One Cheer For Obama

As we move into the election, folks may note that I have much less to say than I did four years ago.  I am unexcited by the Republican offerings.  However, as I have said from 1996 on, the Republicans can pretty much just notify me in November who they have nominated and they have my vote.  I find much wrong with them.  I continue, however, to find prominent Democrats dangerously insane.  That's not a humorous clever statement.  I mean exactly that.

As people I get along with and want to see socially, Democrats and Republicans are about even-up.  Some wonderful and some appalling people. I cannot imagine how these reasonable, fun people can even vaguely consider the fools and criminals they nominate.  Presumably, they feel the same about me.

As we come into the home stretch, I would like to review what we were worried a President Obama might turn out to be.  People had differing worries, but they fell into broad categories.

1.  His default position is not merely liberal, but quite radical, which he covers with dissembling words.
2.  He is a narcissist who believes too much in his own persuasiveness and cannot listen to others.
3.  He is ridiculously inexperienced and unprepared.
4.  He is a dishonest Chicago-politics thug.

I think the other usual criticisms descend from these, alone or in combination.

The envelope please.  I think all those things turned out to be true, but not as horribly as they might have. He is a Chicago thug, as he revealed in the bailouts and via Eric Holder's DOJ.  He continues to have a starry-eyed confidence that repeatedly discredited liberal ideas will work this time - but not to the CPUSA extent we feared.  He has allowed such types too much power in his administration - but Bill Ayers is not SecEd, for example.  He has had no clue what works in an economy, but after his first wild dice-throws, has stopped coming up with brilliant new ideas to fix things.  Just the standard stupid DC jobs-program and "investing" in this, that, or the other thing that the Republicans do about as much of.

In foreign policy, Obama has been quite leftist in rhetoric, but quite centrist in action.  I don't think he's got a plan, and just wings it with one-worlder sympathies at times, but I have come to think that foreign-policy plans are overrated.  Hillary Clinton seems to be running things, which is an improvement over what Obama would have done on his own,  (See Economy, fixing, for example).  My worry with Hillary was always that she had too many plans, but that seems to have receded.  She does the work without getting a lot of glory and seems modest and realistic in her goals, after a liberal-hope-drunkenness to start.  Perhaps she is just weary, but it works.  I think she would be a decent president at this point - far better than Obama or Biden.  Note how measured, and in retrospect accurate, her comments about the Arab Spring turned out to be - even though she had to keep pretty close to the cheery Obama line on that.

I absolutely never thought I would say that.  Let me stress that I don't think she would be an excellent or desirable president, but that I would not fear a Hillary presidency.  Good for her.  Hard work and limited goals sorta kinda won me over.

So one cheer for Obama, one-and-a-half for Hillary.