Obama's promise of a new majority, and the question it prompts: Can a liberal build a majority?

International Herald Tribune: Obama's promise of a new majority, and the question it prompts
By Robin Toner
Sunday, March 23, 2008

WASHINGTON: At the core of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, and build a new governing majority....It is a promise that convinced 67 percent of all registered voters in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll, in late February, that Obama "would be the kind of president who would be able to unify the country" - far more than those who identified his Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, or the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, that way.

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?...

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In many ways, his campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party - which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections - to the middle. His "New Democrats" assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on another bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Bill Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and eight years of President George W. Bush; that it has become open to a new progressive majority and disillusioned with a generation of conservatism....

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...many of Obama's supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured progressive era in which progressives (few have returned to the word liberal) make no apologies about their goals - universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans - and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them. Clinton, on the other hand, often displays the wariness of Democrats who came of political age in the Reagan glory days, when the Democratic Party was constantly on the defensive. As The New Republic recently put it, "Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority."...

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So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with American values and unprepared to be commander in chief. "When you're rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that's going to be difficult to explain," said Danny Diaz , a spokesman for the Republican National Committee....

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11346390

Hillary is far more liberal than she has positioned herself -- she aims to get the middle to get into the White House in the first place.

All we need is a politician who will stand up and proclaim to the nation, "Yes, I AM a liberal, and I am damned proud of it. All of you hiding in the closet, come out and march behind me." That would be a great day in U.S. History. Obama is the one to do it, if he'd quit listening to the people behind the scenes and stand on his own principles.

left....................................center.......right.

centrist now, appealing to the indies and pukes for primary votes.

What is going to happen come the GE when he moves even further right to appeal to the real wingers?

...like the Clintons.

He was an ok president, but she's going to tear your party down.

I'm a swing voter who's voted both ways since Reagan (if not leaning a little Republican). This is the first time in a long time I felt like I was voting for someone instead of against someone. It just so happens that this person is Obama.

Hilary Clinton will only get the nomination by taking it away from Obama by force (legal or political). I am going to wash my hands of the Dems if they allow this to happens. You all will have made your bed, and you can rot for all I care.

of Clinton trying to game the system.

In 2000 she wanted to do away with the Electoral College

Now that it might help her, she wants to use the Electoral College.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/politics/24campaign.html?em&ex=1206504000&en=8acccf15af9d0f06&ei=5087%0A

It's all irrelevant the results of Clinton vs. Obama are not equivalent to Clinton vs. McCain or Obama vs. McCain.

I abhor changing the rules after the fact. If Clinton thought that not counting MI and FL was a travesty, she should've said something about it before the votes.