Well, speaking personally, I’m a Democrat and, as the saying goes, part of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. I also know who Eugene V. Debs is, which I suspect puts me in the minority of the readers here.
I don’t visit many blogs. I used to write in one myself until my health made writing original material too difficult. I also don’t read a lot of opinion. I take opinion at a great discount, including my own.
I test myself not by my opinions, but by my mastery and use of fact. So my most constant reading online is my own package of RSS news feeds: Reuters Alert Net, AP Top Headlines, Top News UPI, McClatchy Washington Bureau, Google News, Christian Science Monitor, NPR Topics: News, Roll Call, BBC News Front Page, The Economist News Analysis, and C-SPAN recent video.
In the election season I have predominantly gone to the poll aggregators for information about the race: Pollster.com, Five Thirty Eight, Election-Projection.net, Electoral-Vote.com, InTrade Projection Markets, Presidential Election Forecasts, Real Clear Politics, Election Projection: 2008,and the one I follow with the greatest interest, Princeton Election Consortium.
Sam Wang at PEC uses a method that both predicted the Bush/Kerry EV numbers on the nose and predicted the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2006.
Most of the genuinely interesting political analysis ends up getting linked to these poll sites one way or another, so I follow the links from there.
I read PJM a lot, and stick my oar into the controversies, since experience tells me that the best way to sharpen a knife is to rub against the hardest stone you can find. The intelligent commentors are interesting and the delusional ones far more entertaining than on the equivalent Democratic sites. Delusional liberals merely froth at the mouth, delusional conservatives are apt to be buying guns, so it is more entertaining, and safer, to keep an eye on them.
I can’t say I find your caricature of a Liberal Democrat to be all that accurate, at least in my case. I actually do know intelligent and reasonable people planning to vote for John McCain, and I cherish all three of them.
I don’t in the least think Sarah Palin is a threat. I think she gets by in the world with a wink, a smile, good facial bone structure, and not much in the way of real information between the ears. Sort of a Breakfast at Tiffany’s with moose sausage on the menu.
I think Obama is intelligent [not brilliant], measures up quite well to the vaunted standard of “family values” in his private life, stable and not whim ridden in his public capacity, has general good judgment, and
is cool and clear when the chips are on the line.
I think Obama will win, and win big, but I think he could very well have lost if McCain, his campaign, had had enough sense to understand elementary strategy, and enough humility to actually learn from observation and experience. And this without any help from “racism” at all.
I don’t have that many criticisms of Obama, but that is only because the stuff I would criticize has largely been knocked out of him by ten months of Presidential campaigning. You seem to think so,too.
Oh, and I do have a favorite blog: Elizabeth Scalia’s The Anchoress. It is where I always turn when I want to see a more rounded picture of a conservative’s life and views.
