Wow, the coming reality check for this person is going to be a dozy – assuming they are capable of living in the real world that is.

INS should be involved, because the evidence says he’s an illegal alien. The court case is still pending, btw.

“Values”, without specification, is exactly my point. Such abstraction is politically meaningless. So is “being a maverick”.

Ronald Reagan didn’t run on “values” in the abstract, he ran on a specific agenda of more aggressive engagement with the Soviet Union, aggressive pursuit of law enforcement, and an explicit philosophy of deregulation of the free market.

George H.W. Bush was mildly hostile to “the vision thing”, so he ran on a specific platform of no new taxes, and then couldn’t pay off on it. The mere fact that he had won a war was not enough, any more than it was for Winston Churchill.

In 2004, George W. Bush ran on a promise to “keep us safe from terrorism”. It won him that election.

Nobody can run on “values” in the abstract, and no party has a copyright on values in the abstract. You have to run with specific values brought to the fore: opposition to abortion, restricting marriage to heterosexuals only, an increased public role for church charities, and so forth.

Despite the general belief to the contrary on PJM, Obama did not run just on his good looks, or his campaign money, or merely on “change”.

He had specific, if sketchy, proposals to offer: a united and comprehensive approach to energy self-sufficiency within a decade modeled on the specific, if sketchy [and it really was sketchy], proposal of John Kennedy to put a man on the moon.

He proposed a trade of national service for money for college support. And he proposed a quite specific restructuring of the tax system. He also offered a gradualist approach to universal health care coverage. And, he finally proposed a more stringent regulation of Wall Street in the public interest [ie "main street"]

Folks over here may not like these proposals, but they are something not nothing in particular. McCain ran on nothing in particular and brought up different, and sometimes incompatible, proposals every week in response to the news cycle.

Obama, on the other hand, started the campaign with a specific message and stuck to it like glue. It was sufficiently “progressive” to unite politically active Democrats behind him, and it was sufficiently consistent and coherent to be directly sold to a majority of voters.

It was a particular brand, and the Republican Party no longer has a particular brand. It, like its leader in the White House, has degenerated into mere political opportunism.

You simply cannot expect the general public to understand what you mean by “values” even though all of you here comprehend this. You have to tell them what you mean, and persuade them that they should want it.

One of the many facts that contributed to Soetero’s victory was the control of the media, and I am sure I don’t need to produce any evidence in this direction regarding CNN’s, NYT’s and MSNBC’s, etc. wretchedness.
This situation was amplified by Soetero campaign’s well organized, aggressive presence on the Internet, where squads of trolls kept patrolling, hymn page/ answers for the topic of the day at ready, trying to confuse and discourage people of nonbama convictions, either by jumping at a beginning of a thread and trying to set-up the tone of the discussion, or by deflecting the matter, clogging the space with irrelevant facts or non-sequiturs – and as you can anticipate, this actions will not stop at this point in Obama’s career).
I studied how this Internet assaults occur on CNN, on their political/electoral news ticker – INVARIABLY, THE FIRST six-ten posts were STRONGLY PROBAMA, either as an laudative choir or executing pre-emptive strikes against the others who might have come later with different views. This, together with the fact that critical views towards Holograma were unlikely to be made public anyway, gave Holograma’s campaign a significant sway over cyberspace – the same situation was present on NYT, LAT, Chicago Tribune as well (since an outsider can’t really know when the next ticker post pops out, I think that in CNN’s case we had also an inside job, someone calling an Obama Dispatch Desk to give them the timing and the topic of the next post, so they could jump at it – or, since often truth is simpler than suspected, we had the old time censorhip at work, CNNN simply not publishing anything inconvenient about Obama).
Voluteers or paid, Cedarford, Hurley, Se and others like them are part and parcel of this Internet desinformation process – hardly an honorable activity, and an alarming omen about the views and practices of the reign to come.

But, wrecking balls alawys return: exactly like in the liberals’ skipping the electoral public funding, the consequences of that, and of this Internet situation will strike back, sooner or later – we learned the lesson, and we shall return!

As far as Hussein Soetero, what can we do so far but look forward to hear about his post-deportation choices in Kenya or Indonesia – cedarford and Hurley will sure keep us informed.