Obama on Clinton

Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama recently stated that he believes that he can “bring the country together more effectively” than Sen. Hillary Clinton. My response to that is DUH! The problem with Hillary, besides her power lust, is her baggage and peoples very well defined preconceptions about her. The fact is that a extremely large number of people in this country simply hate Hillary as a person and as a politician and those people are well organized. If Hillary is the Democratic nominee you will see conservative groups unite like never before. They may not unite behind the GOP candidate (because most of them don’t seem to like any of the available choices at the moment) but they will unite again Hillary. Granted running a Presidential campaign solely on wanting to defeat the other guy isn’t generally effective (just ask John Kerry) but in this case it might work. If you get the right people and the right groups to make enough noise about Hillary, then she is doomed.

Obama on the other hand does not come with baggage, but he may have something much worse…lack of name recognition. For Obama to become the major player, he must define himself before his opponents define him (for an excellent example of how NOT to do this, please again see the John Kerry Presidential campaign of 2004). There is no doubt that there is a magic and electricity behind Obama but it will take more than that to convince the majority of the country that he is the best person for the job. Admittedly I’m not even sold completely on Obama yet but I do think he would make a good President. There are things he says that I completely agree with. Here is a perfect example:

"The question is, moving forward, looking towards the future, is it sufficient just to change political parties, or do we need a more fundamental change in how business is done in Washington . . .? Do we need to break out of some of the ideological battles that we fought during the '90s that were really extensions of battles we fought since the '60s?"

Obama hit the nail on the head with this one. We desperately need to move forward and clean up Washington DC. We need to leave behind the blinders of party politics and work together to find common ground to solve our problems. This is the greatest country on Earth but we are mucking it up on a daily basis with our ridiculous behaviors and attitudes. I don’t have all of the answers and neither does Obama but I think having him as our President would be much healthier for our country than Hillary.