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Eleanor Clift just posted an article to Newsweek entitled: Why Obama needs to seize the opportunity to reclaim his convictions and re-energize the Democratic base.
Clift, and many other liberals, are really puzzling until their puzzlers are sore: where is the Barack Obama we elected? Moveon.org is even running ads with the theme "Bring Obama Back", asking for the Obama in Oct 2008.
They want him to bring the fire and brimstone of an FDR: impervious to Republican attacks, and relentless in his own attacks against Republicans. They want him to fight for socialism, for the public option, to fight against tax cuts for the rich, against the war in Afghanistan, unions are untouchable...you know, liberal stuff. They ask loudly and publicly (before just privately): where is Obama and his convictions.
I just have to chuckle. The reason why Obama will have such a tough time returning to his convictions...is that he has no convictions.
You can tell just from his last 2 years of governance that the man doesn't have any convictions: he freely hobnobs with Wall St and pillories them the next day; he allows offshore drilling then not then again then not. He doesn't really sell the public option at ALL, and refuses Elizabeth Warren (a darling of the left) to head the newly created Consumer Protection agency. He increased troops to Afghanistan.
Liberals are shaking their heads and asking how they could have elected a liberal that has no strong beliefs in liberal issues.
His waffling on "core" issues is not a matter of pragmatism, because Obama gets rolled by nearly everyone, and for absolutely nothing in return. If the analogy that Obama plays chess, then he freely trades his queen, bishops, and knights...for nothing. Great strategy.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone looking carefully at Obama that he is a man of no convictions: after all, what did he do besides give soaring speeches? A community organizer for a couple years, bounced around as a lawyer, a lecturer at law school. He was interested in politics the entire time, and not very interested/committed to much else. Then he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1997 and US Senator in 2004.
But even before that, we can see the seeds of a wandering man in his childhood: abandoned by his father at age 3, and then abandoned by his mother at age 10 who continued to live in Indonesia while he lived in Hawaii with his grandparents. This greatly affected his personality and set the course for who he is today.
Obama felt alienated and out of place; he said himself his own ideas about race were in conflict, and he must have felt very alone while he lived with his grandparents, his mother choosing to stay in Indonesia half a world away. Imagine being 10 years old and living that; his alienation and aloofness, internalizing everything, questioning his worth and identity, would start to form.
Also during this time his own superiority/inferiority complex would develop; although Obama is very intelligent, his superiority complex is quick to be angered by those that oppose him. His inferiority complex would come through by caving in to superior strength rather than fight.
So is Obama a liberal? Does he have liberal convictions?
Young Obama did gravitate toward liberals, as he said himself during his college years:
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
But note that he didn't choose to be leftist based on the appeal of the ideology, but more of gravitating toward liberals because he could take comfort from them from a personality perspective; those kinds of people fit with his own personality. Kind of like a club or group that he would join, and take on their beliefs/style of dress as part of being in the club or "clique".
And because Obama has no convictions (for people or ideology), he has no compunction to "throw them under the bus". It doesn't matter if it's Rev. Wright or anyone; Obama is about Obama.
And so today, Obama walks a lonely road; he ia a man with no convictions, a man who can adjust to the political moment depending on his calculations without reservation or thought about ideology, liberal or otherwise. That's why he can "be a liberal" and freely cave to Wall St., Big Pharma, tax cuts for the rich, and still sleep at night.
So to Ms. Clift and others liberals: if you expect Obama to be FDR in 2011, think again. Obama at this point cares not for anything except possibly getting re-elected (which he might/might not care about, depending on what he thinks his chances are). Obama would have to have convictions in order to want to fight for them; and Obama, it's sad to say, has none.
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