Best Presidential Candidate, Democrats

This story is to discuss the remaining democratic candidates for president. Please keep discussions limited to talk about Hillary and Obama. Keep discussions of the other party in the other story.

Even though Obama is Black and did drugs,

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary would galvanize the Republicans against her.

If Hillary wins the nomination, I'm voting for Nader.

Obama is the only one who can unite the country.

meh

[Pojut]

I personally don't like even Obama OR Hillary...but, if forced between the two, I would choose Obama first. Hillary is a slight bit psycho, and her husband (in my opinion) isn't quite the sharpshooter he once was...Obama may have some "appease the masses" opinions, but at least he has a solid head on his shoulder.

Hillary is just plain frightening. It's a shame that the first woman to really have a chance at the white house is a total lunatic.

obama@google

[Deanalator]

Someone posted part of this clip last time, where Obama talks at google about the future of technology. This is the full 64 minute clip, complete with Obama's joke about sorting algorithms :-)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo [youtube.com]

Great summary of Hillary

[arkham6]

"She is highly intelligent, has real experience and is an attractive candidate. But she is terrified to act on her beliefs. In fact, she seems so conditioned by what she sees as political constraints that one can barely tell where her beliefs begin and where those constraints end."

Re:Hillary and Obama

[pierced2x]

Hillary consistently refers to herself as 'Hillary', not 'Clinton' (go to her website, or see any of her campaign swag). The same goes for Obama. I see nothing wrong with calling them their preferred campaigning name. I am especially tired of the people that say Hillary is being 'disrespected as a woman' because she is called by her first name. Let it go already.

Re:Great summary of Hillary

[ScentCone]

one can barely tell where her beliefs begin and where those constraints end

I don't know. Sometimes she says what she really thinks. Just yesterday, she talked about garnishing the wages of people who don't buy health insurance. Now that's letting her colors show.

Re:My election prediction

[SportyGeek]

Obama is not a Muslim. Just thought I'd clear that up for you.

Re:Onlk Obama and Clinton?

[SilentBob0727]

Offtopic but FWIW, you can use "&lt;" for "<". Gotta escape your special chars because of the html-like markup.

Re:Well...

[cduffy]

I'm not terribly fond of candidates who put a message of "I'm the only person who can bring us together" out there like Obama has

Do you really think Hillary can? Consider her negative poll numbers; granted, they may not be entirely justified, but that doesn't change the fact that they're there. (I also think that "the only person" is a not-entirely-fair caricature of the message, as he strongly prefers to frame it in positive terms). Obama has a history of striking considered compromises (look at the death penalty legislation when he was a state senator for a prime example) and is equally at ease speaking to evangelicals (whose language he speaks fluently -- which not many Democratic candidates can do) and to the traditional left. His history as a constitutional law professor and civil rights lawyer is also encouraging.

I certainly can't disagree that there are a lot of Obama supporters doing Hillary-bashing. Perhaps it's because a good number of those folks who are members of Hillary's negative numbers end up in the Obama camp? That's certainly the case for me, even though I'd still be supporting Obama if I didn't dislike Hillary. If she wins the nomination, I'll vote 3rd party, as I've had enough of her fearmongering, think-of-the-children, divisive, anti-tech, pandering politics; supporting even symbolic anti-flag-burning legislation and doing photo ops with Jack Thompson earned her a black mark in my book long before Obama became a household name.

Re:None of them are worth a damn.

[sorak]

(about Obama)

Why should I believe that he won't be warped and corrupted by the power of the President's office?

It is very easy to dismiss someone on the assumption that every politician is corrupt. The problem is that they are not all equally corrupt or equally incompetent. One has to be better. So do you have any reason to believe Obama would be any better or worse than anybody else?

Re:Provenance and Iraq.

[KiahZero]

I worry about provenance with Clinton. Why was she the head of the Healthcare task force? A recognized health expert? A well-known elected official? Wife of a guy who got 43% of the vote?

Because she did similar work, successfully, as First Lady in Arkansas.

Then again, why was she on the board of Wal-Mart? We mention that (well, she doesn't mention on her website that she was the first female board member of America's #1 retailer). But, why? Was she a business expert? Run a corner store? Worked her way up from the mailroom? Was she the wife of the governor of Wal-Mart's home state?

Because Sam Walton was looking for a woman to put on the board, and Clinton was a known quantity - she had represented the company in legal actions in the past - as well as a significant stockholder. Add in the fact that before that point she was an important member of the Rose Law Firm, was the chair of the Legal Services Corporation (before it was gutted by Republicans), and a host of other organizations, clearly demonstrating her qualifications to sit on the board.

Claiming that Clinton took "shortcuts" to the top indicates you don't really know what you're talking about. Granted, Clinton isn't doing as good of a job of explaining her backstory as Obama has been, but that's not really an excuse for misrepresenting her qualifications as only being the spouse of a former President.

Re:Warning: Post from a conservative

[Pulzar]

Can someone explain to me the real differences in these candidates? I've been following the primaries and I still can't find one issue where they actually differ.

Policy wise, these are the differences as I understand them:

Health care:
- Clinton wants universal health care, and if you don't buy into it they'll penalize you
- Obama wants cheaper health care, so everyone can afford it -- but if you can't, tough luck

Iraq war:
- Clinton was for it to begin with, but didn't expect Bush to screw it up so badly
- Obama thought it was a bad idea, Sadam wasn't so bad, leave the guy alone

Illegal immigration:
- I couldn't figure out what the hell Clinton wants, she always goes into a long speech about middle class American families when asked about this
- Obama wants to let kids of illegals attend school, and give illegals driver's licenses

Violent games:
- Clinton thinks Jack Thompson is right
- Obama thinks parents should worry about what their kids play, as long as the games don't implement bubble sort

That's about it, from what I've seen. But, it seems that most people will end up voting based on some intangibles, like charisma, ideals, inspiration, etc...

I can't blame them, I'd vote for Obama for those reasons, too. Too bad I'm Canadian, so I just get to watch them duke it out on TV :).

Re:I personally

[rrhal]

Another salient FACT is the FACT that the next President will be Republican. Both Obama and Clinton have far too many people who hate them for either of them to win the General Election.

Capitalization doesn't change your opinion to fact.

Certainly you can find an equally large number of McCain haters - just listen in to Brother Rush some morning. And the Baptist base of the moral majority think that Romney is a heretic. And these are people inside the power base of the republican party.

The people that hate either Obama or Clinton aren't likely Democrat voters anyway.

How would Disney vote?

[GodWasAnAlien]

Clinton's campaign, when asked about supporting free/open debates, said:

"Calling for free debates might be seen as opposing copyright."

Also note that B.Clinton signed DMCA, URAA, and the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act.

Comparing that to Obama, who met with Lessig, and signed a letter saying the the debates should be in a Creative Commons license.

Who Disney would vote for?

Re:Patriot Act?

[Trip Ericson]

Russ Feingold. He voted against it the first time, in the 99-1 vote. Sadly, he's not running.

Re:None of them are worth a damn.

[natrius]

The Athenians thought that was a good way to do it. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Gravel?

[Shakrai]

All right then, smart guy... please post your argument for why Gravel is the best democratic presidential candidate. I'm dying to hear it.

Well, he would end the war on drugs, which I'd wholeheartedly support. Other then that though I'm not aware of many of his positions and I'm not going to let myself become a single issue voter.

I'll be voting for Obama, but if it was Gravel and Hillary then I'd probably be voting for Gravel. I just can't forgive Hillary for some of the stuff she has said and done over the last few weeks. I see little difference between her and Bush, other then she happens to more closely align with my own viewpoints. She's not the sort we need.

Re:Gravel?

[Chris Burke]

The worst part is that the die-hards in the Green Party actually do believe this. "There's no difference between Democrats and Republicans". Yeah, well, stop drinking the kool-aid long enough to realize that if Al Gore had won in 2000 we wouldn't fucking be in Iraq right now.

It's funny you should mention that, because I was one of those Greenies who, at least in 2000, believed Gore and Bush to be close enough to each other that the differences didn't matter. I preferred Gore largely because of his environmental policies, but not enough to vote for him instead of my true choice of Ralph Nader. Because really, how much worse could Bush be?

Well then Iraq happened and every day since I've been looking at the sky and begging forgiveness for ever saying "how could he be worse?" I was a fool, I admit it, so please stop making the point!

For a good laugh

[EriDay]

Go read the Repub comments. When I saw that the Repubs had 3/2 more comments than the Dems, I knew it had to be the Paulbots. CmdrTaco called for "Huckabee, McCain, and Romney only" comments. A troll if I've ever seen one.

grep -c "Ron Paul" article.pl.htm

658

grep -c "Score:" article.pl.htm

816

Out of 816 comments, there were 658 instances of "Ron Paul".

Re:I personally

[Shakrai]

and in payment he turned around and voted for "bankrupcy reform"

Umm, I've been through Chapter 7 and I followed the bankruptcy bill pretty closely. I don't recall Obama voting for it. In fact, this [govtrack.us] and this [senate.gov] both say that he voted "nay" on the bill. Ironically enough Hillary managed to miss the vote, though in her defense, I think that was around the time that Bill was having his heart surgery.

That bill is going to make a lot of middle class people lose their homes, and I don't consider that very "liberal".

How do you figure that? The primary "enforcement" mechanism behind the bankruptcy "reform" bill is the means test that can force you into a Chapter 13 instead of a Chapter 7. Chapter 13 actually makes it easier to keep your home. Generally speaking you can't keep your home at all under a Chapter 7 if you are behind on the payments -- and if you are current then you have to look at the amount of equity vs your states exemptions. Bottom line: It's much harder to keep your home under a Chapter 7 then a Chapter 13.

Parent post is verifiably false.

[Behrooz]

The parent post is verifiably false on both counts, either horribly misguided or a shill for the corporate stooges they referenced.

Obama's 2004 Senate campaign finance records are easily [opensecrets.org] available [opensecrets.org] and seem to be noticeably not dominated [opensecrets.org] by banking interests with a stake in bankruptcy law or their employees.

This matches up with Obama's vote against [senate.gov] the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

It's also difficult to credit Obama as a 'corporate stooge' given his record of seeking accountability and transparency [senate.gov] for lobbyists.

Get your facts right if you're going to contribute to the discussion-- mod parent down.