I still haven't decided, but now, it looks like Obama wins Iowa... and it would not surprise me if Edwards picks up enough second-choice votes to eek into 2nd and we have all three competing with a chance through Super Tuesday. Ultimately, I don't think Hillary gets the nomination.
<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3ESAYblaCgQ&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3ESAYblaCgQ&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> 29,000 attend Obama-Oprah event in South Carolina.
Gore: I'd only consider White House bid WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Vice President Al Gore denied again that there were any campaign plans in his immediate future, but told CNN Monday that he hadn't "ruled out getting back into the political process at some point" — and that if he did return to political life, it would be to take another shot at the White House. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, speaking from the Oslo site of Monday's awards ceremony, told CNN's Jonathan Mann that he didn't expect to ever get back in the political process, but that "if I did get back, it would be as a candidate for president." He did not endorse any of the current Democratic candidates for president, and did not respond directly to a question about his view of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's environmental policy proposals. He added that "the political system as it now operates makes it very difficult" for any of the current crop of candidates to make climate change issues a top priority. Gore's political future has been the object of intense speculation since he received an Academy Award earlier this year for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Another White House bid would be the third for the former vice president, who also ran in 1988 and 2000.
I think probably so as well, but I found it interesting that he has yet to endorse anyone. I wonder if he will endorse anyone.
While there still remains a small chance of him being a candidate, he obviously can't endorse anyone. For obvious reasons, he will never endorse Hillary and it would be a big risk to endorse another candidate if Hillary ended up being elected president. He will endorse the nominee after they are chosen or when it becomes inevitable.
Whoa! Obama up by 9 in new Iowa poll! ------- The new Research 2000 poll of Iowa gives Barack Obama a healthy lead in the caucus, at 33% support, with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards tied at 24% each. http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2007/12/14/news/local/doc4762b62922c47155272760.txt
I too have switched from Edwards to Obama. I especially like his plan to slash NASA, something I have been advocating for years. That money can be earmarked for more deserving programs than flying to the moon or mars again.
Here is a positive article on Obama from David Brooks. I'm surprised he would write this. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18brooks.html?hp Op-Ed Columnist The Obama-Clinton Issue By DAVID BROOKS Published: December 18, 2007 Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline. If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them. But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness. Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life. Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant. Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall. Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side. [My comments: This paragraph is beautiful stuff. Obama is the only candidate on either side who could use this rhetoric on the stump without being laughed to scorn]. But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual. Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways. Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other. Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation. What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country. Bob Herbert is off today.
Nominating Obama would be the republican’s worst nightmare! The RNC has reams of oppo research on Hillary and is ready to unleash it as soon as she wins the nomination* (*if she wins the nom). I find it humorous that, to a man, all the conservative posters on the board has pushed forth the idea that Hillary is the inevitable nomination. Why? Because they know she is the easiest to beat. The republican party has nothing on Obama and is scared of his nomination because they know that he can appeal to both democrats and republicans! He appeals to a wide swath of voters that are disillusioned with the politics of destruction and "divide and concur." Obama brings a hope of a new era in America. One that brings the country together despite our differences and looks for the common good for ALL Americans, not just one party. GOBAMA!!!!!
That's an optimistic post. Too bad I have to disagree. The Republicans can't run for anything, so they must run against. The Dem nominee Regardless of who it is) will face an onslaught of negativity with the twin goals of driving unfavorables-up/favorables-down and creating the mindset that there is no difference between the two parties.
OK, with a week to go before Iowa, I went ahead and voted in the poll for Edwards. I'm not wild about Hillary and I keep remembering the story about how immediately after his big convention speech Obama met with a bunch of money men. Nothing I've seen from Hillary inspires me and nothing from Obama can address the nagging doubts about his ultimate effectiveness. Edwards definitely has questions, but I think he gets the fact that if we want the America we knew before December 11, 2000, well, we're going to have to fight for it. He's absolutely right in that the people currently running the oligarchy aren't going to give up that power easily. We saw that with the Clinton impeachment and even more so with the policies of the current administration. I wonder how good a Chief Executive he'll be and I wonder how he'll deal with the constant attacks... but I do think he has thought more than any other candidate about what ails this country and how to fix it... and I'm not talking about a program here or there... I'm talking the fundamentals and essence of the United States of America. So, Edwards it is.
Edwards supporters: Y'all really need to talk to the Edwards campaign and get Mudcat Saunders to take a backseat. I just watched him on Tucker, and he could have talked a Depression survivor out of Progressivism.
kudos to edwards for coming out and saying that he will get us out of iraq in 10 months. glad to see at least one of the democratic front-runners following the will of the people on this key issue.
Yeah, "kudos" to him for coming out 2 days before Iowa votes. The respect I had for Edwards from 2004 is completely gone. His time was 4 years ago and the Dems made a huge mistake by not nominating him instead of Kerry.
*Sigh* It's nice to see the Republicans jump in here and provide their 2 cents ("he's not a man's man"; "Hussein Obama"). Anyways, I voted for Barack Obama. I actually ally more closely with Dodd than with anyone, but Dodd has no shot at actually winning. Plus, as has been already mentioned, Battier is an Obama supporter!
