Four things:

1) site upgrade will take place tonight and the site may be inaccessible for 2-3 hrs.

2) Tomorrow, I’ll be changing my registration to Independent. With the cave-in on FISA by the majority of Congressional Dems and by Obama, I no longer wish to be associated with a party I believe has succumbed to the impulse to behave like cowards instead of defending my Bill of Rights.

3) I remain a committed liberal and will vote for liberal candidates. I will leave my ballot blank where the choices range from lukewarm to full-stink bullshit.

4) If you don’t like my choice, spare us both any grief and go read someone you prefer. I will delete name-calling comments or flame them, depending on my own transient preferences. I don’t much like my choice either, but it seems to me to be the only alternative left. There is no political party in our country now that I believe represents the best interests of me, my family or my fellow citizens. (Being better than Bush and McCain is such a low bar to surpass that I refuse to buy into either-or voting for the lesser of two evils. In presidential races, that’s been my only choice for the past 20 years and I refuse to do it any more.

Symptoms have been spotted in Barack Obama. Of course, his strength, contrary to popular opinion, is not rooted in his oratory as much as it’s been in his capacity for organizing volunteers. Any competent political analyst understands the training and coordination of his supporters was the groundwork that enabled him to win numerous caucuses and upset a heavy favorite in the primaries.

So is his current strategy to continue to rely on that, on planning and internal polling? Or will he ever resume the other aspect that impressed voters: the capacity to demonstrate leadership on anything?

My impression is his internal polling indicates he’s likely to win in November simply because the economy sucks and will continue to suck. So why continue to display boldness or commit to anything that might be construed as ‘new’ or ‘different’ that his opponents could use post-election to say “he’s changed positions?” Better to shift before the election to the conservative status quo guy we’ve been seeing a lot of lately, isn’t it?

The problem with that is it mirrors the DLC strategy that worked - in a different time. It betrays the theme of some new vision for the country to aspire to beyond the one that sheep and wolves will sit around the campfire singing ‘Kumbaya’ in a new post-partisan era.

It offers all the appeal of leftover lukewarm mush. It demonstrates no leadership at all. It says “I’m not Bush” and nothing about what he actually is. Never mind that 75% of the country can hurdle that low bar of being more ethical and more responsible than Dubya.

He is demonstrating the defensive crouch that Democrats have utilized for the past twenty years. But in Obama’s case he’s trying to have it both ways now. He talks about offering change while trying to prove that he’s exactly like every other forgettable Democratic politician, ready to lead the polls, but not the country.

By adopting this new strategy, he’s doing far more than proving he’s not Bush or Cheney or McCain. He’s also proving he’s not FDR, not LBJ, not MLK, not RFK or JFK, nor even Reagan or Ike. He’s also repudiated Carter, which leaves only Clinton, Nixon and Truman and two of them left office with the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded.

Talk about low bars he’s willing to hurdle.

The bottom line? The reason the GOP meme - that Democrats are weak - works so well is because some Democrats actually ARE weak. Not all, of course, just the majority of the House and the Senate. And considering his performance in the past two weeks, it’s a perfectly fair question to ask: when did Barack ‘Wimp’ Obama get infected with Democratic loserism and who ate his balls?