I have to say, the number of people talking about ‘True Americans’ or ‘True Patriots’ here scares me. Very little good comes of people talking about True Anything, when it’s used to categorize people, no matter who is using the term. It almost always boils down to the True _______ being ‘people who agree with me’.

Personally, I’m on the left. I feel like Obama is doing a decent job of dealing with this crisis, at least as well as anyone could be expected to. I can’t say I like the amount of debt being taken on, but if the Great Depression is a workable analogue for this current recession (and I feel that it is), precedent dictates that although this spending won’t be an instant fix, it’ll help keep us from spiralling downwards (as it did in the years of the Hoover administration, due to an extreme hands-off policy).

There are logical arguments for actions such as tax cuts as a response to get us out of this current situation. However, these policies didn’t work as well as some have promised in the past 8 years (and despite the fact it was excessive deregulation, not tax cuts that got us into this mess), so economic control passed to another strategic viewpoint, that is, Keynesian economics.

I won’t pretend that Obama is going to be 100% successful. That’s a ludicrous promise. I do argue, however, that you’re throwing about the labels of Communist and Radical far too easily (and the occassional cry of ‘Nazi’, and while I understand that’s not in reference to Fascism, there’s probably better choices of words), and that there’s a lot of selective perception to arrive at preconceived notions (though good luck finding anyone on the planet who doesn’t do that).

And since the Ayers thing seems to be a pretty popular discussion topic at the moment, I think people read too much into that. Yeah, Ayers did a terrible thing. I won’t condone it. But it’s not like that’s going to be the sole aspect of his personality. He is, despite what he did, a human being, with all that entails. I don’t find it too hard to imagine that he and Obama had some disagreements; everyone does.

As for the Rev. Wright thing (I doubt I’ll post here again, mostly because I only found this through a link, and probably won’t see one again), I also give Obama the benefit of the doubt on that one. From what I’ve read, it sounds pretty much like he went spontaneously berserk when he was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. Obama’s defense of him early on, (while still stating that Wright was not normally like that), was pretty much based on the fact that abandoning your pastor/priest/what-have-you, is something that people really aren’t naturally inclined to do; we’d have more cause for suspicion (I feel), if he’d immediately denounced him (because that’d indicate that attending that church wasn’t true).

In the end, Obama is a human being, with all that that entails. He is neither as good as the worshippers portray him, or as bad as people here seem to believe. He’s just another person doing the best the can, as best they know how.