Tamales and Obama

I am going to finish my thoughts on the aborted "What's With Obama" post, but first I wanted to brag about the tamales I made last night. I've always liked them and order them regularly when I'm eating at a Mexican restaurant, but I'd never tried to make them before. They are a bit of work to prepare, but I think they turned out pretty good for a first try. Next time I'll spice up the chicken filling a bit more, but all-in-all I'm happy with the results. I think that tamales are now officially a part of my cooking repertoire.

I used a spaghetti cooker with a built-in colander to steam them for an hour.




Here's the finished product (or at least what was left after Megan and Caroline and I had our fill). Note the touch of added authenticity of the corn husk ties.











And now on to Obama and his actions over the last few weeks...

I think his pivot to the center went way too far. Any one of these changes would have been no big deal, but they all happened in a couple of weeks, making him look like a typical pandering politician. But who is he pandering to? There's nothing he can do to get the McCainiacs on board, and he shouldn't even bother trying. His decision not to use public campaign financing was the only smart thing to do, and in and of itself wouldn't have caused him more than a day or two of bad press. His agreement with the Supreme Court on the DC gun ban and his disagreement with the court overturning a death penalty for child rape weren't what I would have expected. His soft-pedaling of the withdrawal of troops in Iraq wasn't really a change in policy, but it was sure played up that way in the press. At one point he even endorsed the view that the US should make it's already largest military in the world even bigger. If he had argued that troops levels should be increased but all the rest of the hi-tech toys and missile defense would be cut way back, I might have agreed with him. But his biggest blunder was reversing his view on the revised FISA bill. He had previously vowed to filibuster the bill if it contained immunity for the telecoms, but he ended up endorsing the bill.

He is rapidly starting to look like a run-of-the-mill politician with great rhetorical skills. I hope that's not the case. If he continues along this path, he won't lose my vote (I sure as hell won't vote for McCain), but he will lose my future financial contributions and he will lose my enthusiastic support. I suspect that I am not alone in this view. His early strategy called for enlisting millions of voters who otherwise would not have voted. He showed he could do this during the primaries, but if he doesn't pivot back to what brought those voters out in the first place, it's not impossible for him to lose, even to a doddering dangerous fool like McCain.