Finally, an article about the disgruntled Conservative voters, that would normally vote Republican. According to this, it is about 20% of them. Now if you take away from Obama the blue collar Democrat and swinging voters that will not vote for him on the basis he is half black (surely not that many), I think that it looks pretty promising for Obama:-
Obama's strange appeal to high priests of US conservatism
WASHINGTON (AFP) — They're called the Obamacons -- the conservative thinkers who are disgusted with the Republicans and are rallying to Democrat Barack Obama as the nation's economic and diplomatic savior.
They are joining younger evangelical leaders who see more to their religious mission than slavish devotion to Republican social mores, and fiscal conservatives who reject the war-fueled spending of President George W. Bush.
"The Bush coalition is dissolving," pollster John Zogby told AFP.
"We have polling showing
one-fifth of conservatives supporting Obama," he said.
It seems an unlikely alliance, as some of the star intellectual names who have long given philosophical sustenance to Republican rule clamber aboard Obama's bid for the White House.
But thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Bacevich -- all vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq -- dislike Republican candidate John McCain and see something alluring in his Democratic rival.
Fukuyama, the conservative author of the post-Cold War treatise "The End of History and the Last Man," said on a visit to Sydney last month that the Republicans were a spent force intellectually.
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that many on the right of US politics believe
"Obama probably has the greatest promise of delivering a different kind of politics" that breaks with decades of Republican orthodoxy.
Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, believes that after eight years under Bush,
the Republicans need to lose November's election to reinvent their thinking and policy platform.
"For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one," he wrote in The American Conservative magazine.
Among conservative critics, there is often a strong streak of libertarianism that is offended by Bush's war in Iraq, his curbing of constitutional freedoms in the "war on terror" and his swollen budget deficits.
Through publications such as National Review, the house organ of Republican seers, conservatives claim to have had the ascendancy of ideas for decades -- a point Obama has acknowledged through his praise of president Ronald Reagan.
But if that tide of ideas is ebbing, that suggests trouble for McCain at a time when the Arizonan is already battling to shore up backing from Republicans mistrustful of his maverick Senate record.
Full article:-
AFP: Obama's strange appeal to high priests of US conservatism
Quoting from the above- "The Republicans need to lose Novembers election to reinvent their thinking and policy platform". These are my thoughts in a nutshell.
There are a few Bush apologists, predictably staunch Republican voters. The majority of the US (and the world) however knows that the Bush administration was a failure, it's neo-conservative philosophies lie discredited, the amount of scandals that dogged the administration are unparalleled in recent history, and it has left the USA with several problems on the domestic and international front.
In business I did not reward failure, neither do I in politics. I am a pregmatist. Let the GOP lick their wounds for a while, and hopefully reinvent themselves as an actual Conservative party again- who knows, I might even support them at the next elections if they can achieve this.
