A Kossack's Guide to Obama (take 2)

NOTE: I posted this yesterday, but had the bad timing to do so just as the Edwards story broke.  It was pushed off the page in less than 15 minutes with only 4 comments.  Since I worked for hours on it the other night, please forgive me for posting it again today.  I think this is valuable.  I hope you do too.  

Now that we are down to the wire, I've started to receive requests from some of my less enagaged friends for information about Barack Obama.  Chances are you know someone who is just starting to make their decision.  For this reason, it struck me that it might be useful to compile some of the best articles and Dkos diaries about Barack Obama.

Hopefully some or all of this will be useful to you.  I invite you to add any constructive additions in the comments.

...but before we do - a word about the Obamathon:

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Okay, back to the work at hand.

ON ELECTABILITY

Richard Thompson Ford's - "Who's Afraid for Barack Obama?"
http://www.slate.com/...

From the article:

Defeatists insist Obama cannot win because the average American will never be able to let go of racial prejudice. Yet he somehow speaks to overflowing houses, packed with enthusiastic voters from the American heartland. It will be a sad irony if the biggest impediment to Obama's success next fall turns out to be our own prejudices about the nature of prejudice.

Obama's Senatorial Record

Hilzoy - Obsidian Wings Blog post from Oct 2006
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/...

From the post:

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle.

Ideology

Larissa MacFarquhar's - "The Conciliator"  
http://www.newyorker.com/...

It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake. This was American innocence at its most destructive, freedom at its most deceptive, universalism at its most naïve. "There was a dangerous innocence to thinking that we would be greeted as liberators, or that with a little bit of economic assistance and democratic training you’d have a Jeffersonian democracy blooming in the desert," he says now. "There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam."

Mark Shmitt's "The Theory of Change Primary"
http://www.prospect.org/...

From the article:

In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.

Andrew Sullivan's "Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters"
http://www.theatlantic.com/...

From the article:

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Cass Sunstein's "The Visionary Minimalist"
http://www.tnr.com/...

From the article:

"Visionary minimalist" may sound like an oxymoron, but in fact--and this is the key point--Obama's promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism. He is unifying, and therefore able to think ambitiously, because he insists that Americans are not different "types" who should see each other as adversaries engaged in some kind of culture war. Above all, Obama rejects identity politics. He participates in, and helps create, anti-identity politics. He does so by emphasizing that most people have diverse roles, loyalties, positions, and concerns, and that the familiar divisions are hopelessly inadequate ways of capturing people's self-understandings, or their hopes for their nation. Insisting that ordinary Americans "don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal," Obama asks politicians "to catch up with them." Many independents and Republicans have shown a keen interest in him precisely because he always sees, almost always respects, and not infrequently accepts their deepest commitments.

In addition to the above articles, I also strongly recommend Just Angry's diary "The Obama Six" linking to Youtube videos of seven of Obama's most important speeches.  Extremely compelling viewing!:

http://www.dailykos.com/...

Other standout diaries
Obama's 04 Convention Speech Grows Up - Femlaw
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Barack Obama and the 50 State Strategy - kid oakland
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Barack Obama:  Not so nice - Geekesque
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Barack Obama will change the system (parts 1-4)
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...

A New First Way: Why I Support Barack Obama  - Stroszek
http://www.dailykos.com/...

My friend George Schools Me on Obama and the Race Question - Snout (please forgive my lack of humility in including my own diary)
http://www.dailykos.com/...

I Am Here Because of Ashley - Sinister Rae -
http://www.dailykos.com/...

The Only Thing You Need to Know (parts 1-7) - Just Angry
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Policy speeches and interviews:

Foreign Policy
http://www.barackobama.com/...

Health Care;
http://obama.senate.gov/...

Energy Security
http://obama.senate.gov/...

Ethics Reform
http://obama.senate.gov/...

Iraq:
http://obama.senate.gov/...

Other important speeches on dozens of topics can be found here:
http://obama.senate.gov/...

UPDATE:

Here's a site where you can watch all of the debates on demand:

http://debates.redlasso.com/...