are still fighting those wars - they have never accepted their defeat; meanwhile, the culture has moved on, and civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, environmentalism, freedom to choose your own way of life - all these have been incorporated into the collective culture, to its great benefit.

But conservatives are so intent on reversing these freedoms that they continue to bring up the '60s as the time when America lost its bearings, and when Obama echoes this canard, he becomes one of those whose reactionary policies we have been suffering under since Reagan and especially for the last eight years. Conservatives have been trying to reverse the progress that began in the '60s, and it is they who are still fighting the Vietnam War.

It is these regressive, anti-liberty policies and reversals we're trying to shake off with this election, and the more Obama talks like a conservative, the less hope I have - anyone should have - that he will truly be any different. The list of his positions in the last two weeks that Glenn Greenwald has assembled should give all of his supporters real pause.