It is nice to know we are on the same page, Bro. Conservatives for Obama? I would like to Obama my answer (using Obama in the Japanese sense) by saying “Yes we can’, or “change.” Or maybe…. to Obama in a novel way, “the higher the fewer.”

I agree with Rich that everyone should support Obama. He has done more to promote the Bush agenda than Bush ever could.

Gitmo keeps dangerous terrorists in detention. Obama has decided against any meaningful health care reform and has promoted a bill so bad even the Democarts won’t support it. He wants to send more troops war. His appointees are tax cheats. Government bailed out all the Wall Street fat cats. The Japanese use the word “Obama” to mean empty slogans and the Chinese think he is irrelevant.

Honestly Harrison, how much more could any Conservative ask for?

Bringing about change is never easy, and Obama is doing his best to correct the abuses and mistakes of the past. I believe that America will be a better country, and more respected among the nations of the world because of Obama’s leadership. As an American you have the right work against his agenda if you believe he is leading us in the wrong direction. On this point we will have to agree to dis-agree.

Let’s look at the facts. Aside from the stimulus, which most economists now agree was a failure and was a massive exercise in putting this country into even more debt, healthcare is dead in the Senate and Cap and Trade is, too. Obama’s popularity numbers are tumbling, and the GOP did very well in the last election and District 23 in NY may not go Republican but it will be very close whereas on election day we read about how a majority of voters elected a Democrat.

I predict Obama will be a one termer like Jimmy Carter, and we will all look back and wonder “what were we thinking?”

The only thing that is unfortunate is the wreck he will put the country into.

The only thing Obama is “getting done” is adopting Bush-era policies. More power to him!!

1) The GOP hasn’t really had a good choice since, perhaps, Nelson Rockefeller in 1964, when he was hooted down by the Goldwaterites in that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’ convention.

2) Your last commenter brings up the point about President Obama not managing “to do anything they said they would”. Well, if that means quick programmatic action, that rarely, if ever, happens, whatever the well-meaning or acumen of the actors.

What stalls action in the USA government is what USA government was designed to do: split power to make INaction the default. The ‘branch system’ and ‘federalism’ are designed to minimize power. It’s been successful at thwarting take-overs. It’s stunk at solving problems. Minorities block action, and by ‘minorities’ I certainly don’t mean ‘racial minorities’ or ‘the socially downtrodden’.

‘Minorities’ mean those chunks of America that have had blockage power from the start: a) the commercial interests, always rich enough to buy what they don’t often deserve and can’t convince others of on the merits; and b) the nativists, always filled with a plenitude of hatred.

3) The Republicans have made a pact now with BOTH of those devils. It used to be that you could depend on them to back the most monied interests — and lather up the kind of ‘patriotism’ that supplied large military force to protect those interests abroad.

Now, with the ‘Southern Strategy’ Nixon and Strom Thurmond devised in the late 60s and 70s, Dixie — oh, yes “the New South” — has become as much a nagging fixture for the GOP as it was for the Dems — small town anti-cosmopolitanism, xenophobia, religion that rebels even against theological examination.

It’s not just the South, of course, although the Big Water theory has merit. That maintains that coastlines, Great Lakes, major rivers — those places that have had most continued exposure to ‘the outside’ — contain a greater amount of tolerance, acceptance, openness.

You can find bigots anywhere (by which I mean the narrow-minded, not just racial bigots). People whose horizons are close-in can be anywhere — indeed, in any party. You’ve got your finger on the truth here, though. There’s NOTHING attractive about the GOP now or promising.

The fear is that there may be nothing attractive about the mood of a number of voters. We know a third will always vote ‘conservative’, 20 percent just plain nuts. The kicker is that American sense of wanting to be ‘independent’, to be someone not taken for granted. To be ‘the decider’.

Those people — and those who gamble on their last-minute intuitions — do decide elections. What we would hope for is a choice among reasonable alternatives — if ‘reasonable’ at least means above the Bush/Cheney/Palin level of laughingstocks who are way over their head in deep ideology.