Hillary's 'fighting spirit' has managed to piss off half the Democratic party -- do we need Barack to mirror that asinine 'strategy'?

Is He Too Weak to Champion Liberal Values?

Yes. Enacting change means you piss off the people who have a vested interest in the status quo, and Obama doesn't seem to want to do that.

We are so used to punching and counter punching in our politics now that we don't even know how to think about Obama's style. But if we simply look at where partisan points scoring style fights have gotten us; we can clearly see that this system is not working.

We can go back and forth and have a Republican administration swing our entire government to the right as well as nearly destroy it and then have a Democratic administration swing the pendelum back to the left for while and we can go back and forth that way. But the problem with that is that nothing big and important ever gets solved because all of the politicians are just trying to score points with their base so they can "get stuff done" when they have the power.

So the idea that Obama represents is that if you take the high road when you can and stop the stupid bickering you might actually get people to work together on a few bills that make sense to the American people. Most solutions to our problems shouldn't be solved by a far right or a far left solution but a good mix of practical ideas.

Some answers are in here.

More answers here:

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/10/barack_obama.html

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama's bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)

So my little data point is: while Obama has not proposed his Cosmic Plan for World Peace, he has proposed a lot of interesting legislation on important but undercovered topics. I can't remember another freshman Senator who so routinely pops up when I'm doing research on some non-sexy but important topic, and pops up because he has proposed something genuinely good. Since I think that American politics doesn't do nearly enough to reward people who take a patient, craftsmanlike attitude towards legislation, caring as much about fixing the parts that no one will notice until they go wrong as about the flashy parts, I wanted to say this. Specifics below the fold.