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DarkSteven -> Why Obama scares conservatives. (11/2/2012 5:57:40 AM)
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He's a pragmatist.
I remember one thing he said during the 2008 campaign. "I'm not against wars. I'm against stupid wars."
He likely hated doing the auto bailout at the time. (Now, of course, it's giving him a strong toehold in Ohio.) But he did it because it gave the best chance of holding the economy.
The conservatives have evolved from Reagan's ideologically driven pragmatism to pure ideology.
So we have Romney trying desperately to sound like a pure ideologue because he's supposed to. He's opposing the auto bailout because it interferes with the idea that government intervention is bad. Always. 100%. At the same time, he's trying to make a case that private interests would have invested without government guarantees, which is ridiculous, and he knows it.
Ryan's pushing a budget plan (well, he did. He's been kinda quiet about it since becoming the VP candidate) that advocates tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in entitlement programs, and balances the budget decades later, even with unrealistic assumptions about the growth rate. Pure ideology.
Conservative pundits are attacking Nate Silver's model. That's like attacking math because it doesn't yield the result you want. The cons have failed throughout the entire Bush administration - we got a failed economy, record debt, two unwinnable wars, and an Obama landslide in 2008.
They cannot handle reality.
Obama does stuff that works. His style is to relay heavily on intelligence and use surgical strikes. During his administration, we've had no new invasions, stepped up drone attacks that have hurt Al Qaeda badly, the strike that took Osama bin Laden, and the bailouts. While there's no opportunity to really assess his response to Sandy, it's certainly not a failure and much better than the Katrina fiasco. His failures have been in dealing with Congress, and the Benghazi intel issue. And in stemming the scurrilous lies circulating about him.
He's kept Gitmo open and maintained the Bush encroachment on civil liberties. He's mechanized the war. In short, he does things that no pure liberal or pure conservative would do. He's not driven by ideology.
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