Obama

[lesliepear]

Ok, I am pro-Obama, but I just wanted to post some commentary on elections here.

In recent years it seems the campaign strategy of politicians has been to find negative things about the opponent and not stress their own positive things.

I think with Barack Obama they've had a hard time with this because he's relatively young and lived a fairly clean public and private life. First they found out that the pastor of the church he attended had very racist views. Just because his pastor has opinions and he attended the church doesn't mean he believes exactly the same thing on everything the pastor did. (As far as I know it wasn't a cult that brainwashed it's members). People chose houses of worship for many reasons not always based on the leader.

Now they are attacking him because he knew or served with Bill Ayres, a 60's radical terrorist on a committee on education (a common interest). Obama was 8 years old at the time of Mr. Ayres activies - he probably didn't even know what was going on then. If Obama was like myself, and found the 60's a fascinating time and wished he were older then - that still doesn't mean he'd approve of terroist tactics of the Weathermen. I think the 60's radicals are very different than Al Quida and other modern terriorists - their goals were different and I'm not sure their aim was to wantonly kill people in the name of their cause - they aimed to be more distruptive in general.

Comments

Re: We always disagree politically but anyway...

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

Actually, although I think Palin is a horrible choice, I think McCain would be even lower in the polls without her. She's a huge drag down on his poll numbers, now that people are discovering all the skeletons in her closet. But she's also been a huge boost to McCain's fund-raising, because she's an extremist kook and the extremist kook faction of the Republican party didn't trust McCain until he chose her. Now they're dumping tons of money on his campaign (although not nearly as much as Obama's supporters are sending him since she was chosen), and he can afford ads.

Without Palin, the only money McCain would have to spend would be loans from his wife – if she would be willing to throw money at a doomed cause. If she declined to lend the money, his campaign would be bankrupt. Sure, Obama probably wouldn't have as much money to spend without the inspiration of such an extreme VP opponent, but the ratio between his money and McCain's would be overwhelming.