I now strongly support Senator Obama for President because I think he is the best candidate, Democratic, Republican, Independent or otherwise. In my view, policy positions trump likability every time.

Do you honestly think those threats are going to work? If Obama loses, the Democratic Party is as dead as the dodo in 2012.

When every issue’s going your way and you still lose, then you certainly won’t win after the Republicans have returned to the good graces of the American people with more tax cuts and wars. And please don’t blame it on Palin’s “genius.” You guys are just no good at politics. Maybe you should spare yourself the humilation of pretending you’re an opposition party of any significance. Disband and join the Whigs in political Tartarus. Let the Greens and Libertarians have a go at the GOP.

Obama: Years as a community organizer, first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend twelve years as a constitutional law professor, spend eight years as a state senator representing a district with more than 750,000 people, become chairman of his state senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, spend four years as a US Senator representing a state of thirteen million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment, and Public Works and Veteran Affairs committees.

Palin: local weatherman, four years on the city council, six years as mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, twenty months as governor of a state with 650,000 people.

And, if someone wants us to have faith that they can be the “leader of the free world,” then they *should* be someone elite (meaning “the best”) and have a confidence that will come across to some as “arrogant.” Running for president, is, by definition, arrogant, IMO.

But really, that’s such a red herring: At this point the economy is not going to be solved by any one person. Anyone who believes that is woefully uninformed or beyond naive. The current economic troubles are not the result of one administration’s choices but years of unfettered growth and unregulated investment by the largest investment banking firms. If you want to blame someone look towards corporate managers and government officials who consistently take a short-term view over long. The current administration is setting up a holding company that will long be in existence and formulating economic policy well after anyone even remembers dumb-W set it up. The bureaucracy will be defining, shaping and running the economy for the next decade.

With that said, I’m a former Clinton supporter who cannot get behind Obama no matter how hard I try. If I were to vote purely on economic issues I might be able to, but his whole tepid support for gay people followed by his assumption that we’ll vote for him no matter what, has really left me at an impasse.

Hopefully I’ll get over it on election day and vote for him, since deep down I know it is the right thing to do. But he’s really made some mis-steps with us. With little or no effort to ameliorate the situation. This crazy ‘families and values tour’ is the best example. He’s pandering for social conservative votes while throwing gays and lesbians under his non-inclusive bus. How else do you explain his inclusion of a pro-prop 8 speaker on his tour (Douglas Kmiec). That to me speaks volumes about where Obama places us on his list of priorities and that is why it is so hard to cast my vote for him or put my support behind him.

Obama is simply not qualified to be President. In fact, he is no more qualified than Sarah Palin is to be President. Obama is arrogant–if he wanted true party unity, he would have picked Senator Clinton as his running mate. Now, he is on the verge of losing the election.