…stands for Anybody But Obama. I haven't said much (have I said anything?) about the election. But I posted a comment at Neo-neocon earlier, and since I spent more time than I had intended on it, and it's a pretty good summary of my view of President Obama and the election, I think I'll reproduce it here. The topic of the post (read it here) is why some people still find Obama likeable, and why they ever did in the first place. A number of people commenting there dislike him very intensely, to say the least. Here's what I said:
Well, this is interesting. Another data point: I was inclined to like Obama when I first heard him speak, sometime in the year or so before the 2008 campaign was in full swing. I thought well, maybe he actually is the sort of person who could bring us together instead of dividing us, who could appeal to what’s best on both sides of our divisions, etc.
That didn’t last long, but I still hoped he would beat Hillary for the nomination–because I have the visceral dislike for the Clintons that many of you seem to have for Obama. (I thought I was over that, but every time I hear Bill’s voice it comes back.) Even after he won the election, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and hoped that he would be a decent president. And, yeah, I admit to a sentimental warmth about the election of our first “black” (i.e. visibly mixed-race) president.
Pretty soon, of course, I realized how bad he was going to be, and that his idea of conciliation was that everybody would do what he told them to. So I lost any good feeling toward him that I’d had.
But I still have not developed that strong personal dislike. I’ve been in the Oval Office with him, shaken his hand, looked into his eyes, said a few words to him (“God bless you”). (No, I’m not anybody important, it was a ceremonial occasion.) I didn’t have any gut-level sense of “this is a bad guy” or even “this is a phony.” I just think he’s a man with very bad ideas and a very bad agenda upon which he is very determined, and I want to see him gone. It’s not personal.
I read a comment once from some Bush administration official that many people had the idea that Bush was dumb, but a nice guy, and that both were false. Substitute “smart” for “dumb” in that sentence, and I think it’s pretty true of Obama.
I was pretty sure from the beginning that Obamacare was going to be used as a tool by social progressives to impose their will on retrograde elements, and I was certainly right about that. The attack on religious freedom was the last straw, a matter so fundamental that it makes all other issues seem less important, the political equivalent of an enemy invasion, the point at which negotiation is no longer an option and you have to either fight or accept the invader's rule. At this point I would vote for an empty beer can over Obama and his zany sidekick.
Light On Dark Water 
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