On Nov 26, 2008, at 11:32 PM, David Cake wrote: > Isn't the standard way to run a presidential campaign to run > towards the extremes to get nominated, and then desperately run back > to the centre to win? The trick being to do this slickly enough that > you don't actually contradict yourself, just change your tone.
Except that there were a lot of candidates and Obama ran to the right of most of them including mainstream ones like Edwards and Richardson. I think you pointed out that he was *slightly* to the left of Clinton on foreign policy and *slightly* to right of her on domestic policy. Clinton and Obama were clearly competing to be on the right wing of the democratic party. > > McCain lost in part by inexplicably running to the right to > get nominated, then running even further to the right to try to get > elected. > > Anyway, I bring this up only to note that the best presidents > tend to observe the follow up 'once elected, run towards sanity and > away from ideology in order to govern'. Inevitably this makes some > people accuse them of hypocrisy. It just makes me think they are > confident and aware of the difference between campaign rhetoric and > reality. This is still America and assumption is still Black = Leftist. I'm not at all surprised that the right wing is shocked by how centrist Obama is. They were on record as dismissing any moderate statements he made because they knew he was a socialist. I'm moderately amused that the left subscribed to the same world view. Edwards kept trying to establish his credentials with the liberal base and Obama kept talking about how "bipartisan" he was. Poor Edwards couldn't get any traction because he was a white guy. -- Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it. -Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902) _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
