An American Icon

The newest addition to American Pop Culture just may be our next President. A lot has been said about Obama's lack of experience and lack of any campaign platform. In fact the best line I heard this past week was John McCain's, where he called Barack Obama's campaign, "an eloquent but empty call for change". We here at the Blogway Boys are not going to just jump on the bandwagon and pile onto Sen Obama ... we are going to do our research.

So where do I go to find out the Senator's positions? The obvious place is his website, after all if I wanted people to know where I stood ... I would definitely put all my positions on my website. Sure enough, on his very slick web page (one that I am actually jealous of, since mine looks like do-do compared to it), once you get past all the attention grabbing calls for "Change", there is an issues drop-down menu with 20 issues plus a category entitled additional issues with 6 more. I was delighted ... this would be the easiest research I had ever done.

So with great anticipation, I opened the first one entitled, "Fiscal" and downloaded the 3-page PDF file. Wow, I thought, this guy is good ... he can solve the nations' fiscal crises in 3 pages. Well actually 2 pages, since the first one was a cover sheet ... Well one page, the second one was merely a quote from one of his speeches (triple-spaced and taking up half the page, with the remainder of the page giving a summary and an explanation of the problem). Well actually not quite a page since the last fifth of the final page gave a synopsis of his voting record. Now the meat of the rest of the issue page was that we need to cut pork-barrel spending, reverse the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (though he didn't define wealthy), reinstate pay as you go rules in Congress, make government spending more accountable and efficient, end wasteful government spending, end tax haven abuse, and close special interest corporate loopholes.

I looked at this in shock, o-kay, I could get behind some of the policies ... but nowhere did he say how he would do them. Is he under the assumption that when he becomes POTUS that he can fix all of these things by official fiat? My mind immediately wandered to Sen Clinton's speech where she spoke about the heavens opening up and the celestial choir starting.

Every one of the positions on his website were full of beautiful ideas and ideals ... but not much in the way of how he was going to accomplish them, much less how he was going to pay for it. He also says that he is going to cut taxes on the poor, middle class and elderly. Everything will be perfect in "Obama-Land".

Looking through his voting record, he does seem to practice what he preaches, he voted against giving telecommunications companies immunity for co-operating with the federal government, he voted for pay as you go amendments and against the war in Iraq. He voted against funding the war and he voted for time-tables for troop withdrawals. Now I disagree with all of these votes ... but have to give the man credit for his consistency. The problem I have is he has missed a lot of votes (he has actually missed more than he has cast). I don't know if this is because he had no opinion on them, or if it was because he thought that by voting his conscience that it would hurt him politically ... or if he was just too busy running for President.

Anyway that you look at it, Obama doesn't have a plan ... just empty rhetoric. If he was competing on Dancing With The Stars, he would get my vote ... but for President, I would prefer Hillary (I can't believe I just said that).

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