When Republicans Endorse Obama | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com

Susan Eisenhower is more than just another disappointed Republican. She is also Ike’s granddaughter and a dedicated member of the party who has urged her fellow Republicans in the past to stick with the GOP. But now Eisenhower, who runs an international consulting firm, is endorsing Barack Obama. She has no plans to officially leave the Republican Party. But in Eisenhower’s view, Obama is the only candidate who can build a national consensus on the issues most important to her—energy, global warming, an aging population and America’s standing in the world.

“Barack Obama will really be in a singular position to attract moderate Republicans,” she told NEWSWEEK. “I wanted to do what many people did for my grandfather in 1952. He was hugely aided in his quest for the presidency by Democrats for Eisenhower. There’s a long and fine tradition of crossover voters.”

Eisenhower is one of a small but symbolically powerful group of what Obama recently called “Obamacans”—disaffected Republicans who have drifted away from their party just as Eisenhower Democrats did and, more recently, Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.

Does John ‘100 Years’ McCain Agree With Bush’s Signing Statement On Iraq?

Earlier this week, when President Bush signed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, he issued a little-noticed signing statement, claiming that provisions in the law — including the barring of funds for permanent bases in Iraq — could be disregarded.

Democrats in Congress were quick to condemn Bush’s stealth measure. …

Conspicuously absent from the debate over Bush’s signing statement is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). In the past, McCain has spoken out aggressively against signing statements, saying they are “wrong” and that they “should not be done“:

“I would never issue a signing statement,” the Arizona senator said at a Rotary Club meeting in Nashua, adding that he “would only sign it or veto” any legislation that reached his desk as president.

Perhaps McCain is keeping silent because he shares Bush’s goal of an indefinite, long-term presence of American troops in Iraq. Last month, McCain said it would be “fine with” him “if we maintain a presence in” Iraq for “a hundred” years.

The question arises as to what’s more important to McCain: his anti-signing statement pledge or an indefinite presence in Iraq?

A lot of Democrats I know respect McCain and would find him a tolerable president. (Most of them don’t know he’s anti-choice.) A picture is worth a thousand words. Duhbya used dirty tricks to crush McCain in 2000. In 2004, McCain clings to Duhbya. Is this sick, tired, old man our next president? mjh

AP: Romney accuses McCain of Nixon-like tactics – News

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused his rival John McCain of adopting underhanded tactics from Richard Nixon, the GOP president who resigned in disgrace.

“I don’t think I want to see our party go back to that kind of campaigning,” Romney said in his most pointed rebuttal yet to front-runner McCain’s claim that the former Massachusetts governor favors a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Romney denies this charge, and most media analyses have concluded that Romney wasn’t using ‘timetable’ in the same way Democratic candidates have.

McCain’s decision to level the timetable charge this week without leaving Romney time to rebut it before Florida Republicans voted in their primary “was reminiscent of the Nixon era,” Romney said. McCain ended up winning the Florida contest Tuesday.

E. J. Dionne Jr. – The McCain Divide? – washingtonpost.com

If John McCain secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics — a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.

McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and also the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party’s center and its dwindling left. McCain is winning despite conservatives, not because of them.

Those who built the American right, from Barry Goldwater in 1964 through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, are intensely aware of the dangers a McCain victory portends. Some on the right feel it would be less damaging to their cause to lose the 2008 election with the Republican-conservative alliance intact than to win with John McCain. …

Rush Limbaugh
has served as a spokesman for their cause. On his radio show Wednesday,
Limbaugh excoriated those who “pretend that Senator McCain is the
choice of conservatives when exit poll data from every primary state
show just the opposite.”

“He is not the choice of conservatives, as opposed to the choice of
the Republican establishment — and that distinction is key,” Limbaugh
declared. “The Republican establishment, which has long sought to rid
the party of conservative influence since Reagan, is feeling a victory
today as well as our friends in the media.” …

But as one prominent conservative noted Wednesday night, Republican
elected officials are starting to fall into line behind McCain, despite
their reservations, simply because they think he will win. Their
capitulation signals the end of the Reagan-Bush era and the beginning
of something quite different.

Coulter wants Clinton over McCain
Posted: 11:25 AM ET

(CNN) — In the latest sign that a conservative backlash is starting to build against John McCain, conservative commentator Ann Coulter said Thursday she is prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton over the Arizona senator in a general election match up.

Speaking on Fox’s “Hannity and Colmes,” Coulter took aim at the GOP frontrunner, and suggested he was little more than a Republican in name only.

“If you are looking at substance rather than if there is an R or a D after his name, manifestly, if he’s our candidate, than Hillary is going to be our girl, because she’s more conservative than he is,” Coulter said. “I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism.” …

“John McCain is not only bad for Republicanism, which he definitely is — he is bad for the country,” she said.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

Editorial: Our nation needs a Democrat; Obama’s a better choice – SantaFeNewMexican.com

The nation needs a Democratic president — mostly for the sake of the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary, but also because our government’s policies, foreign and domestic, are badly out of kilter.

There are many good Republicans embarrassed to tears by the Bush-Cheney administration — and they’ll be quick to remind their fellow Americans that, come January, those two are outtahere. So elect John McCain or Mitt Romney, and things will be fine; at least finer than they are now …

Not good enough; eight years of the best that party could offer us is plenty for now. Despite our high personal regard for Sen. McCain, we think it will take Democratic leadership to undo past wrongs, recover the reputation of our globally humiliated country and restore economic and social justice.

But the same operatives who fooled our nation not once, but twice, into Bush-Cheney already are plotting another puppet regime controlled by corporate scoundrels. They’d be ecstatic at the prospect of Democrats floating a Clinton co-presidency, and they’ve been rubbing their hands with glee during recent weeks as the former president mounted the stage on behalf of his wife, one of the two remaining candidates. …

Hillary Clinton is only one of two outstanding candidates for the Democratic nomination, and The New Mexican endorses the other: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Shorter on experience, he also is unsullied by the quid-pro-quo world of Washington. That puts him in excellent position:

* To lead a long-overdue initiative toward universal health care;

* To lead another overdue initiative, on a new nationwide energy source;

* To lead our public schools out of the doldrums;

* To lead the country back to financial solvency and economic independence.

To lead, indeed. Sen. Obama is someone Americans can rally ’round.

His honesty will confound those trying to twist voters’ perception of him and the working-people’s party; his genuineness will disarm critics jaded over politics-by-rote; his academic brilliance and organizing skills will allow him to handle the complexities of the presidency; and his oratorical skills and compelling personality will inspire a long-lax nation to get off its collective butt and achieve what we’re capable of.

New Mexico Democrats can catch an exciting new wave with votes for Barack Obama on Tuesday.

[hat tip to www.dangerousmeta.com]

ABC News: Obama: ‘Old Politics Just Won’t Do’

“The way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq, who agreed with him in voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran, who agrees with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don’t like, and who actually differed with him by arguing for exceptions for torture before changing positions when the politics of the moment changed,” Obama said. …

In his speech, Obama argued against the politics of divide and conquer, without pointing the finger directly at the Clintons. [mjh: The following points a finger at Rove, not the Clintons.]

“We’ve faced forces that are not the fault of any one campaign — forces that open American wounds,” Obama said. “The politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. A politics that tells us what we have to think and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=4215588&page=2

I’m especially tired of George Stephanopolus spinning things Clinton’s way while masquerading as a ‘journalist.’ He was Clinton’s communications guy — and it seems he still is. Read this speech. mjh

Transcript of Obama’s Speech Wednesday in Denver, Colorado
The Past Versus the Future, January 30th, 2008