Although I don't want to hijack this thread to be about Nader, (especially since you started a thread more or less about him) but this is kind of related so I would like to say that I agree with him on a whole lot and am generally sympathetic with the idea of third parties. (In fact, in a different election I might vote for him, although the fact that I live in Massachusetts and thus am shielded from the spoiler effect since Massachusetts is going to the Democrats either way.) But what has come to annoy me about Nader is that he seems to have given up on pragmatism and compromise. (Goldwater was a dick; extremism in the defense of liberty totally is a vice, and moderation in pursuit of justice totally is a virtue.) There's nothing wrong with running an unwinnable presidential campaign to help get across important issues that other parties avoid, but Nader too often phrases things not in those terms but in terms of fulfilling a fundamental duty for him to run for election, which is just lame.
A good politician must always be willing to sacrifice an unattainable good for the sake of a lesser but more attainable good. Ultimately, this is the foundation of democracy, since either consensus is built into the system or minority parties have to be willing to acknowledge defeat rather than try to wage a revolution to take over the government or whatever. This is one of the things I've liked about Obama is that although he seems fairly liberal, (although this is overstated at times) he seems to be very willing to compromise on that to get results which are nice too. Barack Obama: Change you can feel okay about if that's fine with you.
1. If you are against the War in Iraq, why did you repeatedly vote for more funding of that war?
He's against the war, but he's not for everyone getting on a plane and leaving tomorrow, and even if he was there's no way that can make that happen. (I suspect that if Congress had withheld funds entirely, Bush would've done every dirty trick he could to keep them over there anyway, although I might be paranoid in this matter.) Additionally, as long as the war is going on, it is better for their goals to be done as efficiently as possible while they're there. (Even though we should leave, as long as we're still there we might as well try to do what we can.)
5. Why should we trust you to handle the sub-prime mortgage crisis, when some of your biggest campaign contributions are from the very banks and corporate law firms that helped create that crisis?
They're individual contributors, not the companies themselves, which are legally prohibited from giving money. How it works is that people who give more than $200 are required to give where they work. (And for the record, the maximum is $4600 ($2300 for the general, $2300 for the primary) so it's not like any one fatcat is giving him millions of dollars, unless said fatcat is breaking the law like hell.) The fact that Obama recieves a lot of money from people who work at financial institutions and corporate law firms could mean that there's some ulterior motives going on, or it could just mean that those are just companies that hire a lot of people who make enough money to be comfortable making biggish contributions to candidates, which I think is very plausible. At any rate I think that
Obama's proposals for the sub-prime mortgage crisis seem broadly reasonable.
