3 Responses to “A Team Of Failures (II)”

1. cbh8377, on December 1st, 2008 at 10:02 pm Said:

   You are correct, but I still find it remarkable the way lots of people, especially those in the right wing media, find this to be a total surprise. They talked themselves into thinking that we elected Dennis Kucinich. I don’t know why this is so, but it has a lot to do with why their attacks against Obama didn’t work; he simply wasn’t whom they were portraying him as.

2. Daniel Larison, on December 2nd, 2008 at 7:25 am Said:

   It is strange that so many people are surprised, pleasantly or otherwise. Mainstream conservatives find it hard to fathom that someone who opposed a particular war can still be generally hawkish or pro-military or whatever term they care to use. According to their scheme, it can’t work that way, so they kept insisting against all the evidence that he didn’t mean it whenever he said things that should have reassured them.

   What is more remarkable from my perspective is that these are the same people who claimed to have found all the secret clues to the “real” Obama in his tenuous and/or irrelevant associations in years past and managed to miss everything that mattered about his career. Once you understand that he opposed the war at least partly because he was playing to a Hyde Park and Illinois Democratic primary electorate in ‘02, and then look at what he said in his speech back then, and then you weigh it against the rest of his statements and record, it is impossible to confuse him with the antiwar left. This is why I have never been won over by antiwar conservative arguments for Obama. Many antiwar conservatives have also misjudged him on policy, because they wanted or needed to believe that he was a candidate they could support.

3. cbh8377, on December 2nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm Said:

   Mainstream conservatives find it hard to fathom that someone who opposed a particular war can still be generally hawkish or pro-military or whatever term they care to use.

   Some of the anti-war left reasoned in the exact same way and have also been receiving a wake-up call as a result of Obama’s appointments.

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