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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Conservative Obama?

By The Daily Dish
Jan 6 2008, 6:03 AM ET

A reader writes:

It makes sense that conservatives like you support Obama. On the domestic front, he supports a change of tone but not really a change of policy. For him the problems we have are not with society or the policy of our government, but more with the way in which our government attempts to develop its policies. He wants to end partisanship and create a new civil tone with partisans in politics and those in the larger society. In the end, he isn't suggesting there is anything fundamentally wrong with society, and he isn't suggesting we need grand policies to address those wrongs. And while he certainly will bring drastic changes to our foreign policy, conservatives like you envision those changes to be a reversal of the huge and disastrous changes of Bush and Cheney.

As a liberal- this is exactly why I cannot vote for him. I do think there are fundamental problems in society and we need grand new policies to deal with them. The question isn't why do conservatives support Obama, the real question is why do educated liberals.

Three possibilities: healthcare reform, climate change, the Supreme Court. What strikes me about Obama is not that he is conservative or liberal, it is his policy liberalism with conservative temperament. It is his movement beyond these exhausted ideologies.



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