Our “Hate the Gays” amendment passed with more than 60% of voting for it, so this isn’t a “liberal” state.

If there isn’t some real movement to change the way things work, the liberals won’t come out in 2010 and that means more Republican games with redistricting to further marginalize the progressive voters.

I’ve heard all of the excuses for bringing in the DLC crowd, and they don’t wash. After 8 years of the Shrubbery this isn’t the government that Bill Clinton created, and the experience will probably be worthless.

OTOH, it is highly unlikely that anyone who is actually liberal can pass the vetting process that the Obama camp has set up, and Obama has shown no willingness to fight for anyone other than Obama.

Nothing is for certain until January, but the portents aren’t promising.

But, there is such a notion, which I believe is more deeply held by the people rather than those in the political machination, that “you gotta dance with them that brung you,” and I had a sliver of hope he might embrace that, however minutely.

on the other hand, it almost feels like he does not have even a glimmer of a notion that choosing center-right Clintonites (mostly just the fact that these choices are Clintonites) are going to destroy any chances of Dems holding onto the Senate, the House and many state governorships. Note, my view is most likely formed from living in a state that went redder. The Clintonite appointments will bring together the extremist conservative base, and make no mistake, that will expand again and pretty quickly.

Progressives would be wise to develop the “issues” voter, and forcibly move the political machination away from celebrity status.
Just my opinion.

Bill Clinton’s great weakness was that he cut deals too quickly. He didn’t hang tough when he had the approval ratings to win.

I withhold judgment on Obama until he does something, or he fails to do something. His performance on the FISA vote does not inspire much confidence.

The Republicans, especially in the Senate have had a scare thrown into them with this election. Those up for election in two years should be targeted now to bring the pressure to bear. That’s how the game is played – to win, not hold. The Senate campaign committee won’t do it, so the DNC must.

My central point is only that Obama is very, very smart, demonstrably possessed of intellectual curiosity, and sufficiently self-confident to be up to the job. There’s plenty of evidence for all of that.

I deliberately stopped in my reverse historical trip through the presidencies at Lincoln, as you so keenly discerned. As for John Quincy Adams, as any number of biographies of him have shown, he was a great and visionary president. It was the corruption of Congress, and particularly the Southern slave holders and their western sympathizers, that undid his presidency. (They almost succeeded in re-making Illinois as a slave state, as well, in the same period. And what a difference that would have made in the nation’s history!)

You attribute the failures of John Quincy Adams’ most excellent presidential proposals to his being a bad politician; I, to just plain bad luck, in the sense that chaos theory allows for it. No amount of brains and competency can overcome that.

MoveOn and the Democratic Party have both lost my membership, not that I think they care, they real question is how many more will leave when reality sets in. People raised their expectations to the moon, and if nothing happens, there will be major Republican gains in two years.

John Quincey Adams is the most intellectually complete President to date, but that didn’t help him because he wasn’t a politician. LBJ was the most skilled politician who was ever elected, but Lady Bird was the brains of the operation. FDR and his older cousin, Teddy, were the best balance for the White House.

Thomas Jefferson was very accomplished, but he went bankrupt and couldn’t resolve his personal issues with slavery.

Lincoln was a terrible executive and it was fortunate when good people finally rose to the top, but he was the best speaker and writer to ever be in the office. He didn’t know how to delegate.

You mention Rusk and McNamara while failing to understand that Obama is using the same pattern that JFK used when he appointed Rusk and McNamara – bringing in “old hands” for stability in a new administration.

The fact that Obama seems unaware that “Team of Rivals” is pop-history, rather than real history, argues against Obama’s “intellectualism”.

In any case, Obama hasn’t presented any real policies yet, and I reserve my judgment until he does, but he remains true to what he has always said about his vision in the selections of people he has made. My complaint is really with the people who have painted him as something he obviously is not – a liberal.

Right or left of center will make a huge difference. I don’t want “liberal” policies from some ideological viewpoint – I’m an analyst and computer coder, not a social science major or poet – I want them BECAUSE THEY WORK. OK, got it. This isn’t a matter of ideology, it is a reality.

Single Payer Health Coverage is the most efficient and effective way of making health care available. This has nothing to do with ideology.

Social engineering with the tax code is inefficient and ineffective. Continually mucking about with exemptions and rates is stupid and costs people a lot of money. The whole damn thing can be reduced to a table of rates that fits on a single sheet of paper. The rates are based on the cost of the government, not the whim of the Congress.

Invading other countries is expensive and shouldn’t be done unless we already have the means on hands. It should always involve a tax increase to pay for it and a draft to man it.

The government has no business in people’s private lives.

You have to educate the young or they will be useless.

These are considered “liberal” ideas, when I just consider them practical.

If they were truly as “left” as they claim, they would have voted Kucinich, but that didn’t happen.

Any Democrat was better than the Republican alternative. This will be a very interesting Administration to watch.

I won’t insult you by even raising the frat boy George W. Bush. Clinton? Smarts, yes, but in the end too cute by half, always playing the angles. It was a personality defect, I think. GHW Bush? Not much of a reader, no real intellectual curiosity, and at the root of things he had the mind of a mid-level bureaucrat with an eye always on his own career and personal fortune.

Reagan? Don’t make me laugh. Carter? He came close; smart, yes, but undereducated — despite all that hype about being trained as a nuclear engineer — and utterly lacking (when president) the self-assurance he needed. Still, his main fault was that he gave the American public too much credit. He tried to educate US about how complex the world really is. We didn’t want to hear it. We wanted to be licked behind the ears with Reagan’s soothingly simple view of a simple, black and white world.

Ford had the mind of a small town used car dealer. Nixon? The mind of the paranoid crook he turned out to be. LBJ was very smart, actually, but undereducated and, oddly, also lacking in sufficient self assurance to buck the “Best and Brightest” Kennedites he found himself surrounded with, like the execrable Dean Rusk and soul-less technocrat, Robert McNamara.

John Kennedy was smart, self-assured and, like Obama, had written a real book without any ghost writers or (apparent) underlying campaign-mode motive. But was he really intelligent or just the well mannered product of a privileged upbringing who didn’t have enough time to shine? We will never know for sure….

I could go on through Eisenhower, Truman, and even Roosevelt — all street smarts and self-assurance, but not really introspective, intelligent, well educated or intellectually curious. Hoover had, like Carter, the mind of an engineer, although in his case it was married to the soul of engineer as well. The rest of the ’20s are a joke.

Woodrow Wilson in his first term — certainly so until his stroke, although he was badly handicapped by his overt racism and it remains undetermined just how early his physical illness may have hampered him in the second term before the stroke.

Wilson aside, and not to endorse Doris Goodwin’s thesis, I do think a case can be made that we haven’t had a really intelligent president since Lincoln. So, as to Obama, is it great that we elected a man with mixed racial heritage? I suppose so in a cultural sense, although in a biological sense I continue holding to the view that there is no such thing as race. We are all descendants of Lucy.

But it IS great that even after being exposed to 50 years of commercial television, a dominant journalism culture that makes one weep, and a long lived political crusade by talk radio and the Republican Party against brains, we actually have elected an intelligent person as president.

The majority of the people of the US and the majority of Democrats in Congress are to the left of the Party leadership. The Blue Dogs don’t make up 20% of the Democrats in Congress, but they are the group that get catered to.

I just hope the left learns its lesson and doesn’t waste its energy in 2012, because they’ve already screwed this one up. Only time will tell how badly.