Yes. This is what is actually happening. This is what happens in an election and this is how people primarily make their decisions on a candidate. They have a gut feeling on an issue, or perhaps they just think that one guy is a "guy I’d have a beer with" and the other guy is "not a guy I’d have a beer with" so they vote for their drinking buddy. This is truly how far many people think on such matters.

It is people left, right, and center who have noted that his policy proposals have altered very quickly, including quite a few disillusioned voters who supported him in the primaries. It’s likely most of them will get over it by November, although a few never will. So it goes with national level politics.

Anyway: no, I really don’t feel that I have a firm enough grasp on his character to trust him to be particularly predictable in general, nor able to handle the pressures of the job. I have some idea what he’ll do on some issues, but I find him too green, and way too slippery and condescending, to trust that he’ll do anything he says. Others I know, including people who’ve met him, feel differently. Okay then.

There’s nothing worthless about coming to judgments about the character and temperament and values of those who seek the most powerful and famous political office on the planet. So far as I’m concerned, it would be outrageously irresponsible and wholly irrational to demand otherwise.

I guess this gets to an old divide in politics, as to whether character matters or does not. I say it does. Apparently, you find it worthless and irrelevant, and only policy goals matter? You wouldn’t be the first. I respectfully disagree.

Be serious.  "Shifted all over the place" is from campaign guff. 

You nevertheless have a pretty good idea of what Obama is likely to do in office: or try to do, if you want to nitpick.  And you have a pretty good idea already if you want that or not.
 
"The thing is, I believe quite firmly that most voters know that too, and that almost no one who voted for him thinks he’s stupid."

Well of course: that’s the "gist" of the personal ideas of people who don’t like him based on "character."  People who do like him by and large have their own equally worthless caricature.

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You are quite correct that George W. Bush is clearly not a stupid man. The thing is, I believe quite firmly that most voters know that too, and that almost no one who voted for him thinks he’s stupid. I don’t. Nevertheless, the "stupid" motif pointed to the view that he was shallow and not very thoughtful, and those can sometimes be valid criticisms.

I am pretty sure we would not have invaded Iraq had it not been 9/11. I am pretty sure he was sincere in wanting to avoid "nation building" and such in 2000. After all, I believed the same thing and voted for him. I am pretty sure he really did change his mind after 9/11. In part because so did I, in exactly the same way. One thing I and others who like this President (and I like him very much, by the way) is that we have always found him pretty predictable, because we feel we have a pretty good grasp on his character–both the good parts and the bad parts.

Almost no one is going to vote for Obama simply because of something like this. All politicians have things they have to overcome, and in Barack’s case, one of them is that he’s black and is therefore going to be suspected of being either openly or closetedly a practitioner of racist politics ala the Rev. Jackson. Things which distance him from that brand of racial demagoguery will make people more likely to listen to and consider him. I don’t see that as irrational at all. It strikes me as quite sensible. I won’t vote for Obama, but I must say that little things like this make me feel better about his possible Presidency.

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Now Jessie’s comments might help, but Barack Hussein Obama’s playing of the race card will, I expect counteract most of that.    He’s a more nuanced race-monger it appears to me. 

So, lots of people who don’t own guns and don’t plan to, will vote against someone with a bad 2nd Amendment record. They may take "votes for gun control" as a proxy for something like "looks down on ordinary voters."

The identity of Politician B’s enemies and critics is good secondary evidence. If you have strong opinions about Politician J, your evaluation of Politician B is likely to be significantly different if you think J’s endorsement of B is sincere or not.

Consider another possibility: a hyper-rationalist view of politics may actually be considerably less sophisticated than we arrogantly assume it is. Voters likely to be moved by this incident with Jesse Jackson may actually be the smarter ones. Let me try to explain why.

Anyone who thinks hard about it knows that you can’t really predict what’s going to happen in a 4-8 year Presidency. The candidates can say whatever they want, take whatever policy positions they want, but when they’re actually sworn in and the rubber hits the road, shit changes. It has to. You can create whatever plans you want, but as the aphorism goes, "no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy." Facts on the ground are going to change, positions are going to shift, compromises are going to happen. No human being can possibly ascend to the Presidency and four to eight years later come out and say "yep, I accomplished everything I said I would when I campaigned for the office, and did nothing in contradiction to anything I said when I ran that campaign." It’s impossible.

Thus, what many voters–probably most voters–construct in their heads is less a checklist of the specific policy positions (although they usually have a pretty good grasp of that) than an assessment of the candidate as a person and how they think he’s likely to deal with things over the next few years. And, how he’s likely to treat them and their interests over the next few years.

In short: we’re electing a Commander In Chief, not a Policy Wonk In Chief. These voters know that.

Knowing that he’s not liked by someone they despise makes him immediately more trustworthy, because they’ll assume he’s not a "trojan horse" who’s pretending to have their interests in mind but will really be "just another" black politician who hates them. That will make all the difference in the world to a lot of them. Arguably, it should.

For instance, Ron Coleman has hinted at the possibility that the incident was staged for Obama’s benefit.  I find that desperately implausible, but there is an element of truth to the idea that events like this have little real content to them, at least if you know the general stance of all the players.  Obama wasn’t any more or less in league with Jackson than he was before  (well, perhaps less with him specifically by necessity, but that isn’t to say that he’s more or less in line with people like Jackson).   His positions on nothing relevant to the interests of blue-collar workers have changed. Even his attitude towards anything, including blue-collar workers, hasn’t really changed.  But for some reason the fact that, by chance, this subject was brought up and highlighted in the media, benefits Obama.  

What that tells me is that voters don’t actually know that much about the candidates to begin with, and are mostly being led around by the nose, as if this were a drama playing out on TV rather than an event in the real world. If their opinions of them can change based almost entirely on choice of subject matter is brought up (and one subject benefits one candidate in general vs. another), then it seems like they were missing a lot of information in the first place, and still are missing a heck of a lot of information about other subjects that, if they headlined, would make them think less of the candidate.  

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