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You have to get elected first, to do anything. I'm CERTAIN that I don't live in a country where the electorate provides enough votes for Bush/Cheney to claim a victory in 2004, after their record of the prior four years, but then experiences the effect of enough new voters and change of hearts of prior republican ticket voters, to muster the voters to put the son of a Kenyan muslim and an American woman, a candidate named Barak Hussein Obama, no less...in the white house.

We make the mistake, the bulk of us in the USA, of thinking everyone is similar in what they want and how they go about getting it, to us.

The big problem, the reason we are convinced we are a "classless" society, is because folks like the Bush "pioneers", when they aren't writing checks for $400,000, donated to their favorite presidential candidate....the best investment they proabably make that year..... they are paying for the influences that maintian our perceptions of "classlessness".

In return, many of us who post here do not want to vote to levy progressive taxes on the people who leverage their wealth to purchase outsized political and media influence.

We think everybody else thinks and feels "a lot like us", so surely, enough of them won't be negatively influenced by Obama's easily exploited, superficial liabilities....of course, they won't be influenced....they'll vote for him, just like I will.... You better hope that you are right.

In Europe the majority know what class they belong to, they vote in their own best interests, and they have health care, pensions, livable minimum wage laws, and vacation "packages", because they have voted for these things.

We live in a duped and controlled society. The wealthiest control what the rest of us get, including who our political leaders are. You're trying to change that in one big bite. It's too dramatic a change. I don't want Hillary, I want republicans ousted. The memory of the two failed candidates from Massachusetts and Al Gore 2000 is a long one. Don't count the Clintons out, because West Virginia was a disaster, at the hands of the leading democratic candidate's own party members.

As dc_dux posted, he doesn't know for sure what the race effect will be. Obama can't change his name, his skin color, his daddy's religion, or his shortcomings in the manly swaggering image department. Hillary can reinvent herself as circumstances dictate.

I have an advantage in that I'm not feeling the vibe from Obama, or from anyone. I know who my political opponents are. I want to see the government tax the shit out of the top one percent of wealth holders, and I want to see a big piece taken out of the cash flow streaming into the military/intelligence complex. I don't give a shit who the political leader is who accomplishes it, I know that it won't be a republican who changes at all , the way we are going.

First things first. Obama would need a miracle to overcome his image obstacles. There is no need to start with a liability like that, not against a candidate who, against a different democratic opponent, could be as weak as McCain should be.