The London Sunday Times ran a report yesterday about Republicans who are supposed prepared to support Barak Obama for President:
DISILLUSIONED supporters of President George W Bush are defecting to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois, as the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation.
Tom Bernstein went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. In 2004 he donated the maximum $2,000 to the president?s reelection campaign and gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. This year he is switching his support to Obama. He is one of many former Bush admirers who find the Democrat newcomer appealing.
Matthew Dowd, Bush?s chief campaign strategist in 2004, announced last month that he was disillusioned with the war in Iraq and the president?s ?my way or the highway? style of leadership ? the first member of Bush?s inner circle to denounce the leader?s performance in office.
Although Dowd has yet to endorse a candidate, he said the only one he liked was Obama. ?I think we should design campaigns that appeal, not to 51% of the people, but bring the country together as a whole,? Dowd said.
(…)
[L]last week a surprising new name joined the chorus of praise for the antiwar Obama ? that of Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, which called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Kagan is an informal foreign policy adviser to the Republican senator John McCain, who remains the favoured neoconservative choice for the White House because of his backing for the troops in Iraq.
But in an article in the Washington Post, Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by
Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was ?pure John Kennedy?, a neocon hero of the cold war.
In his speech, Obama called for an increase in defence spending and an extra 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to ?stay on the offense? against terrorism and ensure America had ?the strongest, best-equipped military in the world?. He talked about building democracies, stopping weapons of mass destruction and the right to take unilateral action to protect US ?vital interests? if necessary, as well as the importance of building alliances
Frankly, I think that these Republicans aren’t all that different from the Democrats that have latched onto the Obama campaign since his announcement. Barak Obama is very much a blank slate. Most people don’t know alot about him or what he really believes in, and he does a very? good job of using the rhetoric of politics to make people like what they hear, or think they do.
