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because of the exit polls that almost half of Hillary supporters will not vote for Obama. Now i wont speculate on the will not vote for Obama (although i have 3 ideals on this and i will keep that to myself

But Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and Obama supporter, disagreed, saying the Democratic Party has "the best coalition to go out and talk to people across racial lines, which are the unions."

If Obama wins the nomination, he said, support from unions should help him gain support among blue-collar workers when "they don't have to choose between two Democrats."

Among the Democratic candidates, Clinton has had the advantage with working-class and middle-income voters, though Obama has increased his support in that demographic, according to exit polls.

In the March 4 Ohio primary, Clinton won voters who made under $50,000 by 14 points.

In the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, that advantage was down to 8 points. And in the Indiana primary, exit polls showed the two candidates evenly split among those voters.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/07/limbaugh.obama/index.html

That same man had a record of failure in business.

The DCCC reported more than $44 million in cash-on-hand recently, far outpacing its rival, the National Republican Congressional Committee.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/08/weinstein.pelosi/index.html

BILL MOYERS: You say he's the most pro-war candidate in the last decade.

MATT WELCH: People forget this, but in 1999 and 2000, when he was running against George Bush, he was the neoconservative candidate. You know, four years before the doctrine of preemptive war ever even occurred to Bush, McCain was running on a campaign of rogue state rollback, is what he called it, in which America was supposed to go anywhere there was an authoritarian dictatorship. We were supposed to help the insurgents materially, covertly, however. And if those insurgents got cracked down upon about the government, then we support them militarily. It is a much more radical and interventionist approach than George Bush ever had, certainly at the beginning of his presidency.

MICKEY EDWARDS: We have a tripartite system. I hate to tell you this, but the executive branch — head of the executive branch is not the head of government. It's one of three equal branches. And George Bush forgot that. And I'm not totally sure that John McCain would remember it.

BILL MOYERS: Did you watch the endorsement of McCain by George Bush earlier this week?

PRESIDENT BUSH: In 2000 I said, vote for me, I'm an agent of change. In 2004, I said, I'm not interested in change — I want to continue as President. Every candidate has got to say "change." That's what the American people expect. And the good news about our candidate is, there will be a new President, a man of character and courage — but he's not going to change when it comes to taking on the enemy. And there's still an enemy that lurks, an enemy that wants to strike us. And this country better have somebody in that Oval Office who understands the stakes, and John McCain understands those stakes. SENATOR MCCAIN: Thank you, sir. I don't have anything to add.

BILL MOYERS: Combine that with what you said and what write, and it seems to me that Bush is echoing — it seems to me that McCain is echoing Bush and Cheney when it comes to the imperial presidency, the power of the presidency, to the foreign expeditions, to a strong — to, you know, doubling the budget. Am I wrong on that?

MICKEY EDWARDS: No. I think he's making a mistake in showing up at the White House, standing beside George Bush. You know, the thing that gave him all of the credibility that he had was that he was perceived as a maverick. He was perceived as somebody who is not in George Bush's pocket. You know, now, he undercuts that. First of all, he's already won the nomination, right. So why does he need to play to that very small base of Bush supporters?

BILL MOYERS: Why?

MICKEY EDWARDS: You know, I think — well, you know, it was — I think it was a mistake. Because if I were him, I would say, "The Bush presidency is ending. I'm something different." Not "I'm a continuation." The country does not want a continuation of George W. Bush.

MATT WELCH: A very interesting artifact of this primary season that if you look in the early elections — before Super Tuesday, McCain never won even a plurality among voters who self-identify this Republican when asked.

MATT WELCH: Even in close primaries. He was tied at best, with anybody. He won because he won two to one on the vote that was anti-war, that was angry at Bush, and who described themselves as independents. And independents in this country, even more than regular citizens, are completely against the war. People— he won the Republican nomination because of the anti-war vote.

BILL MOYERS: Fascinating.

MATT WELCH: It's fascinating.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain it?

MATT WELCH: I think it's partially because he's a charismatic, likeable fellow. People have a fond memory of the 2000 campaign, when he was being very mavericky, and he was calling, you know, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agents of intolerance, and these kind of things. And he seemed to speak his mind in a way that was unusual for a politician. And he's just sort of a charismatic personality.

But it's also because I believe that he's both overexposed and under-examined. People don't really look at his foreign policy, his experience, his family tradition. His father and grandfather were both four star admirals in the U.S. Navy. And not just that. They were both really strong advocates for a sort of 19th century British model of imperialism, for lack of a better word. Of using the huge navy to guarantee the world, make the world safe for democracy. This is the tradition that John McCain has marinated in his whole life. And it was only Vietnam that sort of knocked him off his game. It reduced his faith in the sort of — the right of America's might. He regained that faith right about the time that he started running for president for the first time. And since then, he's right on message. And that message is more interventionist, it's more explicitly militaristic than George Bush.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03072008/transcript2.html

Many of these same people elected a president, TWICE, that had convictions and arrests for DUI's and theft, who spend most of his life an alcoholic, and who only discovered God at the end of his life.

Montreal Guy, I'm not disagreeing with what you've said..but, as for that last sentence, at least Bush did discover God. In my heart of hearts, I know, Obama's God is not my God. I don't think he has made that discovery yet. I dont approve of his church AT ALL.

"What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer," he told reporter Hank De Zutter in a 1995 article in the Chicago Reader, "as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grassroots structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions." As a politician, he has not always fulfilled those lofty ideals, but they still animate his presidential campaign.

One thing is clear about Obama: No matter what he learned on the streets of South Chicago, in the classrooms of Harvard Law School, in the church he joined or in the gritty politics of the Illinois Senate, he had the air of a "natural." When Kendall first met Obama shortly after he came to Chicago, she recalls telling her husband, "I just met somebody we're going to say we knew him when. He just had some quality about him, something special. I can count the number of times I've said that on one hand. It was just a presence and self-assurance about him at such a young age."

And after Obama became DCP's director, Bagby recalls, "I said, 'What am I doing following this young boy?' But he was just so knowledgeable, and he knew just how to get you to do what you needed to do, and he knew what we needed to do. I never knew anybody who could lead somebody without them knowing he was leading."

But even a natural needs some training and practice. Gerald Kellman, who first recruited Obama, taught him the basics, and he also learned from organizing trainers associated with the Gamaliel Foundation and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Both organize community groups, primarily religious congregations, and trace their lineage to Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky, the patron saint of contemporary community organizing, started working in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, next to the Chicago Stockyards. In 1941 he established the IAF, envisioning his neighborhood work as a complement to industrial union organizing.

Neighborhood churches were important institutions in Alinsky's strategy and became even more critical to the work of his heir at the IAF, Ed Chambers. Alinsky and his disciples wanted to help ordinary citizens create powerful local organizations that could demand change from politicians and corporate executives. They focused on developing relationships among community leaders, such as pastors or lay leaders of congregations, who could mobilize other people through their institutional connections.

Gregory Galluzzo, a Gamaliel founder, was one of Obama's teachers. "I tell people I'm a mentor," Galluzzo says, "but an organizer is like a musician. A musician has to play music. Somebody listens and points a few things out. But nobody teaches a jazz musician jazz. This man was gifted. An older musician would know if a young musician was practicing, and Barack was always practicing."

Practicing involved one-on-one meetings with potential leaders-listening to them and developing relationships, then getting those leaders to mobilize other people for "actions." Alinsky often favored flamboyant, theatrical confrontations, but the typical action for contemporary faith-based community groups like Gamaliel is a large meeting where community leaders present their case for change, then demand a commitment of concrete support from some official.

According to other organizers and community leaders who worked with him, Obama insisted on democratic process and resisted exaggeration of successes. And he followed the organizers' credo: Be accountable to others and demand accountability from leaders in return. He pushed the local leaders into the limelight, they say, keeping himself in the background.

Loretta Augustine-Herron, a part-time teacher who was a DCP leader, recalled one such occasion, a meeting with a city employment and training official. Augustine-Herron was supposed to be the group leader for the meeting. "This lady came in and was very aggressive and domineering," she says. "I was supposed to introduce the issue, and she tried to take over. She said, 'You don't even know what we do.' From the back of the room, Barack shouted, 'We want to hear about the issue. We want to hear what Loretta has to say.' Then the whole group picked up the chant, and she backed down."

While he often stayed in the background, Obama was anything but passive, according to his former fellow organizers. Galluzzo recalls Obama's efforts to organize residents of Altgeld Gardens, a Far South Side public-housing development, to demand removal of asbestos from their apartments. The night before a trip to meet with Chicago Housing Authority officials a big crowd turned out, but the next morning few people showed up for the trek to the CHA office. So Obama began dragging people out of the projects into the van.

"People the night before promised to take a stand," Galluzzo says. "But the people in public housing, they didn't show up after they said they would. The organization's reputation was on the line. Barack was on the line. And Barack filled that van. We had our action. An organizer is one who says, 'Damn it, I'll make it happen.' People don't just rise up."

Obama was also empathetic, even with his antagonists. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he recounts that during the Altgeld asbestos campaign, he felt anguish for an official who was on the verge of attempting a cover-up that would backfire on him.

Fellow-organizer Mike Kruglik recalls Obama's approach with panhandlers. "Instead of giving 50 cents and walking down the street, he'd engage a person and invest some emotion in that person," Kruglik says. "I remember him saying, 'That could easily be me. There's not that much that separates that kind of person from me.' There was some relationship between his capacity to empathize and his determination to do the job, the possibility starting to gel in his mind that he could create this organization of African-Americans that would be very powerful."

http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/149/obama.html