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I just voted in the PA primary yesterday - and I gotta tell you, it was a tough one. I'm a dyed in the wool Dem, but I can honestly say, I've never been a Hillary fan. . . (frankly, I think if anybody was to be doaling out bj's in the oval office, it shoulda been her - but that's just MHO) Anyway, I got to thinking I might prefer Obama (slightly) just because he's run a clean campaign and that speaks to his conviction to take the high road, etc.. however - and this is the thing I think most people are missing. . . Although I might prefer Obama, if Hillary won the nomination, I'd vote for her (as would most BO supporters, I would think) - but would the Hillary backers vote for BO? THAT's the 60 billion dollar question! And that is why Hillary may just eek out the nomination. Because the D's can't afford to blow it again alienating their own people.

McCain's foreign policy is far more consistent than it seems. Much like George W. Bush, McCain sees the world in oppositional terms - us versus them, and good versus evil. McCain speaks often of taking the lead "in fighting this transcendent issue of our time: the battle and struggle against radical Islamic extremism." To him, it is a "transcendent struggle between good and evil." This alone tells us much of what we need to know.

A Manichaean or dualistic approach to foreign policy has a long pedigree in American history, stretching back to the 1600s, when early settlers proclaimed their adopted home a New Israel, a God-ordained refuge from the sins of the Old World. This distinction between the United States and everywhere else eventually became more secular, but it also became more tangible. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the U.S. saw itself in opposition to the rest of the world in no small part because it was. Enemies ranging from hostile native tribes to competing French, British and Spanish colonists surrounded the new country on all sides. Presidents Washington and Jefferson cemented this antagonistic attitude with their famous warnings against entangling alliances. They believed neutrality was the only policy that would prevent the great powers from toying with a vulnerable America.

This worldview persisted well after the United States became a great power itself - particularly on the right. During the Cold War, a central tenet of conservatism was that the U.S. was locked in a battle with evil. That was not wrong exactly - the Soviet Union was indeed evil - but it was a hazardous way of framing the conflict. The advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s had made a more cooperative foreign policy a matter of survival. For the first time, our continued existence depended on stabilizing relations with an enemy; national security was no longer a zero-sum game, no longer a matter merely of us versus them. Which is why both Democratic and Republican presidents concluded that, whatever its sins, they had to reach a modus vivendi with Moscow.
McCain has taken a moral observation that the United States is a force for good battling the forces of evil and turned it into a strategic guide.

Thus, he rejects negotiation with our enemies in favor of "rogue state rollback," repeatedly deriding as "appeasement" the 1994 deal that froze North Korea's plutonium program and mocking calls for unconditional talks with Iran. He conflates our enemies - perhaps one reason he has confused Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq with Shiite extremists - because evil is monolithic. Much like the right wing in the early 1990s, which first sought to prolong the notion of Russia as an enemy and then turned to China as the next great threat, McCain has turned on Moscow and Beijing as adversaries in a time of peace. Even his proposed new international body, the League of Democracies, can be seen less as a rejection of Bush's unilateralism than as an exalted "coalition of the willing," in which America can avoid the hard work of cajoling and coercing countries with different interests and values, as it must in the United Nations. McCain may nitpick Bush's foreign policy, but the foundation is the same.

Just look at how scared the far right is of him - Rush has even got his listeners registering as Republicans to vote for Hillary. I know he pretends that it's all to keep the race going - the fact is they see Hillary as beatable, and Obama isn't.

But he appeals to the voters a Democratic nominee needs to win - Independents, undecideds and crossover Republicans. I remember the Reagan Democrats; after the last 8 years there will be a whole lot of Obama Republicans this year.

I think it's pretty clear Obama would easily win the Presidency.

Just look at how scared the far right is of him - Rush has even got his listeners registering as Republicans to vote for Hillary. I know he pretends that it's all to keep the race going - the fact is they see Hillary as beatable, and Obama isn't.

But he appeals to the voters a Democratic nominee needs to win - Independents, undecideds and crossover Republicans. I remember the Reagan Democrats; after the last 8 years there will be a whole lot of Obama Republicans this year.