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Fine, change the example say it's a corporation's lobbyist against an environmentalist's lobbyist. My arguement was that money, not popular appeal rules lobbyists. You admitted to this.
It's complicated. In the example you are citing now, corporations have more popular appeal than environmentalists. Corporations have millions of investors, thousands of employees, and millions of consumers. All of these people have hard interests, and there's a lot of them. Environmentalism, to most people, is more of a "that's nice, I support it as long as it doesn't cost me anything."
Also, most of the time when environmentalists get into a battle with a corporation, the unions line up with the corporation against the environmentalist group, so it's a double team.
Now if you think Obama will buck unions in favor of environmental issues, you need to look more closely at his record of supporting coal, the dirtiest way to produce energy imaginable.
Yes, he want's to give subsidies to alternative forms of fuel. This ends the stranglehold that oil has on our economy and creates jobs, both of which are huge issues in this campaign. The issue with this policy is where now?
It is very unlikely that we'll be able to clean up coal. Few environmentalists think that's an option worth pursuing. Same goes for ethanol.
Obama, like any Democrat other than Al Gore, is going to choose unions over the environment 9 times out of 10. That's reality.
Barack Obama has been a Senator for 3 years. Ronald Reagan was Governor of California for 8 years. Jimmy Carter was Governor of Georgia for 4 years.
State politics counts too. If anything, state politics is even more "political".
Well there is a tradeoff for everything. I'm personally against NAFTA. We have a choice of forcing uncounted thousands of Americans into unemployment or ruffling the featers of Canada and Mexico. I would choose the first option.
NAFTA has created jobs in all three countries. There are several million jobs in this country dependent on exports. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot economically while alienating our neighbors.
Who says he will look like a fool if he gains nothing? I certainly don't think so. If he visits North Korea and nothing of importance happens, I'd see it as an example of Obama being willing to talk before the only option left is conflict. I'd respect a man who talked with someone who hated him.
Unsuccessful talks are very, very bad. Think of the 2000 Camp David talks between Ehud Barak, Arafat, and Clinton, and what the failure of that summit resulted in: war.
I don't understand how anyone can think that talking is a no-lose proposition. Try sitting down with a personal acquaintance you haven't gotten along with and see if talking helps. Sometimes it does, other times it just makes you both even more angry at each other.
Then there are the unfortunate visuals that sometimes come from holding talks. Like shaking hands with someone who has murdered 2 million people and smiling at them. That picture raises the stature of the dictator and ends up being used as propaganda against us later on(witness the picture of Rummy with Saddam from 1983).
I agree with you here. If a genocide does happen, we need to have a plan. I'd like to see the US presence in Iraq be replaced by UN troops from neighboring Arab states.
Bad idea. Sunni Arabs would just take the Sunnis' side in any civil war. The Shiites and Kurds would much sooner see a continued US presence than admit foreign Sunni Arabs into their country.
The Iranians are actually a better idea, since they would at least side with the majority Shiites.
Obama is thinking about global warming by reducing our dependance on oil. Obama is thinking about jobs as well. Once again, where is the problem?
He's thinking about jobs, period. It could be interpreted as reducing dependence on oil if it was more comprehensive, such as including a plan for more nuclear power plants.
Apparently most Americans can afford to give more. Obama has millions of people who have donated money because they believe change to be worth the investment
Most of Obama's donors gave $200 or less. By contrast, the tax plan Obama voted for last month would cost a median family over $1000 per year.
So the moment we know something will work, we need to stop supporting it? We know alternative fuels will work and will one day be lucrative, why are we still supporting it?
We don't need to. There are no technological obstacles to say, plug-in hybrids. The obstacle is consumer resistance. No amount of subsidies will change that. A higher gas tax would probably do more than subsidies, and a higher gas tax would at least be fair. Subsidies tend to go mainly to political allies of whoever is in power.
First of all, change doesn't have to be something new. It was counted as change when Bush lowered taxes, but he wasn't the first to lower taxes
Obama promises change in the sense that the old politics will go away. Obama's platform says nothing of the sort, it's just change back to what we were doing before Ronald Reagan. Other Democrats had similar platforms, but they didn't call it change. Hillary Clinton packaged it as a restoration of sorts, a return to the good old days. For once, Clinton was a lot more honest than Obama is being.
Second, a lot of Obama's policies are brand new. He wants to legally require parents to purchase health insurance for their children.
Expanding health insurance through government mandates dates back to Truman.
wants 25% of our energy needs to be met by renewable energy by 2025. Brand new
Conservation is new?
He wants to take our troops out of harm's way in Iraq. Brand new
JW Fulbright and Wayne Morse might disagree with you there(Vietnam).
The policies you are citing are new only in the circumstances, or there are microdifferences between those policies and the way it woud have been done in the 60s. But there is nothing there that a liberal Democrat in the 60s would disagree with.
Obama is advertising himself as a unifier, someone who wants to transcend the old politics. He has no plans for radical reform of government. Nothing even so radical as McCain-Feingold. It's pretty bad that he claims to be something that McCain has already been, only better.
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