Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Time To Move To The Center



That's the usual assumption about what happens after the presidential party primaries are over. The candidates stop courting their respective bases and start wooing the muddy middle of the so-called independent voters.

Thus, we should start seeing McCain sometimes sounding like a liberal (eek!) and Obama sometimes sounding like George Bush. We should. So far I have only seen Obama move to the right at a fairly good trot. Nothing corresponding appears to have happened to McCain.

The latest example of Obama's general election campaign shift is this:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

That last sentence means that religious providers of various social services can discriminate in their hiring decisions and still get tax money perhaps paid into the system by the very people who couldn't get jobs with those providers. I'm not happy with this. Not happy at all, especially given the other religion posts I've written today.

Obama is thousand times better than McCain (who is now openly expressing his contempt for unions and minimum wages and such), make no mistake about that. But we need to keep reminding him of the issues which matter to us.