Obama isn't as clumsy with the language as Kerry, but when you look beneath the so-called "nuance," too often you find that there isn't an actual answer there.  For example, a few months back I had an argument with an Obama supporter here who contended that Obama had a "very specific" stance on gun rights.  What was this stance, I asked.  Well, he believes that people have a right to bear arms, but that some amount of common-sense regulation is acceptable.  Period.

Now, that is a position.  In fact, it's pretty much the mainstream Democratic position right now.  What it is NOT is a "very specific position."  In fact, it doesn't say a whole lot of anything, except that the speaker isn't at either of the two extremes of the gun debate.  In between "the government can completely ban handguns if it wants to" and "absolutely no regulations on gun ownership are permissible" there is a wide, wide range of possible viewpoints, and this "position" attempts to grab that entire middle ground without staking out any specific territory of its own.

That's the sort of thing we Democrats call "nuance," presenting ourselves as being "somewhere between the two extremes" in an attempt to capture all the voters who are also between the two extremes.  It may be good politics, it may not be
good politics.  But if some people respond negatively and say "I don't really know where he stands on that issue," it is not the fault of those people for failing to understand our awesome "nuance."

Here is a classic example of a "nuanced" position that actually WAS specific: Hillary Clinton's infamous answer on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.  It couldn't be encapsulated in a sound bite, but her position was still easy to understand: she didn't agree with that specific proposal, but she understood that the states were being forced into that sort of stopgap measure as a result of the federal government's inaction on the immigration issue and she didn't have a problem with their efforts to do something about it.  Her position was that the federal government should enact comprehensive immigration reform so that the states wouldn't have to resort to controversial stopgap measures.  I didn't find that hard to understand at all, and Hillary wasn't even my favored candidate at the time.

Gore won the popular vote after being behind in the polls until the last few days, when he switched to a populist stance.   Said populism also delivered the later primary victories to Sen. Clinton.

There are some things that I am very nuanced about. In part, because I know a lot about the topic and I am fully aware that there are a lot of different aspects that are tangentially connected that need to be addressed or at the very least...examined.

There are other things that I am quite binary about...indeed, some have argued down right stubborn and stuck in the mud.

There are very few people who are 100% nuanced or 100% binary all of the time.

Of course he did. But he knew how to combine his nuance with his ability to convince ordinary voters that he really cared about them.

I think that Bill Clinton will always be the gold standard for how Democrats can and should communicate their concerns and ideals.

nuance

and

did he even answer the question?

Obama is way to seeped in the latter.

Now, it is not necessarily a bad thing to be able to look at an issue from more than one side - I think people like knowing that someone's mind is open enough to acknowledge and even consider other viewpoints.  And as Democrats, we are more likely to be able to accept that on issues like abortion and marriage, we do not presume to legislate for others the choices we would make for ourselves.

However, at some point, in order to make policy and to move the country forward, he has to take a position, and the people deserve to know where he is on these things.  If he's said something is good and bad and okay and possibly not a good idea, how am I supposed to know where he is headed with an issue?  Will he advance it, try to kill it, table it for later, what?

I happen to think John McCain is wrong on just about everything, and while there has been some flip-flopping on his part, too, I think it's easier to dismiss that as the normal pandering just because he has a long record and one can see for one's self where he stands.

With Obama, ask him a question, and he will give you all kinds of answers, and when he's finished, I usually have no idea what it adds up to.  I think I'm a pretty intelligent person, I've been working with lawyers for forever so I'm pretty good at parsing, so am I just better at seeing that there's not much "there" there, or is he really not saying much?

Sally Quinn would like to live in a simple, binary world where the choices between good and evil or right and wrong are easy to make. Unfortunately, she lives in the real world, where nuance matters. That's also Barack Obama's world.

It's really at the base of the gift for teaching.

Some people who understand complex material can manage to communicate it superbly; some can't seem to do so for the life of them.

We've all met professors who can teach their courses so that everyone pays attention and catches on, and others who seem only able to talk to themselves and other professors -- or at most graduate students.

I think it's pretty clear Bill Clinton was an example of the former. Clearly, too, Obama is an example of the latter.

I really don't think that's going to change much.

A knack for teaching is, most of all, and certainly at the extreme end required by a successful national politician, a true gift.

I think Obama's issue is more the gap between his charismatic speech appearances, with which we are all so familiar, and his at times rambling Q&A answers.  It's not so bad that he's like two different people, but it could use some improvement.

When someone says they dislike Obama for X, someone else says that McCain invented X in 1904 and is soooo much worse than Obama (I know McCain didn't invent the drug X, though it woulda been interesting).

So the idealist might say, well I won't vote for Obama because of X, even though McCain's X is much worse. (In this world, one should only vote for a candidate, not against another one).

But the realist might say that there are only two choices (assuming no major scandals) and that a vote for one is inherently a vote against the other.  So the realist would say that even though they dislike both candidates, they dislike Obama less, so they'll vote for him.  

In this world, insulting Obama can be matched with the argument, "McCain is so much worse."  Also, people who espouse this view would be voting against McCain instead of for Obama.

There are multiple parties in these discussions, some of which are from the first perspective and some from the second.  That's why these discussions spiral outta control; there are two philosophies involved.

McCain has officially shed all pretense of the moderate label. As I said in other threads, I had not been paying attention to McCain for a while and it's a good thing I watched the other night because it re-energized me to STOP HIM at all costs. He is nothing but a warmongering, woman-hating, right-wing fool. (It's not that I didn't always know this, I just needed a dose of McCain to snap me out of my apathy apparently.)

His words that night were forceful and clear, yes, but they were forceful, clear pronouncements of the same old neocon saber-rattling, bigotry, and republican disdain for the have-nots. He has truly returned to his base.

Obama is smart and thoughtful, yes, and his ums and ahs have never bothered me very much as they do other people.

 contradictory?

It has to be confronted squarely. And one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God's task. But we can be soldiers in that process. And we can confront it when we see it.
Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. Because, you know, a lot of evil's been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.