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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Give the guy a break, and all you leftists, snap out of it, for gosh sakes! The coasts may be full of far-left "progressives" but the majority of the people in this country are centrist. Why do you think people loved Clinton? Because he was able to work across party lines and get stuff done.
The last few Democratic Presidents are:
Obama (now)
Clinton
Carter
Johnson
Kennedy
All of these men were CENTRIST! There's a reason McGovern and Mondale aren't on the damn list! Even Reagan had a great working partnership with Tip O'Neill.
Politics is the art of compromise.
As a life long Conservative, it strikes me that you 'Progressives' may have been 'fooled'. We could be sitting here in 12 months, watching a far-left Congress battling a conservative-acting President.
The hysterical laughing sound you hear in 2009 will be Republicans...
Ok, everyone. I am so tired of the whiny whiny liberal tone of salon lately. Grow up, Traister! Grow up Madden. We all knew he was going to govern from the center. We need the center. The center is what won this election.
Hello, we're in a culture war! We have been for decades, and sorry, the left hasn't been winning it. This is a chance to get beyond some of that alienation, and some of the alienating politics, and get some middle of the road things-- like health care and the environment-- taken care of AT ALL. So let's do it.
Remember how fast Clinton started the Gingrich revolution? Our country and congress can't take an Obama who is going to alienate the right. Let him govern from the center. Stop heckling. Work for progressive change in other ways than mudslinging the president-- and his wife for staying home, for heaven's sake.
Well said, sir. You echo my feeling almost exactly. I will add this to all the "OhMyGodding" going on here. Change, fundamental change has already come to Washington and to America because WE THE PEOPLE have evolved enough to take a major step away from our tortured history with race and toward something new and different. Now we could have elected a black Republican man or a white woman (Sarah Palin?) from the GOP, and called ourselves evolved, but we went a step further. We chose someone who was not only black, but bi-racial, reflective of our diverse, multi-ethnic society, and who is, quite frankly the smartest guy in just about any room. But wait, there's more. Not only is he brilliant, colossally gifted, and cool under fire, he is also having the discussion and framing the discussion about the issues that liberals and center-left progressives have been craving for most of the last decade if not longer. I mean the issues of climate change, universal access to affordable health care, and economic justice. He's not only talking about them, he's planning to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM beginning with the first day he's sworn into office as President. Did it actually ever occur to anyone on the left that once someone who lived up to our aspirations had the power to do something, that he would do something other than say, approve marijuana for medicinal purposes? Seriously?
Did it never occur to anyone that such a person might give serious thought to how things have been and begin to move back to the center and towards something that works for everyone? My point is, my brothers and sisters, we have knocked it out of the park electing this guy. The problem is that we are also suffering from a right wing hangover. The debate got so extreme in this country that anything that isn't the other extreme looks too "compromising" and "soft". Barack Obama owes a lot philosophically to the brain trust that served President Clinton so ably in the 1990s. I think the most balanced way to look at his nascent administration is that this is the next logical step forward for the ideas that Clinton championed but could not push far enough due to Republican resistance. It makes perfect sense that he would call on some of those people, including Madame Clinton to fill key posts, as well as people from his own political backyard in Chicago. These are the actions of a gifted and shockingly smart man who is refreshingly free of ego and the baggage that trips the Clintons up. Oh, and he's a pretty decent speaker, too. So, superlatives aside, I would submit that progressive governance looks a bit like competence, common sense, and the right judgment about the challenges we face, and a bit less like rigid ideology left or right. Now with all due repect to Mr. Madden and Mr. Greenwald and his thoughtful, cautionary analysis, Y'ALL NEED TO CHILL!
He has been elected for a couple of weeks, and I have heard nothing but whining coming from my fellow Dems...
He is not the President of the Progressive states. He is President of far left, far right, center left, center right, and independents and all others in this country. He said he will put the best and the brightest in his Cabinet. Right now, we need to stick together and not just go all crazy on the liberal side. Tough times ahead, people. Stop whining!
First, Bill Clinton came from nothing but smarts as much or more than Obama. Obama's mother and father both had graduate degrees and his grandmother was vice-president of a bank. Clinton's grandparents owned a small grocery store where they were famous for extending credit to blacks as well as whites who were down on their luck, and his mother was a nurse.
Second, Hillary Clinton did NOT support the war. Their are lot of interviews and speeches in which she (and Bill) said DON'T INVADE IRAQ, DON'T INVADE IRAQ. She supported giving Bush the right to THREATEN invasion to get the inspectors back in to AVOID war. They went back in because of the threat, but Bush, lying bastard that he is invaded anyway.
Third, both Clinton's actually are liberals. But after his first 2 years of governing as a liberal, Bill faced a hostile Republican Congress and so was forced to compromise to get any of his programs through, including an increase in the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit. As a Southerner he knew that you had to talk like a moderate to get in and pass a liberal agenda. He did. Hillary is more a product of the liberal social gospel movement from the turn of the last century. They were Christians who believed that Jesus cared about "suffer the little children to come unto me," and "I was naked and you did not clothe me..." rather than Evangelicals of recent time who believed Jesus cared most about stoning homosexuals and women who had abortions.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
