...a way to clean up the mess.

As I see it, Barack Obama is a practical liberal. Sometimes mistaken for a centrist. His aim is to get to a very liberal position. On most, if not all issues. But a true liberal knows that he can't shove a liberal agenda down people's throats. It's gotta be done coyly. Persuasively. Over a period of time. A true liberal tries not to make the same stupid mistakes of a conservative. George Bush, for instance, is as stupid as they come. Brazen and stupid. He tries to foist his gawd-awful conservative agenda on everyone. Unilaterally. He'll even start a war just for the hell of it. With lies. With deceit. With blatantly false intelligence information. Yes, a conservative likes to be the decider. Doesn't matter if the conservatives are in the minority. Actually, the first time around, Bush didn't even have a majority of the popular vote. But that didn't stop him from saying he had a mandate and a ton of political capital to spend. Anyway, little wonder that eventually Americans woke up. And clearly understood that Bush was a disaster. The worst president we've ever had. Now, if Obama was the same sort of unbridled ideologue as Bush, only in a left-leaning way, he'd probably turn out to be as big an ass as Bush. And eventually sour people on his agenda. But Obama has a brain. And savvy. And a sense of decency and fairness. He'll try to bring the American nation to the left, ever so gradually. Bit by bit by bit. The best he can. In a practical way. Because most people don't like dramatic change. They don't like to go from one extreme to another. Bush was an extremist. He refused to listen to points of view different than his own. Bush also was a religious zealot during his tenure in office. He divided the world into good and evil. Black and white. And he saw himself as champion of the good. And he even repeatedly identified the 'evil' nations. That's why he started a preemptive war. To take down an evil despot. And to this day, Bush doesn't think he has an evil bone in his body. He doesn't seem to have any regrets. He's convinced that history will judge him as a good president. One of the best. Yes, this guy is a believer. That he was picked by god to be the savior of America. Well, I'm not so sure about that. I'm just hoping that a practical liberal can find a way to clean up the mess. --Jim Broede