Democrat Thought Experiment

If I were running for president as a Democrat right now, I’d be hammering on this whole Karl Rove immunity from subpoena thing pointing out that people in my administration are not above the law and are subject to congressional oversight. Then I’d try to force my opponent to say whether his stance is the same, forcing him to either repudiate the Bushista stance or claim the same nonsense. Puts him in a lose/lose.

I don’t know if the Obama campaign will do this. They’ve had ample opportunity to – rather than talk about vague values and leadership – actually put Obama out there to lead. I’ve been underwhelmed with Obama all through this campaign, which has made loyal Obamites insane with me for the last year. I lived in Chicago in 2004 and got to experience his rise from a crowded Democratic primary field to a complete domination in the general election. I was highly impressed by him then, but ever since then he has demeaned actual progressive values. Constantly for the last four years he has hammered about how we need to “stop bickering and foster bipartisan cooperation.” I’ve slowly learned to hate him for that stance. When your opponents are attempting to reinstitute monarchy and tyranny and destroy the rule of law, we don’t need bipartisan cooperation in that effort but Obama does it anyway.

Really, when Edwards left the race there went actual progressive values. I think people are beginning to experience buyers remorse, as we are seeing in the whole FISA bill debacle. I’m tired of bloggers expressing shock and disappointment over this. It’s exactly the same things as Obama has been saying all campaign and all during his tenure as a senator. If you are surprised by this, you just haven’t been paying attention because this was always entirely predictable and from some of us, predicted.

Let me head off what comment #1 will be: “So what, you are going to vote for McCain?” No, I’m not. I’ll vote for Obama because he is what we have to work with. McCain is a corrupt, war-mongering, unprepared partisan hack who is barely a notch above what we have now. However, both Clinton and Obama were in my opinion tied for 4th best choice in the primary, at best. I want to see Obama win, but I sure wish it was John Edwards winning instead. If that happened, we might actually get some progressive policies in place and a rollback of the shredding of the constitution of the last 7 years. What I expect from Obama is at best a stop to the bleeding. But, in lousy times like this I’ll take it.