and Max further added later:
> Yeah, I'd say that is very unlikely.
> Obama has already put himself out on a limb
> supporting a hike in the payroll tax to
> fix the 'problem.' He's not going to be
> in any hurry to do that.
>
> Hillary is another story.
Well, thank you all. After New Hampsire, my rage turned to deep regret that I had every said anything bad (and particularly the wrong things) about Obama.
Clinton back on top. Damn!
At least on the Social Security issue, Obama is better by a centimeter or so than Clinton, with high stakes involved.
As for the other issues, I'm having trouble figuring out who is better, though it continues to irk me that Clinton still hasn't said she was wrong about the attack on Iraq vote; Obama dissembles by now saying he wouldn't have, thought at the time he said he was undecided. There may be a millimeter of difference there in Obama's favor again. I'd rather have a dissembler than someone who never admits error and continues on as if they've never made any.
So while he hardly qualifies as "progressive", it appears he's better than Clinton by a tiny degree.
It's rational to vote for the slightly better candidate who can win, even if they aren't close to what you actually want. Go ahead and be irrational, a certain amount of irrationality is actually useful (Krugman writes on this on matters related to trade, in Peddling Prosperity and it's now well known in other literature). But if too many people are too irrational, we end up with Bush, or worse. Some political scientists say that Fascism is the appropriate system if people are irrational. Real people are a mixture of all the things (rationality/irrationality, selfishness/unselfishness, etc., that make any sort of modeling nearly futile; plus, we may be divided into fundamentally different personality types such as Myers/Briggs). Laissez faire capitalism, allegedly justified by models assuming people are rational and selfish, doesn't fit us well at all, as should be pretty obvious to any open minded person.
Given winner take all systems, there can't be more than two choices either. Now if somebody can actually win, they can create the "new" party that replaces the old one. When I suggested Bloomberg to my centrist political scientist friend, he sent me a page of laughing out loud. By my reckoning (I consider the Democratic party the continuation of Jefferson's party) it always seems that it's the "other" party that gets replaced, and even that hasn't happened often.
So, my rational (?) list goes (or went) like this:
1. Someone else better who could win. 2. Kucinich 3. Edwards 4. Obama 5. Clinton
*******
And just continuing this other to the GOP side, if I really had to choose among them, but not forgetting abortion rights, creationism and other parts of theocracy, appointments, (anti-)unions, base of support, and numerous other issues--all important IMO-- on which Democrats are millimeters or centimeters better than Republicans:
6. Paul (gasp) 7. McCain (ugh) 8. Huckabee (whew) 9. Giuliani (Just say NO!)
Charles Peterson San Antonio, TX
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