"And Obama is (or was) a very compelling candidate in his own right to many people."

I’m pretty/absolutely sure that if you take skin color off the table Obama is not a good candidate, and I don’t count skin color as "in his own right" any more than any other physical attribute. 

Obama taking Biden as his VP is a pretty clear illustration that Obama is not a change agent in any way except skin color, he is committed to the status quo as dictated by a democratic Congress.  The Obama candidacy smear of the President, trying to link Bush & McCain as the same (wierd that he tried to say McCain is at odds with Bush on status of the economy), and smear of the VP pretty clearly proves Obama believes in business as usual.

I was talking to an old friend of my father’s (and my 6the grade science teacher) yesterday, he said that Freddy & Fannie were put in place in the Clinton era to make sure that people who couldn’t really afford it  would be able to purchase houses.  It got really lucrative, and main stream financinal institutions started jumping on the band wagon of financing high-risk loans.  Finally, banks demanded a place at the table. The risk was expanded from peripheral institutions to main stream while simultaneously expanding the risk pool.  Since the underlying principle is that high risk pays off sometimes in commerce, the whole thing in retrospect seems like a house of cards.   So a big question in my mind is what part of this Obama would have stopped?  Getting more money to poor people to live beyond thier fiscal means?  Getting main stream financial institutions to support this?

Yes and no… I read the Lefty blogs as much as I can stomach them (which isn’t that much, omigawd what a collection of vile, profane lunatics you find on KOS, Firedoglake or Huffpo. I mean these people have serious mental health issues) and on those blogs I see a lot of vitriol hurled at Congress for their inability to advance the progressive agenda. In fact one of the enduring memes on those sites is sustained apoplexy that the village idiot in the White House somehow STILL manages to thwart the right and proper goals of the Left even after the Left took control of both houses of Congress. I mean you can’t get to a 14% approval rating unless the majority of YOUR OWN PARTY is angry at you.

Obama has been beating a retreat to the middle since his coronation at Mile High Stadium and there is good reason to believe that once he is in the Oval Office he’ll start seeing things differently than he does today (see Clinton, Bill). He is smart enough, I hope, to look at Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations and model his own after the one that can claim to have had SOME success, as opposed to the one that led to the Reagan Revolution in only four years.

I guess we’ll see, I still can’t see how Obama can blow this election, no matter how hard he tries. The deck has been stacked so strongly in his favor that it would be a political melt-down of historic proportions for him to lose.

Let’s get back on this subject in September of 2010 and see where we think the Obama administration has gone, and how well pleased the moonbats are by its "accomplishments."

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Socialized Financial Systems?

I’m not sure which will drive the Lefties to distraction more, a McCain victory, or an Obama victory which turns out to be business as usual in Washington.

I’m not sure there will be any such distraction with an Obama Administration. Obama isn’t just a liberal – he’s a leftist. And even if it’s business as usual, and I don’t think it will be under his watch (which isn’t a good thing), liberals are so convinced of the rightness of their cause that having him in office will be all the proof they think they need.

They’d have won the argument not because Obama changed anything, but simply because he has power.

Need proof?  Look at Congress.  Its not gotten a single substantive thing done being handed over to the Democrats yet you know idiots will keep voting for them.  Accomplishing something isn’t the point.  Obtaining and holding power is all that matters.  Keeping it out of the hands of the enemy (which I am convinced too many on the left see Republicans as) is all that matters.

Obama may win this election, there certainly are enough people in this country fed up with the way things are, and the Democrats have done a masterful job of sliming President Bush until the public image of the man is virtually indistinguishable from the liberal one-dimensional caricature. That will change, of course, over time, but for this election all that matters is how people view GW Bush now.

And Obama is (or was) a very compelling candidate in his own right to many people.

But whether Obama wins or loses he has already proven that his promises of "hope and change" and running a positive campaign and reaching across the aisle and all that other touchy-feely stuff was just pure political posturing.

It took him one day to go from Mr. Hope to chucking slime and innuendo with the worst of them. And he’s been doing it nonstop now for two weeks. And now that he has slowed or stopped his drop in the polls, he is learning that throwing all the mud he can find to see what sticks actually works. So look for more of the same going forward.

So the irony of this whole election is that no matter how much Obama promised a new and better way, he has not campaigned that way, and since he has asked us to judge how he will govern based on how he runs his campaign, I am forced to conclude that he will not govern that way either.

In other words, Mr. Hopey-Changey will almost certainly find himself in an administration that is just as partisan as any of our recent administrations and the end result is going to be a whole lot more of the same old same old.

In some ways I almost think it’s some sort of poetic justice to have Obama win and then have his deluded followers come to the realization that the man is just another politician and that his administration will have virtually all the same kinds of troubles that other administrations have had.

I’m not sure which will drive the Lefties to distraction more, a McCain victory, or an Obama victory which turns out to be business as usual in Washington.

Either way I predict some serious disappointment for them.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Rays still lead in AL East?

I’m not sure what the donation limits are in general, but, those limits are on candidates who take Federal election funds to help their campaign. Obama broke his promise to take the Federal matching funds because he thought he could do better without them. I’m not sure if there are any limits to how much in donations can be accepted but it’s probably pretty high if there is any.

Anyone else know?

The Democrats expected to spend their efforts on expanding their margin of victory and the length of the presidential candidate’s coattails, they absolutely did not ever think they would have to fight just to win.

It is an artifactof cutting and pasting from Word 2007 into WP via Firefox 3.x. I didn’t even see it until I looked at it in IE7.

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> <!–[if gte mso 10]> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} <![endif]–>

Is that just my browser (I.E 7)?

I have not thanked you for teaching me so much about politics.  I remember with fondness how you explained both Republicans and Democrats.  I probably don’t remember exactly how this came up, but you had me look at it like a football game.  Then I looked at my own values and morals and came up with being a conservative.  I remember when you were a Democrat, and helped out the campaign.  You did a lot of work and I admired that, and wondered what I was missing.

I still have so many questions but I try real hard to learn.  I hope you and others don’t get upset with me when I ask questions.  I did ask a few this week and nobody answered me so I figured they were too deeply involved with their opinions.  I really understand that.  I love all the commenters here and I have for six or so years now.  I wish my Daddy was still alive because he would get such a kick out of me.  I yell at the television, the radio and use my remote to follow several channels.  I was this way over games from my hometown college.  I went to basketball games, football games and shouted to the roof tops.  Now, it is just me and my two kitties.  They have often got very startled hearing their master yell out loud!

Values mean a lot to me.  I want an honest man or woman in office.  I want them to have character and integrity.  I feel all those with McCain.  I’ve honestly tried to listen to Obama and carefully weigh what he has to say.  I would like him to come back in four or eight years from now when he has some experience under his belt.

Question:

How many times can a canidate go to a high dollar ($28,500.00) fund raiser with a lot of people that already gave to his team?

How does the general public find out who is funding Obama?

Thank you Dean, and all commenters