I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view…

Re: Middle America, talking specifically about people that on the political spectrum aren’t staunchly in one camp or the other. It is always these people that remain sceptical about both parties that win elections for people in two horse races.

Re: Socialism, good point, I don’t really look at it in terms of countries just the general gist of the policies you cite. Perhaps “more socialist” is a better way of describing his policies compared to Obama’s?

re: Neoliberalism - no, probably not, but then I feel most political classification have their negatives and positives :P

“You stated that one candidate has all these, what you clearly allude to being great, ideas on what I would call quite socialist policy …”

This is such a relative thing, and I have no idea what you would normally define as socialist, so it’s rather tricky for me to comment here. What is your benchmark for “socialist”? Britain? France? Norway? Cuba? China?

“… while the other is essentially a centre-right capitalist with a penchant for free markets (and alluding that is bad…”

Yes.

I’ll admit that a centre-right capitalist with a penchant for free markets would make an improvement on the Nazi capitalist with a penchant for awarding contracts to his mates, but excuse me for not getting too excited.

“… to me just goes to show that you’re a very ideological person. ”

I’m not really sure what you mean here, and I’ve always considered myself a pragmatist. It is useful to be aware how ideologies of varying shapes or forms affect the world, and right now the dominant one is neoliberalism — which has the University of Chicago as its spiritual home.

Do you think neoliberalism is a good thing?

“[Middle America] clearly prefers the level of difference Obama offers.”

Who are these mythical “middle Americans”? Are you sure they’re in the middle? Why is it only them that decide who gets to be president?

“The baby steps comment isn’t to say he is not making much movement, and so I’ll admit I perhaps used the wrong terminology, but rather that he’s walking the country with him rather than jumping over to the finish line and pleading with the electorate to believe the way is safe.”

Ahh, now I get it. What you meant was “baby talk”?

“Oh, and Edwards is hardly a far out radical by any standards other than very recent American history (you know, the period when the Democrats kept losing).”

…to me just goes to show that you’re a very ideological person. Not that this is a problem, but I just don’t feel it’s realistic. The voters that voted Bush after voting Clinton aren’t going to sit there and say “well you know if you ignore *recent* history then that guys policies are pretty reasonable”, they’re going to compare to what they’ve got and define themselves what they see as comfortable change. To me, I think Edwards would be great and comfortable change, but I’m not middle America who would even consider voting Bush in for a second term, and they clearly prefer the level of difference Obama offers.

This isn’t to say I am belittling his policies, nor suggesting how he should act in office. The baby steps comment isn’t to say he is not making much movement, and so I’ll admit I perhaps used the wrong terminology, but rather that he’s walking the country with him rather than jumping over to the finish line and pleading with the electorate to believe the way is safe.

What you’re suggesting is not some novel new approach to reversing the decades-long rightward march of politics in America (and just about anywhere else aligned to US interests). It has been the strategy of the Democratic Party establishment for a long time now, and it has been an ugly catastrophe. In the 1990s it put a baby stepping “Democrat” in the White House and achieved precious little else. Then came the bitter defeats of 2000, 2002 and 2004.

Have you learnt nothing from all of this? And do you think the American conservative movement got to such a position of influence by taking baby steps?

Obama clearly has learnt lessons, and whatever his ideological faults, you do him a disservice if you’re suggesting the root of his appeal is a willingness to take baby steps. In fact, that picture is a gross simplification of American politics (and its electoral mechanics).

Oh, and Edwards is hardly a far out radical by any standards other than very recent American history (you know, the period when the Democrats kept losing).

And despite what you may say about obama’s stance on health care it is still looking more towards the people than the insurance companies. it may not be what is ideal by our standards here but it is certainly talking the right talk for moving the nation away from it’s problems…and without pissing off those that actually agree with the insurance system because they’re possibly going to get cheaper prices too if a higher competition element is indeed adopted, I feel it’s about as progressive as you can afford to be in the US.

I probably just about support Edwards more than the other candidates on policy, but it’s clear why Obama is the one winning the polls.

Democrat voters are faced with a choice between a candidate who says he will take on corporate interests, empower trade unions and create a universal health care system versus one that says he will work with corporations, is not promising universal healthcare and believes in the power of the market to provide solutions to social problems. Oh, and Hillary Clinton. It’s not rocket science. You’re middle east analogy is irrelevant.

O -

I agree with you that none of the candidates are as progressive as we’d like, and I also agree about Kucinich.

Regarding Dean, I am aware that he was actually quite conservative fiscally and on gun control. Then again, a dose of fiscal conservatism was just what was required back then; and, on purely tactical grounds, his love of guns would have been useful when selling his anti-war message in the flyover states. Either way, the difference between 2004 and 2008 is that the former was all about the war, and about kicking that vicious psychopath out of the White House. Back then it was imperative that the Democrats chose someone who had opposed the war from the start. But that’s water under the bridge now, there’s no point fighting yesterday’s battles today.

To argue that Obama has the most progressive healthcare plan is perverse. None of the candidates offers the perfect solution - to my mind, this would be a healthcare system totally free at the point of use - but if you don’t make it mandatory then it won’t be universal, which is the minimum requirement for a progressive system.

Obama says he will decrease the cost by increasing competition among insurers, with the aid of a “National Health Insurance Exchange”. But the companies themselves are bound to fight this tooth and nail, and as long as they have a seat around the table they will water down any proposals. Unless Obama acts differently as president to how he says he will act - and why should we believe this will be the case? - he is not presenting a universal healthcare plan, he is presenting a universal healthcare aspiration.

Only by excluding the insurance companies from the process will it be possible to reduce costs to the point where all apart from those under the most extreme financial hardship (who Edwards says will be exempt) can afford it. While on paper Edwards’s “New Health Care Markets” looks to me broadly similar to Obama’s Exchange, Edwards is more explicit about the importance of non-profit purchasing pools, where Obama places greater emphasis on competition (i.e. market based solutions).

Which brings me on to the next and most important point on which I disagree with you. Irrespective of who Krugman supports, he is right when he accuses Obama of surrounding himself with the wrong advisers. Obama gives us every reason to believe that he is fully signed up to the neo-liberal agenda, with its religious belief that markets are the best mechanism for delivering solutions to social problems.

For a different take on this, check out the following piece from CiF:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_koffler/2008/01/substance_not_style.html

This was written by an Obama supporter, but reading it left me utterly cold. Chicago economists are serial fantasists suffering from physics envy whose rational choice models have led us to the brink of the abyss. More than anything else, it is this dogma that urgently needs to be confronted during this election, and Obama is heading in the completely the opposite direction.

Just one final point regarding Edwards’s dead son. It may very well be that he did lie about it - the man is no exception to my politicians-are-vicious-narcissists rule, and I can believe he arrived at his current position through cold calculation/opportunism rather than genuine conviction - but the source for the story has absolutely zero credibility in my view.

Sunny -

Well, the issues discussed above, mainly. That said, I’ll concede that I maybe overstated the case when one considers that Hillary is in the race.

However, for the reasons that I laid out above I still can’t decide whether he or Hillary are the least bad option. It may be pure cynicism on her part, but perhaps better the cynical politician who knows what way the winds blow, when they are blowing towards the left, than a neo-liberal true believer.

That may sound cynical on my part - I should emphasize that I swing back and forth between them - but I don’t think there is anything cynical in the reasoning. In the link I gave above, TrueLeft puts it very well, so do read his posts.

That was a very interesting analysis. As a bystander in all of this, I’ve heard both Obama and Edwards speak, and frankly, immediately after hearing them, I’d have voted for whichever one of them I’d listened to last. And, no, this was on an MSNBC feed, not live.

That is speechcraft of the highest order. To persuade someone with no dog in the ring that, hey, I’m the best candidate, is frankly, a talent . I have not heard so much of Hilary who is almost certainly as good an orator.

What I assume will happen is that the media will decide which candidate they want, and then proceed to throw any sort of mud possible at the ones they want to lose. This might be an interesting early example, a ‘no smoke without fire’, piece:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

hat tip to:

http://crookedtimber.org/

Obama has dealt with it. But the drip, drip, drip of little men with goatee beards will not end anytime soon.

Hilary is the annointed one, I think, and it will take a heave and a grunt for that to be shifted.

Best of luck. If I had a vote, Barak would get it.

Such as?

Take a look at his record in Illinois and you’ll see he’s more progressive than you would think. I have written a blurb on it in my top ten reasons for supporting Obama on my site. The famous line that is said is that Dean was far more conservative than people thought he was, and Obama is far more progressive than people think he is. And I was a Dean supporter. And Obama’s policies are not to the right of the others, that’s only Krugman’s–Hillary’s mouthpiece at the NYT–view of it, and even then he says barely so on the economy. As far as health care, it is actually far more progressive not to have a mandate than it is to have one. Why would you force the poor to purchase it if they still could not afford it? Obama has said he would only institute a mandate once it were sufficiently evident that costs were low enough. But demanding one off the bat would be counter-productive (anti-progressive if you will!).

But it’s more so that the others have track records that are noticeably not progressive. Edwards, as Shrum explains in that article, was a proud DLC Democrat (centrist Democrat, same group Hillary is from). In that vein he supported all sorts of legislation from the Bankruptcy bill, to low marks on the environment from the league of conservation voters, to the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, favored trade status for China, and support of NAFTA without any labor/environmental protections. His record doesn’t match his rhetoric. So it’s very much in line with his personality to lie about something like his son’s death for political convenience. He said in 2004 that he would have gone to war with Saddam even if there were NOW Weapons of Mass Destruction. Don’t be fooled by the pretty words you hear from him today.