What will Obama do if elected?

Barack Obama is truly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Being a Democrat must be very difficult these days. The far-left gravitated toward Obama's flowery rhetoric. He was a blank canvas on which they could paint their personal preferences. As I have noted before his primary strategy was to get to the left of Hillary on every major issue. The idea of capturing your party's base in the primaries and then veering toward the middle is not new so Barack Obama didn't invent sliced bread but his strategy was only successful because Hillary (believing that nobody was going to seriously challenge her) decided to start her general election campaign (portraying herself as a moderate to go up against the "right-winger" the GOP was sure to nominate) before she captured her party's nomination.

So we have an Obama who made all kinds of promises and statements that were very appealing to the nutroots crowd and later took the traditional path toward the middle, moderating (flip flopping on) many of his positions. I documented one that is important to many of us Cuban-Americans:

As I've been reading posts at my.barackobama.com for the next phase of my "Your my.barackobama.com quote of the day" feature I noticed that many of Obama's supporters are staunch opponents of the embargo. That's no surprise, of course, because most staunch opponents of the embargo are Democrats, but Obama, as I showed in the video, has already come out and said "As President, I'm not going to take off the embargo."

But it's clearly not just one issue he's done this with.

Which takes me back to what his primary supporters must be thinking. Do they go into the voting booth on November 4th thinking "Yeah Obama is acting like a centrist to fool all these dupes in 'fly-over country' but I have faith in him being the lefty that I voted for in the caucus once he gets in there."

On the other hand conservative Republicans have no illusions about McCain. They know he's a moderate who has a liberal streak in him. We're strictly voting for the lesser of two evils. So what we have is a liberal with many socialist leanings posing as a centrist and a centrist posing as a conservative. Weird.

What happens if Obama gets elected and reality sets in? I mean the fact is that Washington doesn't do U-turns very often and when they do they require vast support (like Reagan achieved in the 1980s). As we have seen despite all the negatives in the country today (which should be an aid to the candidate from the party that is perceived to be out of power) it's a 50/50 nation.

For example, we can pick and choose little things that Bill Clinton did that were liberal but the truth is that the country pretty much kept it's center-right course during his eight years. What will Obama's core of supporters think if he turns out to be more like Clinton than they are comfortable with? If Obama turns out to be a "polling president" with his finger in the air trying to determine what the popular will is like Clinton did so successfully, what will these people say?

And here's something else to consider. What about the Democrats who are more moderate or even conservative (there's far more conservative Democrats than liberal Republicans)? What if they buy into Obama's latest iteration as a centrist and he turns out to be a hard core lefty?

Like I said, it must be weird to be a Democrat. The far left must act on faith and the more centrist elements of the party are hoping they aren't being duped.

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at September 26, 2008 11:48 AM

Comments

Posted by: thinwhiteduke at September 26, 2008 01:27 PM

Posted by: Henry Louis Gomez at September 26, 2008 02:15 PM