This is not in the bag for Obama. All i say is this reminds me of Dewy vs Truman
Truth is all McCain has to do is stay white and he is in the race.

So, we'll have a dishonest but prudent socialist President in cahoots with a highly imprudent leftist Congress. That's very comforting.

His temperament could just as easily be interpreted as political cowardice or shrewdness (such as being against Iraq, then for it, then against it again, or voting present hundreds of times in the state senate). Certainly, his campaign has been run with incredible disdain for election laws (such as the bogus online credit card donations, the phone banks from Gaza, the bogus ACORN votes). Without providing concrete examples of Obama's temperament leading to him making an informed wise decision, you're just basically saying you're impressed with his acting abilities. I admire actors too, but don't consider that an important quality in a president.

I agree with you in that I could not support McCain/Palin, but find your attempts to convince yourself you're correct in joining the academic herd in supporting Obama pathetic.

I agree with you about what I perceive Obama's temperment to be. Indeed, wholly on platform I'm not too uncomfortable with McCain and HIGHLY uncomfortable with Obama. It's temperment and temperment alone that makes this election particularly difficult for me.

But one of the reasons I'm voting McCain all the same is just that I'm not terribly convinced we know all that much about Obama's temperment. When you stop to think about it, this is basically the first fair and openly contested election Obama's run in. He started out with few expectations and luckily overperformed. He's NEVER been backed up against the wall the way Hillary was defending herself against him or McCain was on finding out that he was behind late in the game. He's always been in the comfortable position of being ahead, or being clearly on his way to being ahead, the whole time. When you really get to see a man's character is when things AREN'T going his way ... and things have been going Obama's way from the get-go. So while I agree with you that McCain has shown us a nasty side that certainly gives me pause, I have to agree with Rob that we don't really know that what we're looking at in Obama isn't just a slick actor. Put him in a position to lose his cool, see what happens, and then we can talk about temperment.

But that's the whole problem with Obama - prudence my ass - every Obamacon I know thinks exactly like you do Dan: they see a reflection in Obama of the way they want to believe the world works ie that you can rationally work through problems and by means of logical steps come to the right conclusion. You're an academic, an intellectual - you obviously want to believe the world corresponds to that [and don't be naive - Obama is completely aware of how his demeanor works on people - he milks it like an actor]. And so when Israel bombs nuke plants in Iran Obama's gonna gather all his big brained people in the Oval Office and he's gonna wanna bring his enlightened prudence to bear on the issue and they're gonna form their logical categories into nice rows which will spit out the 'rational' response they can be 'comfortable' with.

Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way.

When as a young man Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom and he swore to his captors that when released he would hunt them down and crucify them all and then did exactly that - Romans admired him and understood the meaning of it. Logic and prudence had little to do with it.

Joshua: I think you're overstating--at the start Obama was a big big underdog and several times there were opportunities to panic (certainly some of his supporters were).

Balok: You've got some truth. You might cite the JFK/Khrushchev meeting, where Nikita used force of personality to browbeat JFK. But we've advanced past the Romans and there's something [actually a whole lot] to be said for prudence, just read the new Dobbs book on the Cuban missile crisis. Or, for what an emotional analysis can do to us, read Tuchman's The Guns of August.

I think it "sealed the deal" for a lot of us when Obama and McCain chose their running mates. It's hard to imagine a more stunning contrast of approaches to important decisions. Point, game, match, Obama.

When you disagree so fundamentally with so many policy issues, the candidates mannerisms don't seem very relevant to me. I still can't really fathom how anyone who considers his or her self to be even moderately conservative can vote for Obama, other than as a protest of the Republican party.

"the Obamacan [sic] phenomenon, of which I guess I’m a reluctant member"

I don't see how a Kerry (and now Obama) voter, like Drezner, satisfies the "con" part of the "Obamacon" moniker. (Perhaps that's why Drezner spells Obamacon as "ObamacAn".)

In Drezner's case, it seems to me the label should be Obamoderate-liberal.

Dan's argument is good as far as it goes, but it des take into account where we are in history. We have had eight years of an administration that has been badly, whimsically run, that is headed up by a person who runs things by his magnificently underinformed gut. The failure of this administration has had consequences that I don't think we fully understand yet. (Who is to say that part of the great bank panic was caused in part by people's failure to believe anymore in the United States and the fool in charge of it?) And, part of the problem is a philosophy that says the internal affairs of many other nations is necessarily the business of the United States.

Of course, right now, we are as a nation way overextended, and we are in a situation where our actions may have results completely than those we intend. So, in this point in history -- do you want someone who is plenty tough, but who is not known for their flexibility. Do you want a drama queen who comes stomping into a delicate situation (and then fails to follow through on the consequnces of his actions)? Do you want someone prone to snap decisions, which may be right, but may just as easily be worng?

Or do you want someone more thoughtful, who is (oddly for a Liberal, when you think about it), more humble about what our government can achieve on the global stage? Do you want someone who will, when it looks like a policy is going wrong, appears to have the capability to change course?

McCain on policy is likely to be a stopped clock -- sometime right but never changing. I have more faith in Obama's ability to change positions if it appears justified. For example, I don't think we'll be seeing coal companies go bankrupt, as freeze our way through the next few winters under Obama. I do see us staying in Iraq for the next 200 years under McCain.

Dan, this post inspired me to write about the Athletics this morning. Process is good, but you need the talent to go with it.

But what all of these "more thoughtful" "change course" arguments rely on is that you already agree with his policies and the way he sees the world. When you don't, none of that is really worth anything.

Evidently, Obama can be charged with political cowardice because he fails to take absolutist positions on whatever issue is put forth in front of him at any given time. The overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. He could have chosen to be the heir to Ted Kennedy - an eloquent spokesman for leftist causes in the Senate, but nothing more than that. But with just two years under his belt in the Senate, he decided to take on the most powerful political name in the Democratic Party since FDR. And it was no cakewalk - there were plenty of time he could have simply walked away. After all, the policy differences between Clinton and Obama were slim. But Obama did not back away from a fight.

The scenario repeated itself in August, when Obama was slandered with "celebrity", "Muslim", "not patriotic enough" "socialist", etc. He could have given in, and lost his temper on camera. But, let's face it, an angry black man on TV does not win votes. Obama had to campaign with one arm tied behind his back. Just as Jackie Robinson had to smile through taunts of racial slurs, so did Obama have to keep his temper in check.

For all of the charges of socialism - are these same idealogues going to give up Social Security, Medicare, prescription drug benefits, and federal guarantees of bank deposits? Not likely.

Here a little old lady rattles Obama. Maybe she reminded him of Toots. And of course for a few days after the Republican convention, the Palin comments had him flusters. He did, of course, recover.

You do have to admire the way he has run his campaign, Axlerod was a smart hire. And he certainly has stayed on message. Still and all, I think his sangfroid, like much else about the man, is more apparent than real.

What goes unmentioned by both left and right is the remarkable degree of managerial competence displayed by Obama over the last two years. He has run a huge political enterprise (dwarfing, e.g., the state of Alaska) with a steady increase of "revenue" (voter turnout) and negligible personnel turnover at the top. Who else in this race has done anything comparable? Don't talk to me about "inexperienced" or "untested."

By what criteria does Obama's campaign dwarf the state of Alaska?

I'm not sure how this is a true endorsement. Obama prudently arrives at the wrong decision or slowly and thoughtfully implements socialism in our country? I know what you are saying about his temperament and how he answers questions. He inspires much less defensiveness and he actually seems to think about his positions before tossing them out there, in debates at least. But he still sticks to liberal illuminati ideals and makes his slow and thoughtful decisions according to them. And that's not something I can support.

This is an interesting question for me, since I intend to vote for Sen. Obama in the expectation that as President he will take positions with which I disagree more often than not.

Obviously an essential condition for such a vote on my part is the abject and comprehensive failure of the incumbent administration. The gap between myself and those Republicans still prepared to make a big deal about party loyalty is primarily about this subject, not about Obama; most of the party loyalists sincerely believe that George W. Bush is an admirable man who has been a good, even a great President, while I regard Bush with contempt on a personal level and think his administration has done as much damage to this country and its interests as any since James Buchanan's. An Obama Presidency would have to be awfully bad to be worse than the one we've lived with for the last eight years.

This still begs the questions what I expect from Obama in the White House. Frankly, to the extent I am voting for Obama rather than against the Bush Republicans now using John McCain as a front man, it is a vote based more on hope than on expectation.

The judgement of journalists and pundits who cover campaigns for a living that Obama has shown a first-class, Presidential temperament by the way he has run his campaign is not one in which I have any great confidence; Obama has mastered the conventions and mechanics of the modern American campaign, but history tells us that this is not reliably predictive of a man's performance once he ceases to be a candidate and becomes a President. After all, one of the things that has made George W. Bush such a disaster as President is that for Bush the campaign never really ended. Do I know Obama will be different in that respect? I do not.

I note that Obama has fought no battles for causes not directly tied to the professsional advancement of Barack Obama. Nor has he deviated in any significant way from rote endorsement of specific policy agendas promoted by the organized interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. Nor has he modified a program of tax cuts that was probably too expensive when his campaign first proposed it a year ago in light of the economic earthquake that the financial markets' panic this fall represented; indeed he his campaign has leaned more heavily on that part of his platform this fall than it has on any other. Nor -- and here I find myself oddly in agreement with some of the least reasonable people on the left wing of American politics -- has Obama specifically repudiated the innovations made by the Bush administration (or rather by its Vice President) in the way the Executive Branch of the government conducts its affairs. All these things, and several others, give me pause.

However, I do nurse hope that Obama's apparent respect for orderly procedure represents something more than an accommodation of David Axelrod's ideas about how a Presidential campaigns should be run. If it represents instead Obama's own strong views about how the government should be run, and if he insists on them as he appears to have done during his campaign, repair of the damage done by George Bush's administration during the last eight years should become possible. Process in earlier administrations was shaped to allow the President to make the decisions he needed to; process in Bush's has been shaped to make it possible to spare the President from making any decisions with which he felt uncomfortable. I don't have enough confidence in Obama yet to expect that he will return to the earlier standard. But I hope he will.

We really can't go on the way we have. We have to take a chance on something better. It doesn't matter whether I can imagine a better chance than Barack Obama represents; he's the man the electoral process has produced, and the choice has to be made now. So I'm voting for Obama, with some reservations but no doubts that he is the best choice for President this year.

Is Dan finally going to admit that he is a Democrat? This is a good blog but Dan is not a libertarian Republican and should finally come to terms with that. Perhaps, it is beneficial in terms of media requests (see Andrew Sullivan) to claim to be a conservative but always manage to vote Democrat. Funny, but all of these self-professed conservatives who voted Democrat in 2006 based on the benefits of divided government no longer seem to care about it.

I love that expression prudence. I also love the supporters that appreciated obama's nuanced handling of the economic crisis.....call me if you need me. Oh come on, do we really need someone that during a crisis (and I'm thinking a 9/11) he sticks his finger in the air and goes the way the wind is blowing.

[...] learned a new word: Obamacon. Conservatives voting for Obama. While I don’t think most of these conservatives (myself included) actually agree with Obama [...]

Toots has passed away ...obviously I didn't know that when I posted above, no disrespect meant.

So, what you're saying is that Sen. Obama is Daniel Patrick Moynihan? Great listener, familiar with the arguments on all sides-- but always votes the same way, party-line, when it comes down to it.

Who knows, perhaps his fans are right and his votes on protectionism and ag subsidies have been a case of a lack of political courage rather than really wrongheaded ideas. I agree that he seems very intelligent, so it's perhaps more disappointing to think that he might actually believe in protectionism.

"The one positive trait that conservatives of all stripes have linked to Barack Obama is his first-rate temperament."

Not this conservative. In fact, I think his temperament is another big reason to vote against him. But then I don't admire narcissism and dishonesty. To turn the famous quip about FDR around, I think Obama has a second-class intellect (at most) and a third-class temperament (at most).

His office is telling. It is full of pictures of Obama -- and almost empty of books.