1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue.
2. He [never had] the ability to make the experience argument.
3. He never defined himself as a principled [liberal].
4. Erratic and incoherent, he lack[s] sufficient [courage].
July 20, 2009
How Obama lost me.
Meade writes the (inevitable) post for me:
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401 Frist!
God was number 400. I knew he was watching.
The big question right now is can moderate "blue dog" Democrats be bought off with pork projects AND keep it out of the media. One has to think that Boener and Cantor won't let that go quietly.
Alex,
I guess you don't get sarcasm much.
moneyrunner - whatever. I just know that myself and other atheist people I know are willing to overlook Palin's foibles as long as she is not an outright nutter.
Chip Ahoy,,
I'm told God can take care of himself. But I'm totally serious about God and Ann.
It's a cultural thing.
Did anyone notice that the passionless President Obama has quietly gone straight to the step of simply commanding that the Israeli State to stop construction of jewish owned residential projects inside Jerusalem? No mention of that being inside the Jewish capital city or a right for Jews to live there or not. Just do it! The last thing our President Obama seems to lack is a purpose. He has courage to support a putch by a Chavez style tyrant for no American political benefit. He also has enough courage to support the Tyrants ruling in Iran for no American political benefit. This man has a plan, and we are only pawns in that game plan.
Alex,
That's the point. What are her foibles and what makes her a "nutter?"
In comparison, say, to Biden?
Some tips for libertarian/conservative Obama voters who find themselves surprised that the Bill Ayers-palling Chicago community activist turned out to be an inexperienced, economically-illiterate radical:
1) Stoves are hot. Don't touch them.
2) Never pet a tiger.
3) If your date's five previous wives have all died under mysterious circumstances, don't go on a second date.
Let me repeat: Obama is a good looking black guy who gives a great speech and uses good English. Vs. an old white guy whose base is composed of evangelical Christians and who chooses as his running mate another evangelical Christian who can be ridiculed on SNL and slammed by the NY Times.
What’s liberal white woman in academia to do?
The obvious thing to prove she’s not a racist and culturally superior.
Don't over-think this. All the rest of the reasoning is sophistry once the cultural issues decide the issue.
With his approval sinking this fast, any day now Chris Matthews will begin calling Obama America's first half white president.
You'll know it's over when Letterman and Stewart turn on him.
moneyrunner - yes I agree with you that the overarching reason for Althouse and her like to have voted for Obama is white liberal guilt. No doubt in my mind. She will never admit it.
traditionalguy - fortunately Bibi Netanyahu doesn't take orders from America easily. Besides there are Jews in high places(Eric Cantor) that will help out.
Just to play devil's advocate here, couldn't it be that Althouse voted for Obama because McCain was such a piece of shit candidate?
She's all into reading carefully. So note that the post back then was about how McCain lost her. What does that suggest? Well, it suggests that once McCain was not lost to her, but then he became so, It doesn't suggest that she became enamored with Obama. In fact, she wanted to vote for Romney.
I don't stalk you Althouse. Just a good memory.
I also note that I voted for McCain rather glumly.
It's all Bush's fault.
It really is!
Seven Machos,
Note that I gave as the reason for Ann’s decision had as much to do with the culture that McCain/Palin represented as the Liberal woman’s attraction to the attributes of Obama. Once those feelings were implanted in her mind, she could then ignore all of Obama’s other flaws including the people surrounding and shaping him.
Yeah Althouse was never an Obamabot. She just voted for the lesser of two evils in her opinion.
Let's hope the country can reject far right and far left and get back to basics. Fix one thing then go to work and fix one more thing.
It is not that hard to fix soc sec or Medicare. It just takes balls from someone to tell the people the hard truth ...."there is no free lunch".
This Jim DeMint sounds promising to me and Tom Coburn too.
What will become of Obama in 2012? An ex-president at age 50 or 51? Can you say alcoholic has been? Does that explain why Jimmy Carter is so bitter? He was about 55 maybe?
Where is Jeremy to ride to his defense?
AJ Lynch - the American people do not want to hear those words "no free lunch". The first politician to say that is a losing politician. You say insane? I say it's human nature to want a free lunch, and maybe dinner.
Seven Machos,
Note that I’m not disagreeing with you – I think – unless you’re implying that Ann simply did not want to vote for someone who ran a poor campaign. I don’t think she’s that shallow. Like most people, she lets her feelings make up her mind and then uses reason and logic to justify her gut.
That’s the most charitable explanation I have for people like Ann. Logic had nothing to do with choosing Obama in the first place.
Regarding Obama's sole executive experience, at the helm of the $120million (!) Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), of which a superficial, in-house post-facto evaluation showed zero positive actual outcomes...
FDolwing the project's completion, the full CAC archives were given over to the library of U. Illinois at Chicago, the public university at which the execrable William Ayers not-so-coincidentally teaches.
Righty but eminently respectable academic scholar Stanley Kurtz (Harvard Ph. D. in Anthropology) got permission to access the CAC archives, which the University then unexpectedly withdrew from Kurtz, claiming the donor (i.e., the CAC)hadn't authorized what would amount to oppo research. The sh.. then seriously hit the fan all over the center right blogosphere, the University quickly relented, and Kurtz was invited to present his findings on Milt Rosenberg's (spp??) WGN-AM call-in talk show, which has been running for several decades. Milt was a prof emeritus at U. Chicago with impeccably liberal sentiments; and to counterbalance Kurtz's perspective, contacted Obamazoid Central in Chicago to provide a second speaker on that show. They declined for spurious reasons, but mobilized instead a denial of service attck on the aWGN phone lines, with preposterous pre-digested talking points for those few callers who actually got through, highlighting Kurtz as an "evil" liar and threatening WGN with an FCC regulatory hit for inviting such a terrible man to voice his twisted views. Milt was shocked shocked shocked, never having experienced such an excercise in not-so-soft Stalinism in all his years on the radio. Of course the mainstream media gave zero coverage to this highly indicative epsiode. Go Google it. The whole two-hour show is probably still accessible on the WGN Chicago website.
Money -- Althouse is a Democrat from Madison, Wisconsin. Not too surprising that she'd vote for the Democrat when presented with a crappy Republican candidate.
What about McCain did you like? I mean, really. Let's not go and lionize this guy. He was the worst candidate for president since Walter Mondale, and he lost accordingly.
Seven Machos,
What was it about McCain that I liked? Not much. I voted against Obama. I told my friends that I voted for Palin and the guy who was on her ticket.
I predict (as someone famous already has) Obama will blow his cool on camera or in front of an open mike. He will reveal, once and for all, his true petulant, arrogant socialist-knows-best mindset. Then it will be in the open for all to see.
That will end the upward trajectory of his career.
So it's cultural for you also. ;]
"Anyone who backed this guy against McCain who is just now "waking up" is either dense or dishonest. I don't think of Ann Althouse as dense."
Touché, sir!!!
Direct hit, sir!!!
(I now return to my practice of ignoring the trendy poseur Ann Althouse)
Millions of us recognized that Obama was clueless? How can a law professor get sucked in?
Actually, the more "educated" or "intellectual" one is, the more easily one is fooled by yer basic hucksters. Magicians all know that the easiest mark is an academic, because academics never think in terms of subterfuge.
moneyrunner
You are Totally Correct.
Good Analysis.
I can only hope that Obama is a one-term president. I am utterly confident that McCain would have been a one-term president.
How did things work out for Quayle, Mondale, and Charles Curtis?
You Palin Phanatics need to be careful what you wish for your star prodigy.
428 "comments" and the post was not even written... I mean 'authored' ;) by Althouse.
Nice going Meade.
Seven machos...That's the nicest thing you ever called Palin: a prodigy! Thanks for your support.
As I recall, Althouse said she was voting for Obama because he would be pragmatic. I never understood where she got the idea that he was pragmatic but that was what she said.
I just would like to hear what it was about Zero that made her think he would be pragmatic and how is that working out in practice. He sure doesn't seem pragmatic to me at all. He just seems as if he farmed out his policy to the House and Senate and he will decide his position by how the polls respond to them. No pragmatism there at all. Those of us who paid attention to Obama back then and did some research IMNSHO saw through all this and realized that he would be just what he is - a cipher.
You're supposed to invest the minimal effort to figure this shit out before you vote, dildo. He LOST you? How about you f**ked up? As in, Big Time.
I don't know anybody who follows current affairs who pulled that boner. Now go pull yours.
Althouse is a woman. If you are going to use sexualized insult, please call her a twat.
Thank you.
No, sometimes it is best to see Democrats working in the clear, without the benefit a smokescreen like McCain would give them. Let them explain their far left socialist programs without McCain rising and saying "My friends! My friends! This is the best consensus we Republicans and my dear Democrat friends could forge, given the 2006 and 2008 Elections!
In the short term it may be worse, but a President McCain would have perhaps made the long-term worse - legitimizing every thing he assented to from "old colleagues" Pelosi, Feingold, Schumer, and "dear special friend Joe Lieberman".
----------------
Moneyrunner - What was it about McCain that I liked? Not much. I voted against Obama. I told my friends that I voted for Palin and the guy who was on her ticket.
Makes as much sense as a woman I know who Disliked Bush and especially Kerry - but voted for Kerry because "John" (Edwards) "was so cute and dreamy".
----------------
traditionalguy said...
Did anyone notice that the passionless President Obama has quietly gone straight to the step of simply commanding that the Israeli State to stop construction of jewish owned residential projects inside Jerusalem? No mention of that being inside the Jewish capital city or a right for Jews to live there or not. Just do it!
The problem with swallowing Zionist propaganda is no one outside US "religious Right" people actually believe it. It contains too many lies.
The problem with swallowing Zionist propaganda is no one outside US "religious Right" people actually believe it. It contains too many lies.
7/20/09 10:41 PM
God I wish blogger had an ignore feature so I could be rid of your antisemitic Nazi ass once and for all.
Here's a jaw-dropper.
What else are they trying to slide under the door in the dark of night?
If McCain had been elected we'd probably be at war with Russia and/or Iran.
Obama will be dangerous in the short-run - until 2010. OTOH, McCain would have a long term disaster of epic proportions. He would have absolutely destroyed the Republican party.
Sadly, the Repubs haven't learned their lesson. Right now they want to nominate another "moderate" old white man in a business suit whose flipped flopped on 100 issues - a guaranteed loser - Mitt Romney.
If McCain was president, we'd probably have food shortages and 50 percent unemployment and all manner of rancid disease as well as war with Russia and Iran.
All equally plausible.
I doubt unemployment would be at 50 percent or food shortages.
But given McCain's love of war, his attacks on Putin, his comments "We are all Georgians" and his belligerent threats against Iran "Bomb, bomb,bomb Iran" - I have doubt war would've broken out with Crazy McCain at the helm.
Ah, yes, Bomb, bomb,bomb Iran. Definitely a threat. Definitely.
That was actual text in a major foreign policy speech, right?
rcocean, people said the same thing about Reagan -- that we'd be at war with the Soviet Union in no time.
The Soviets believed it too -- and spent themselves into oblivion. McCain was just crazy enough to scare the shit out of the right people.
Holy Molly Rocky, are we going to hit 500 comments, of which some were not vomited by Jeremy and his alter-ego lad suck-ups.
Of course, when "Obama Health Care" fails, when "Obama Cap and Trade Tax-it into oblivion" fails, when his administration's transparency become oblique, when there are not enough hours in the year to read one of those God Awful complicated twisted bills, when the nightly news no longer headlines Obama's plans. things night begin to seem failing and out of sorts. That's the time to re-think Obama's strategy, perhaps.
Meanwhile be of good cheer and pray for certitude and honesty in all things
You know, I've waited and waited for this post, and now that it's come, I just don't have a "I-told-you-so" in me.
It doesn't matter why Obama ever had you in the first place. And it doesn't matter whether your vote against McCain was the correct strategy all along (as it prevented an unsuccessful McCain from dragging the conservative movement down with him). All that matters now is: How do we rid ourselves of Obama, now that he's dug himself in like a tick? He'll have 120% turnout in Cleveland in 2012, and more cover from the media than Hitler had from Goebbels.
How do we rid ourselves of him before he completely destroys the country?
Pastaf,
I don't know who was more scared of McCain being elected - foreign leaders or the US voters.
McCain isn't just a crazy old coot who likes to talk loudly, and carry a little stick, he really means what he says.
Seven Machos...You are intelligent in your comments. But what is it about US projecting a strong and believable military power to the world that you believe starts wars? The wars are ALWAYS started by a vacuum of projected power and a belief in its use. In other words Obama's strategy of non-confrontation is a method of starting wars all over this world as soon as our allies one by one leave us for leaving them unprotected. Of course Hillary can beg them not to go their own way since she has apologised for using our power to protect them in the past. And every good liberal knows that all you need is love.
We get rid of Obama by fighting like Hell. No reaching across the aisle, no phony 'bi-partisanship'.
Hopefully, in 2010 we can elect enough Republicans to stop the bleeding. Then in 2012 nominate a real conservative. Someone wtih a track record of political success and who is both social and an economic conservative. No Bob Doles.
Traditional -- You got me figured wrong. Myh war policy is this: (1) Try to avoid them. (2) When you make them, destroy the enemy utterly. (3) Reconstruct them as your ally, protectorate, part of your country, etc. -- as a United States clone.
Great. Just great.
NOW you figure out that Obama is exactly what his detractors said he was.
Here's what I don't get: how is that so many supposedly smart people got taken by the Con Artist in Chief? It's not like he had a record of success actually running anything.
This is what Red State America doesn't get about Blue State America... you keep telling us you're so smart and waving all those fancy degrees to prove it, and yet you don't really have a clue, do you?
Was there really anyone LESS qualified than Obama running in 2008? Certainly no one on the GOP side. Huckabee, Palin, Thompson, Romney, McCain... every single one of them could point to significant accomplishments. What could Obama point at? I mean, really? Editor of the Harvard Law Review? Maybe his performance running the Chicago Annenberg Challenge... oh, wait, that was a TOTAL failure. What did Obama actually DO?
Right now Obama's best weapon is the RNC.
I'm a lapsed Democrat (I switched parties after 30+ years to vote for Palin and whats-his-name), but I'm still on most of their mailing lists.
While the mainstream voices of the Democratic party are calling to their voters to end the power of the GOP in Washington forever, Michael Steele and John Cornyn are endorsing and supporting RINO's like Crist, who announced he would have voted for the stimulus in the same week Californians from BOTH parties rejected every tax proposal set before them, for the Senate, along with a Congressman (Kirk) who voted yes on cap and trade.
They are utterly tone deaf to anything except their own insider politics and oblivious to the demands of their voters.
Obama represents the kind of mistake one makes when trying to vote for an individual, parsing angels on pinpoints and so on, rather than simply deciding "This is my view of the world, these are the principles by which I believe this country should be run, which candidate better fits that structure?"
I found it odd in the extreme that individuals that pride themselves on their judgment could not realize that the public Obama was the tip of the iceberg, the ten percent of the man that Axelrod and Plouffe and the NY Times wanted you to see. That the Brookses and the Chris Buckleys and so on would fail to understand this, that they'd fail to realize that the greater mass kept artfully submerged might not much resemble the sun-burnished crest visible to the world, left me completely baffled.
McCain was in no way my idea of a perfect President; I'd have preferred Romney, I'd have preferred Rudy, I'd have preferred Palin in the White House. But given a fundamental, ironclad belief that in Chicago politics only the scum rises to the top, and a philosophy of governance that's center-libertarian domestically and somewhere to the right of Curtis LeMay on foreign policy, the choice was clear.
Wow.
451
And the trolls are silent.
And people are posting who have lurked forever.
And there are probably some new people wandering in from Instapundit...
As for what else is being slid under the door BJM, (or under the side of the tent?) how about the "you must talk with a doctor (or whoever) every 5 years about how you are going to die with dignity."
Or else? Like what are they going to do? Fine you if you don't talk? Make you do community service and pick up trash on the side of the road? Make you read stories or feed people who can't feed themselves? [Scratch that, there won't be any of those. They will have already "died with dignity."]
What if I don't WANT to "die with dignity" Mmmm?
Talk about totally creepy.
Having the government set you on a schedule about something like that is so Orwellian.
Does anyone else see that?
Who are these people who are writing these bills??
Obama spent 20 years in close association with an America-hating (well, white America anyhow) anti-Semite (his spiritual guide, mentor and political advisor--Obama himself said he never made a move without first consulting with Rev. Wright) and immersed in an anti-white, anti-Semitic, Marxist theology.
Obama learned politics from operatives in the most corrupt political machine in the country. When asked about securing his first elective office by having his opponents eliminated on technicalities (something which surely would have earned a "dirty trick" label had it been done by, say, Dick Nixon), Obama said "I believe if you can win, you should win."
Obama spent a lifetime surrounded, tutored, mentored and supported by ultra-liberals, leftists and radicals. He has spent his entire life in the society of fellow liberals having his own liberal ideology reinforced; they and it are his mainstream. Academia, politics and community organizing have been his sole milieux.
Obama completed his education, won a couple of elections, wrote (maybe) a well-received memoir and gave a few over-rated speeches. Those were the sum total of his accomplishments. He never ran anything, much less a business that had to concern itself with things like meeting a payroll and making a profit. The only executive experience he had was presiding over the Law Review and evaluating and distributing Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants. He made no discernible mark on the Law Review and, by its own evaluation, the CAC and the various programs it funded were abject failures.
Obama's handlers, supporters and sycophants said none of that mattered. They said he could emerge from the muck and mire of Rev. Wright's church and the Chicago machine unscathed. They said he was from that environment but not of it. They said his thin resume and lack of any real achievement or experience were immaterial because he was so very brilliant and talented and wise even though they could point to no concrete evidence of such. They said that contrary to everything we knew about him to the contrary, he was a man of the middle and would govern like a moderate. He himself invited us to project our hopes and dreams on his purposely blank screen. They all assured us that he was, indeed, the one we'd been waiting for. And a bunch of supposedly intelligent critical thinkers bought it and now they're trying, rather unsuccessfully, to explain why.
Ironically, the two people who had Obama pegged were his Vice President and wife: the candidate Obama was a story-book mainstream, articulate, bright, clean, nice-looking African-American who "hadn't done anything."
Ms. Althouse,
I am either sorry to see it took you so long to see what many of us already knew or happy to see you have come to your senses. I have not decided which.
As a Chicago resident, I take exception to this twaddle about Obama being part of our machine. Our machine gets the garbage hauled away and cleans the streets and educates any kid willing to learn keeps the city aesthetically pleasing. We got problems (gun control, gangs, absurd taxes, etc) but I'll put my city's machine up against your sorry excuse for local government any day.
No way Obama was part of my beloved city's machine.
jal -
"Having the government set you on a schedule about something like that is so Orwellian."
I was just talking about this with my wife earlier. I can't help but believe that there is something inherently evil about people cavalierly talking about making decisions about whether other people live and die based on cost decisions.
In the current private healthcare system, people make those decisions for themselves - as it should be. Should we take out a second mortgage or take on medical bills for another six months of precious life?
Now we hear Leftists talking about life and death decisions like they're assets and liabilities to be arranged on a balance sheet to their liking instead of intensely personal decisions which no sane person would hand over to an incompetent and unfeeling government bureaucracy.
It's evil. Pure and simple. Those that would impose a system on others that would do something like imposing the mandatory pentannual "death with dignity" meetings have an essential piece of their souls missing. It makes me sad to think there are so many who so cavalierly dismiss the elderly as if they have an expiration date. I thought better of many of these people. I thought, we just have different visions of what's best for the country. We each believe the other is mistaken, but there is no malice involved.
I'm sorry. But if there is no malice in actively encourage our elders to die so that we can better balance our books, then the word malice no longer has any meaning.
Alex said...
The problem with swallowing Zionist propaganda is no one outside US "religious Right" people actually believe it. It contains too many lies.
7/20/09 10:41 PM
God I wish blogger had an ignore feature so I could be rid of your antisemitic Nazi ass once and for all..
The pity is that if you Zionists had been more honest, your support would have been broader.
1. Convincing the guillable that Jews are only colonized private, Jewish-owned property in East Jerusalem is a whopper. It was an illegal annexation condemned by even the USA in UN Res 242. Then in UN Sec Council Res 248. The land is captured, occupied land, taken over by the Jewish Government and sold to wealthy real estate developers to "establish more facts on the ground".
2. Jerusalem is not recognized by any other nation as the Jewish Capital, in large part due to the Land thefts and illegal settlements (15 with 160,000 people) in East Jerusalem. The Zionists tried bribing a few small Latin countries to give them the veneer or respectability...but they decamped and joined other nations in putting embassies in Tel Aviv.
It's that odious. And the Hague ruled that any nation that officially recognizes Jerusalem as the Jewish capital before restrictions agreed to and ignored by the Israelis are resolved - that nation is in violation of Geneva.
3. That didn't stop Palin and McCain, salivating over Religious Right & AIPAC money, from declaring their support of recognizing the conquest and annexation of East Jerusalem....And ignoring the ethnic cleansing going on there, and bars against non-Jews settling in any capacity in Jerusalem except as government-permitted residents.
Even Bush rejects that. Now Obamam a string of consistent policy going back to LBJ.
Like all other Presidents, he is holding to the Final Status of Jerusalem will be determined in negotiations...not by a pack of right-wing Zionists demanding "new facts on the ground" or for the US to just "Shut up, and give your Special Friend - the money and military hardware."
Those rich goddaamn Jews in 1948. The nerve of those callous fucks. Right after a war too!
What are we going to do about this Jewish Problem, Cedarford? Do you have a Final Solution in mind?
It's almost as if he has some animus against Jews, but since that's anti-Semitism, that can't be, right?
Maybe there are other issues? No dreidel in the cradel, perhaps?
seven,
I used to ignore Cedarford, then i would read his anti-semitic comments and think simply that he was racist.
I have rad his comment all this last week, and now I truly believe that he has a screw loose. He is mostly incoherent and poorly reasoned in almost everything he writes.
His comments are a tremendous waste of time. I don;t even want to waste 30 seconds of my day anymore putting such tripe and crap in to my conscious mind.
"1. He did not understand economics, the most important issue."
It was a triumph of self-delusion to believe that he did BEFORE the election.
Law professors generally have an IQ in the 140-150 range.
And yet many people some 2 SD lower figured out who Obama was.
This is the ultimate argument against statism. The elites have no clothes.
I call bullshit on the law professor IQ range - I would be surprised if it was much over 100, even 110 would be shocking.
Most of them, like Ann, are government droids, unable or unwilling to take any risk or run a business. They just feed at the trough and vote for whomever they think will provide the most slops. Enjoy!
Ann,
What of these things are surpises? Some have noted here that they were saying these things last year, but if you look at your own state of mind when voting, *didn't you know these things yourself last year?*
Didn't you vote for Obama *in spite of these things,* rather than believing something different about him?
If so, then this isn't how Obama lost you, it's just how you explain it now.
All of the evidence pointed to psychopathic narcissism, and it was very clear from the start. We had the very same thing with Bill Clinton. The lib-fascists are addicted to this borderline personality type. The lib-fascists are enablers. Every psychopath seeks out these weak personalities who are attracted by the charisma, their ability to turn every situation to their favor, the need for power and control.
Didn't you even get a teensy bit of a clue when your son told you about the hijinx in TX? Or when you found that sealed court records tend to get unsealed when somebody runs against him? Or when promises that weren't negated by events, like public campaign financing, were broken?
Not even a teensy one?
I can understand why people didn't (or couldn't) vote for McCain or why they voted against McCain, but I can't fathom why anybody except those on the extreme left voted FOR Obama.
It just goes to show that even otherwise intelligent people are capable of fooling themselves into believing irrational things.
Hey NKVD -
"But he sure loves him some despots, so that is good, right?"
Not as much as W, who arranged for the safe passage out of America for all of Bin Laden's family the day of the 9/11 attacks. But at least W caught Bin Laden. Oh wait...
Hey everyone - get a dictionary and look up "socialist". Its always best to know what a word means if you're going to constantly regurgitate it.
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