Two years ago I wrote this entry about Obama's then-imminent entry into Presidential office. Here's an excerpt:
Obama looks good, speaks well and clearly is intelligent. He talks about "change" a lot. He speaks beautifully about rising above partisan politics. But who is Obama, really? What change would he bring? How would he "rise above" the nastiness that characterizes politics in Washington? No one knows for sure.
To be honest, I'm a little apprehensive at the prospect of an Obama presidency. It seems to me that the *idea* of Obama is much more popular than the man himself.
In one word, the idea of Obama is "change." But change for what? It's like saying "anywhere but here." I, for one, am pretty interested in where, exactly, Obama plans to take us. But all I get is vagueness about change.
What I do know about Obama the man is that he voted with his party 95% of the time and that he has one of the most far-left voting records in the US Senate. When has he ever shown courage bucking his party? Never. And this is a man who will reach across party divisions and compromise? Seems unlikely.
Cloaked cleverly behind beautiful rhetoric is a man who is, in reality, far to the left of most Americans. He supports "spreading the wealth around" in the form of higher taxes and transfer payments. He's never actually run anything or created value in a business so I doubt he understands how business creates wealth in society, or how additional taxes and regulatory burdens harm the overall well-being of everybody.
At the risk of sounding immodest I nailed it. Obama *did* in fact turn out to be way more leftie than the masses realized, and he *did* show little appetite for compromising on any part of his tax, spend and regulate liberal agenda despite all his talk time on "bi-partisanship" before the election.
I saw all this a mile away. It puzzles me that anyone was surprised by it. It was plain as day.
You might also read this entry, from a Wall Street Journal editorial around that time.