President-elect Barack Obama will not move for months, and perhaps not until 2010, to ask Congress to end the military's decades-old ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, two people who have advised the Obama transition team on this issue say.
Repealing the ban was an Obama campaign promise. However, Mr. Obama first wants to confer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his new political appointees at the Pentagon to reach a consensus and then present legislation to Congress, the advisers said.
What a novel idea - to confer with those most expert in a policy before implementing it! And then to want to reach a consensus rather than an edict from the One.
He's smart to avoid the brouhaha that erupted when President Clinton chose to make this one of his first policy changes in 1993 and everyone got distracted from by that fight. Obama is showing that he can learn from others' mistakes.
Whether his supporters are willing to accept delay on yet another of his campaign promises is another story. Right now they seem ready to cut him slack as he fills his administration with former Clintonites, even Hillary Clinton herself, toys with keeping on Bush's Secretary of Defense, forgives Joe Lieberman, and delays promises about an immediate pullout from Iraq.
But the netroots will have to get used tothe fact that the election of Barack Obama might be the worst thing that could have happened to their influence. They might rage against some of his changes, but as long as Obama has the support of the MSM he's not going to be worried much about some disgruntled voices on the extreme left.
President-elect Barack Obama will not move for months, and perhaps not until 2010, to ask Congress to end the military's decades-old ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, two people who have advised the Obama transition team on this issue say.
Repealing the ban was an Obama campaign promise. However, Mr. Obama first wants to confer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his new political appointees at the Pentagon to reach a consensus and then present legislation to Congress, the advisers said.
What a novel idea - to confer with those most expert in a policy before implementing it! And then to want to reach a consensus rather than an edict from the One.
He's smart to avoid the brouhaha that erupted when President Clinton chose to make this one of his first policy changes in 1993 and everyone got distracted from by that fight. Obama is showing that he can learn from others' mistakes.
Whether his supporters are willing to accept delay on yet another of his campaign promises is another story. Right now they seem ready to cut him slack as he fills his administration with former Clintonites, even Hillary Clinton herself, toys with keeping on Bush's Secretary of Defense, forgives Joe Lieberman, and delays promises about an immediate pullout from Iraq.
But the netroots will have to get used tothe fact that the election of Barack Obama might be the worst thing that could have happened to their influence. They might rage against some of his changes, but as long as Obama has the support of the MSM he's not going to be worried much about some disgruntled voices on the extreme left.
But the netroots will have to get used tothe fact that the election of Barack Obama might be the worst thing that could have happened to their influence. They might rage against some of his changes, but as long as Obama has the support of the MSM he's not going to be worried much about some disgruntled voices on the extreme left.
The left has almost no influence in American politics. Liberal voters are the most taken-for-granted voting bloc in the country. Republicans keep us voting for liberals, not the Democrats. They don't have to pay any attention to liberals.
Way to just throw the MSM insult in there arbitrarily, too.
A Rasmussen poll (reported 06/08/08) showed that even Democrat voters believed reporters would try to help Obama win rather than McCain (27% to 16%) instead of reporting objectively. Voters who said they were not affiliated with any party said they believed reporters would try to help Obama more than McCain (44% to 14%). Nationally, only 17% of voters saw reporters as unbiased. 68% believed reporters skewed their reporting to help the candidates they wanted to win.
In my book, it's an insult for the MSM to portray itself as "objective" when it's obvious to so many average voters that it is not.
