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[bigtree]

146. so who plays Obama the insurgent? There was another dynamic working for Obama, as you know

. . . his race provided a surge of newly registered voters and gave him a lock on one demographic and helped him in other minority demographics.

I'll stick with my point that this was a political neophyte, at least to the battles D.C. was already engaged in and in his own stated expectations. I think the military is another area where he did not have enough institutional knowledge to formulate policy ahead of the republican holdovers he let stay and run his military and intelligence agencies.

He underestimated the political landscape involved in closing GITMO. He looks at trade deals as some compromise between republicans and Democrats, instead of having a political center that insists on his own pov prevailing. Too much of what he's done has been a learning process, and many times he's run headfirst into political obstacles that everyone, except him, apparently, knew well.

And the basic premise that he used to describe his governing philosophy was so naive you had to conclude that he was oblivious to the ground already covered and gained by the party before he came to power.

I don't know any other way to describe his military policy in Afghanistan except to say that due to his inexperience and lack of a base of military leaders and managers in his personal rolodex, that he committed a record number of troops to 'surge' there and ended up with more troop casualties and deaths there than Bush even managed. I'm going to call that a tragic rookie mistake. I really don't know any other way to describe it.

If you look at his experience in foreign affairs when he was in Congress it amounted to a speech against Iraq that he didn't have an original transcript for; a pt stint on a foreign relations committee with little to show for it than a handful of recorded questions from the junior senator and an arms deal with Lugar.

Conversely, Sen. Clinton had reams of questioning from countless hearings when she served on the Senate Arms Services Committee. You could actually measure her interest, concerns, and experience from those hearings, as well as in the legislation she proposed. It was a stark contrast with her less-ambitious Democratic rival.

All of that emotion from you . . . who is this dynamic candidate like Obama with a ready-host of new voters?