fpb | A faltering campaign? (Reply)

So far, McCain supporters have been greatly disappointed by his performance against Obama. I will, personally, wait and see until the vote, and then decide whether the man who managed to completely defeat the Republican Party establishment practically without any starting means could not find a way around his current opponent. However, there is one thing I know for sure: the strategy that a loud chorus of conservative pundits are calling for - hound the steps of the young Obama for evidence of political extremism and what they call "socialism" - is bound to fail. I do not know what these gentlemen's life experience is, but in that of most of us, a certain amount of more or less reflexive student-union leftishness is practically inevitable. Everyone who has been at college has had Communist friends and maybe an anarchist acquaintance or few, had a favourite professor who was a Socialist theorist, or an aggressive race-theorist acquaintance. You cannot scare a modern public with what Obama did or said twenty years ago; not when the man - apart from his abortion proposals - is offering a program that is really further to the right (as

kennahijja has pointed out) than the standard of a perfectly democratic left party in most Western countries. There probably is more to be got out of his connection with the Daley machine and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Americans and electors in general still dislike party machines, corrupt politicians, and connections between politics and big business.