While I'm supporting Clinton I think this analysis is spot on. I'm still leery of Obama but I think the odds are heavily in his favor and if Clinton either loses TX and OH or at least doesn't win them by 20 pt margins I think she will either concede or the party will step in. The last thing the Dems. want is a convention fight especially with the nomination for the GOP sown up. Also I don't see any chance of Clinton and Obama on the same ticket. Its very much in Obama's interest not to take on Hillary as if he did so he would also take on Bill and the last thing he wants is to be seen as in the Bush-Clinton-Bush continuum.
Yeah, no chance. It would be nice to see Al Gore on Obama's ticket though. That solves the experience issue really fast and it gives Obama's admin even more credibility in the world. I doubt Gore would be interested in doing it again but it sure would be nice to have him in there.
As an aside, every election since I've been of voting age has had a Bush or Clinton on the ticket... 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004. (I missed being of voting age in 1980 by 28 days, but I'm still counting it.) And though given my political leanings and the obvious fact that a Bush was on all but the 1996 ticket, I really wouldn't mind a major change in both parties.
the group says online ballots were cast in 164 countries and territories, including Antarctica Online voting... what could possibly go wrong?
sorry meant for another forum. http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/ Here is a link and I selected parts, then highlighted parts of those. This is from a far right source as well. It is clear Obama missing 1/3rd of the votes slanted his rating because he averaged 13th most liberal/87th most conservative the previous two years. You also have to view this in context. This is within the senate, and based on bills portions of bills actually being voted on (how many tax increase bills are out there, bills to allow gays to marry, bills to open the borders, etc). There are not many liberals in the senate, most democrats there are center-left to appeal to wide demographic base (since only only like 20% of the US population defines themselves as Liberal vs about 40 moderate and 40 conservative, hard to win a senate seat with the Liberal pitch). Now there are quite a view more liberals in the house where candidates only have win a district--you might even find some self described socialists and others in favor of gay marriage for instance--they are not too many of those if any in the senate. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator. In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10. "The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter," said Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the only other senator whose presidential candidacy survived the initial round of primaries and caucuses this year, did not vote frequently enough in 2007 to draw a composite score. He missed more than half of the votes in both the economic and foreign-policy categories. Overall in NJ's 2007 ratings, Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 key votes on which he voted; Clinton voted the liberal position 77 of 82 times. So yes I have no problem at all with Obama calling himself independent, moderate, or center left. but the guy certainly isn't an extreme liberal within the US political spectrum (I think center-left is most descriptive), let alone within the spectrum in 1st world democracies more broadly (I would call him dead center for this).
