What state are you in Pat, and have you voted yet?

He’s obviously taught Constitutional Law so long, he got bored with it, and decided to run for office. Otherwise why spend 10 years teaching it?

Those who teach can’t do, and if they can, they don’t spend 10 years before they do.

Hillary has always been a doer; that’s why she hasn’t been a teacher except for a short stint right after law school.

Does America want a teacher or a doer?

Obama inspiration requests that America revisit with him the 1960′s to focus upon race, when America is beyond race in the necessities of today. We’ve moved on to economics, to gender and gender orientation, and to globalism. We don’t need to go backward in time or in spirit.

What we need is to use the talents of everyone in the nation to combat the forces of terrorism, the forces of economic plundering, and the forces of negligence that threaten to cripple America, and end its democracy as well as the national prominence which made it the kind of country others want to follow.

It needs youth, and it needs voters, but it needs them to go forward, not to return to the land of yesteryear where Kennedy and Kerry feel comfortable touting Obama as the new JFK because he evokes a familiarity with those years. This is 2008, not 1968.

Allowing women to transform the nation, end domestic violence, and offer youth and children a chance at tomorrow will do more for America than anything Obama can do about race. Race is passe; America has spent decades on civil rights and affirmative action to make it that way. We don’t need to go back as the change we need. We need change to go forward.

“Let’s win this thing by running the most popular kid in school instead of the captain of the debate team.”

There’s no question that there’s value in that approach. Depending on what the goal is.

But winning one race doesn’t mean you win the girl or the game of life. What happens to the class clown eventually? As a parent, I’d much rather have a debate team member than a class clown for a kid.

You focus only on the winning – but that’s no better than Bush did with Iraq. We’ve got to think about everything after the win ALSO – both time periods deserve equally serious consideration.

Now, you also wrote this:

“It sounds like the new Clinton defense is that his words are empty and lacking substance.”

That’s not a new defense. People have been saying this for a long, long time. I heard Obama speak in person at Tri-C last year and wrote then about how moving he was but we needed specifics. People have been saying that for a very long time.

Now, on the other hand, people made this complaint about Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland when he was running, but the effect was to set expectations low, or not at all. That worked well for Strickland – his favorables remain very high, esp. compared to former OH Gov. Bob Taft.

I don’t think it’s a stretch, what’s being asked of Obama – so he needs to just do it. How hard could it be for a guy as smart as he is to come up with ideas that people can then repeat as being his plans?

“She seems to be sulking on the whole unfairness of it all – having to actually fight for it.” I think that was true, particularly after Iowa and New Hampshire.

“In short, she comes across as a candidate woefully unprepared for the kind of candidacy Obama put forward. And it seems too late now to repackage her. She carries too much baggage from the past.”

Again – I agree – unprepared for candidacy.

But what about presidency? There’s so much emphasis on how they are running campaigns and how they are as candidates.

It reminds me of the difference between taking the bar exam and being a lawyer. They barely compare.

We have a real problem in this country with separating out and allowing to remain entangled the politician who has to run and the leader who must govern.

I don’t know the answer, but this love for a great candidate versus assessing who’ll be the best person to govern distracts us during a primary. In a general election, not so much maybe – I’m not sure. But in general, I think it’s a very bad distraction. We should be smarter than that.

That said it seems to me that Obama realized at the very beginning that the only way the Hillary machine was going to be beat was to fashion a campaign that reeked of newness and hope. If he had tried to go toe to toe with her on traditional Democratic issues-based debating, he would have been playing to her strengths. Why does she want so many debates? She wants to pull him back into the land of the wonk where she excels.

But Obama’s people know what disaffected people want to hear from a candidate. They also know what people want him to seem like – the smile, the charisma, the can-do attitude – yeah its PR but that’s the way campaigns succeed in America. And he’s been brilliant in bringing this off. Years from now when political science textbooks are written, Obama’s campaign is going to be used as the shining example of how to beat someone with all of the momentum, money and connections that Clinton had coming into this campaign.

It may seem unfair to policy wonks, but the strength of any candidate in modern America is not so much on their position papers (no one believes policy promises anymore anyway) but on their VISION of what they see for the future of the country. Republicans learned this lesson first and a long time ago and they’re forgetting it now. All they have to offer going into this election is 100 more years of war. Obama is offering a different vision. Whether he can actually translate that into action in office remains to be seen. But what is Hillary’s vision for the future?

She seems to be sulking on the whole unfairness of it all – having to actually fight for it. And her positions generally are reworks of former Clinton positions on health care for example. And if we take into account the fact that she voted for the war authorization, her positions on foreign policy do not deviate much from the Republicans.

In short, she comes across as a candidate woefully unprepared for the kind of candidacy Obama put forward. And it seems too late now to repackage her. She carries too much baggage from the past.

I’m not 100 percent sold on Obama. But for me, I’m willing to give hope in this process just one. . . more. . . shot. And I believe he can beat McCain while I believe Clinton cannot. And polling seems to back that up.

Love the debate though

As the NBC slogan goes “The more you know…” I totally believe that.