This Blog is a online debate and discussion board for us to discuss the issues of the day. As the title suggests, it is not about personal attacks, harsh rhetoric, or insults. It is a place to record the REASON behind your opinions and ideas, and the learn the REASON of those who disagree with you.
"Cease to do evil, Learn to do good, Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD (Isaiah 1: 16-18)
Obama has a 95 percent liberal rating from Americans for Democratic Reform, a liberal advocacy group that ranks all members of Congress. Yet he is often portrayed as a centrist.
Posted by
Michael
at
1/31/2007 02:32:00 PM PERMALINK
Label Cloud |
1 comments:
Politics: Perception vs. reality
Bill Sammon, The Examiner
Jan 31, 2007 3:00 AM (1 day ago)
Current rank: # 40 of 12,353 articles
WASHINGTON - Although he frequently makes a point of finding something charitable to say about his opponents’ arguments, Sen. Barack Obama almost always ends up voting liberal.
“The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact,” the Illinois Democrat wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” a memoir published last year. “Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal.”
Obama has a 95 percent liberal rating from Americans for Democratic Reform, a liberal advocacy group that ranks all members of Congress. Yet he is often portrayed as a centrist.
“His record is liberal, and his rhetoric is moderate,” explained Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
For example, Obama goes out of his way to voice approval of at least some aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
“At times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview,” he wrote in “Audacity.” “When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.”
But in summing up Reagan, Obama concluded that the former president’s “clarity about communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world.”
By pointing out the merits of both sides of an argument, Obama often sounds statesmanlike, even if he almost never ends up siding with conservatives. This dichotomy can be seen in Obama’s analysis of President Bush’s foreign policy.
“I agree with George W. Bush when in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free,” Obama wrote. “But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention.”
If Obama survives the Democratic primaries and becomes his party’s presidential nominee, his liberal positions will not necessarily hurt him among the centrist voters who cast ballots in the general election, according to Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report.
“How you come across is more important than how you vote,” Cook said. “If voters perceive you as moderate, then your voting record isn’t terribly relevant. Perception is more important than reality.”
Post a Comment