David Brooks is wrong about Obama having been pushed to the far left. He will easily reoccupy the territory claimed by Hillary once she leaves the field. Former Republican John Cole exemplifies the attitude that will sway the sane people in the middle and middle-right toward Obama. He wants to send the far right extremists back to the fringes where they belong. McCain, it should be clear to anyone paying attention, is too eager to play ball with the extreme right:
You see, I still have my “Peace Through Strength” button from when I campaigned for Reagan. I believed in limited government, I believed in a strong national defense, I believed in fiscal restraint and balanced budgets and I believed in personal integrity and individual liberty and personal freedom.
I am pissed. I want the frothing nutters, the fraudulent hucksters, the race-baiters, the anti-science frauds, the anti-intellectuals, the gay-bashers, the big-money cheats, the torture fetishists, the religious nuts, the tax and spenders, the xenophobes, and the phonies to pay. I want payback. I want the people who ruined my former party relegated to permanent minority status. I know I am a newly minted Democrat, and, as such, it is ballsy for me to start telling you what I want from the party, but this is my website and you are just going to have to deal with my opinion.
I am under no illusion I will buy into everything Barack Obama puts forward, but I am damned sure convinced he is a decent man who, at the very least, will restore a sense of competence to the national stage. I am willing to meet most Democrats half-way, and I am already doing everything I can to get this man elected. I think Obama will act in good faith for this nation, and I am responding in kind. His policies are not outlandish or crazy or uber-left- they reflect a rational, and I would argue, a decent and progressive way forward out of the mess I helped to create. I won’t like all of them, and I will not agree with all of them, but there is no chance that I will ever be President, so perfect agreement is never a possibility.
And don’t get me wrong- I am not for Obama because of what I am against. I am for Obama because he is a decent man, a break from the past, and really a once in a lifetime opportunity. He has treated us like adults throughout this primary, and it is time to act like adults. There will be times we feel he lets us all down, but we are not electing a diety. We are electing a leader, and Obama is that leader. It is time to get past the bullshit of the last 20 years, the battles I am really tired of fighting, and time to turn our attention to the really important issues of the day- the economy, the budget, our international presence, our crumbling infrastructure, our military, medicare and medicaid and social security, and on and on and on.
If Barack Obama was not your your preferred candidate, I am sorry that person did not win, but it is time to remember that the target is John McCain and the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. If you can not accept that and help move us forward, please at least get out of the way.
***
UPDATE: By way of Greenwald in a post in which he defends sane conservative Catholics:
Long-time right-wing advocate and prominent devout Catholic Doug Kmiec (formerly Dean of Catholic University and a Professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Law) recently endorsed Barack Obama and made several of these points:
As a Catholic looking at candidates, my faith instructs me to look at the whole person respective to the church's social teaching on wages, education, issues of family, culture, responsibility toward the environment, the reduction of mindless or excess consumption. And the Catholic Church was quite explicit about the concept of preemptive war being contrary to the principles of just war. One of the things that happened to Catholics over the last two decades is because of the evil of abortion, we've been somewhat less mindful of the need to serve those around us -- those who are calling upon us for assistance in a tangible way. . . .
When I look at Obama's eloquent speeches, his references to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, those are so much a part of modern Catholic education. And the preferential option for the poor or solidarity with the poor, how that is not heard by the Catholic mind has troubled me. So one of the reasons for speaking out at this point, and one of the reasons to speak out on Easter Sunday, is to have my fellow Catholics reexamine this topic and listen with more careful ear.
Kmiec was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations.
See more on Kmiec here. Please forward to me other examples of articulate Obamacans you come across. I'll start a recurring post on the subject.
P.S. About the abortion issue and Catholics. Kmiec's attitude represents an attitude very similar to my own. I think that unless you have sincerely thought it through and are personally convinced that the human fetus at any stage has the same ontological status as one's gall bladder, then abortion should be a profoundly troubling public moral issue. That isn't to say that it's black and white or that there are simplistic answers.
I think that what bothers people like me is this assumption by so many liberals that abortion should be considered an exclusively private matter, that it has no social ethical dimension to it, and anybody who thinks differently should just get over it. Nevertheless, those Christians who make it the litmus test for whether they can vote for someone are the same types who probably would have supported fascists like Franco or Mussolini because of their anti-abortion positions. It's more than ridiculously simple-minded; it's an abdication of one's capacity for moral discernment, and more often than not leads people into naive support for other even more serious forms of social evil.