Loserville: Obama Is Channeling Kerry and Gore

Like John Kerry and Al Gore before him, Obama, who ran his primary campaign as a liberal, staking out an anti-war position, has morphed over recent weeks into a Republican-lite candidate, calling for a hard line against Palestinian rights, threatening to attack Iran, calling for an expansion of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, and backing away from genuine health care reform and other important progressive goals here at home.

One might think that after watching Democratic candidates lose the last two presidential elections by following exactly this kind of “strategy,” if it can be called that, Obama and his campaign managers would have decided to try something different, but it appears that the Democratic Party at the top is hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests that favor war, free-market nostrums and corporate welfare. (Okay, I know Gore really won the 2000 election, but he should have won it so convincingly—for example taking New Hampshire and his home state of Tennessee—that the election couldn’t have been stolen. And Kerry, similarly, should not have had his race determined by a close vote in economically distressed Ohio, which should have been his by a blowout.)

Obama got where he is—the first African-American major party nominee and the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the White House—by appealing to the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Now Zogby reports that Obama’s support among liberals has plunged 12 percent. That’s liberals folks!