reprinted from my post within the referenced diary by popular demand... with a few minor edits.
The spot on the ballot next to Obama's name which I plan to fill in with an opaque spot before mailing it in is listed under President of the United States. NOT Messiah.
Read this diary. It's how Obama and his people built a bottom-up political machine based on giving people empowerment tools and letting us do what we thought needed doing.
That is how I expect him to govern. (within the limitations of the system in general and the Constitution in particular.)
I see him as helping us get the tools and resources together so we can work with him in building an America which will be a place people want to come to, not flee a generation from now. This means we don't get a free ride and neither does he.
"Assuredly we will all hang together or we will all hang separately". Benjamin Franklin
No, it isn't over even if the election results are President Obama, a Democratic landslide, and the GOP as a former national party smashed into chunks.
If you want a President who claims to be able to do our thinking for us and will provide us with talking points to "think" with, that's Hillary or McCain.
We are adults looking for competent, honest, and diligent adult leadership. We are looking for a leader smart enough to listen to us. And to oppose us when in his best judgment, we're wrong. Along with a clear explanation of why he thinks so. And if we're certain enough that he's wrong, we need to persuade him and if need be, to fight him.
Here's where we may wind up having to fight him:
- He's wrong about "clean coal" (it's an oxymoron)
- he needs to drop support for corn ethanol
- he needs to scrap his health plan and replace it with single-payer
These are things we might have to fight him on for the good of the country. But this will be fights between reasonable adults having a difference of opinion, not a War Against Evil of the sort we've had to wage against Bush all these years.
If he trades in "bottom-up" for "top-down" in your "switcherroo", he'll have to look elsewhere than the netroots for money and political support, because he'll have demonstrated that the main difference between him and Hillary is style.
We're PROGRESSIVES, not Obamabots.
In my judgment of the characters of the three candidates, two would be delighted to see diaries like this written about them looking to short-term political advantage and a long-term plan to pick America's pockets protected by loyalists, Obama would be wondering where the hell he went wrong.
The next President of the USA will have the biggest and most intractable problems any POTUS has ever faced.
We will either help that President solve them or America is going to become a place where parents who care about the future of their kids will help their kids escape from. And if we don't get a President smart enough to listen and to do and we don't work with him, not for him, may your [insert favorite Deity here] have mercy on us all.