Why are Democrats in sequence so bumfuzzled and then so smug and soft-headed? There's just never the sense with them that they can simply make a decision, establish a conviction, and then follow it through. Always there is the handwringing and the worry, asking themselves "oh, is this a good idea". And when they get what they want, all they can do is be smug - feel good about themselves. They're like an Alzheimers patient in a whorehouse. Every 4 years the same things happen - they constantly get screwed, and they don't want to pay for it. They wake up the day after the election and wonder to their self-righteous selves, "how did this happen?" "Somehow the evil Republicans stole the electon from us with their evil evil evil-doing."
They can never imagine how they are wrong. They can never admit that the ideals they put forward are in some way fundamentally, and unequivocally, flawed. It may make them feel all warm and fuzzy to say that jobs must stay in America and not be outsourced, but that doesn't make their conviction in any way right or in any way justified. And when they get uppity about tolerance for other people, they seem to have no notion of how much people are tired of being called racist or predjudiced just for getting up in the morning. As long as Democrats think they are constantly on the brightest white side of Good, and the Republicans are somehow inherently evil, they will never have the muddy pragmatic realism to win with people who don't give themselves the luxury of being too good to come in first.
Obama can preach his gospel all he wants, but as long as his oratory is used to serve the base crassness of decieving yourself as right in order to play on the irrational fears of populist sentiment, he can take his "new politics" and shove it up his ass. You are not being "right" when you insist still on not telling the truth about how things are. And to pretend that you are telling the truth while lying and distorting is surely a larger sin than simple pandering. If you're going to pander at least have some shame in it. Hillary and McCain are held back a little each time they have to push out crap in order to get themselves elected. It doesn't mean they're not going to do it, but at least they don't seem so proud of themselves having done it.
Say what you want about McCain on the attack - he is always principled enough to sign his name at the end of everything he does. He has at least that much pride. Obama has taken to being shy and hiding his ownership of his negative attacks. McCain tags all his ads at the end, so that even after the knife is stuck in, you know who did it. Obama's been doing it up front, so that by the end, you're not sure who did what. And know who does what is the fundamental step you follow in language and in narrative in order to be honest to how things are. If you're going to attack, you can't be shy about soiling your lily white hem with your opponent's blood. Stop pretending to be self-righteous and admit you're playing the same game everyone else is, rather than pretending to stand above it all. You are not a fucking saint. Your party is not a party of saints. At least Republicans have no shame in being who they are.
Decrying the politics of personal destruction, and still playing the gotcha game (saying McCain thinks people aren't rich till their income is $5 million) is fine if you're a normal politician - but not when you think you're the second coming of Christ. No one is better than the game. If you can play, then you surrender yourself to the compromises you have to make. Acting better than how you are is the real presumptuosness.
As for the speech, I've seen this movie before. It worked the first time. But fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If you're not willing to offer realistic, substantive, concrete ideas devoid of hyperbole and outsize rhetoric, you are not being honest to the people you're talking to. Let your ideas be dramatic, rather than the way you couch it. Say you want affirmative action to be based on economic status rather than race. Admit that allowing people to invest their private savings accounts rather than paying into a failed Social Security system is not "gambling your money on the stockmarket", but rather ensuring for themselves a higher rate of return than the opportunity cost of capital.
Barack Obama is fundamentally irresponsible. These are the most fundamental things I taught my students when I taught them writing: 1) Be clear on who is doing what. Do not obfuscate the agency of a given action. 2) Do not exhalt with melodrama something that is paltry. If something is important, all the more it should be presented in the clarity of prose so that the emergency of what is happening can be appreciated for what it is, rather than exaggerated beyond any accurate of realistic sense.
Barack Obama is fundamentally irresponsible.
Much has been said, not least in the popular media and even in intelligent literate writing, that decries the goal of profit maximisation as the stated goal of industry. Just off the top of my head, I think of Michael Moore's Roger and Me, where he rails against the fact that profitable industries are still closing plants and moving manufacturing to countries other than the US in the 80s and 90s (a process that, as far as I'm aware is largely complete nowadays). But even more recently The Wire - or more specifically the introduction the the 5th season - talks about how with journalism and the funding of newsrooms, it wasn't that they weren't making profits, it's just that they weren't making enough profits. 
I've come to realise this to be true: that profit maximisation indeed is not a sufficient means of defining what companies should strive for. But of course my objection has little to do with agreeing with the discourse I've cited, and more to do with explaining exactly why "profitable" companies still desire to make sometimes large and drastic changes.
Brealey-Myers makes an intriguing and really rather stunning assertion about the brief managers should recieve from shareholders - exactly that profit maximisation is not the most appropriate objective of professional managers. This is in part because profit maximisation as a principle is needlessly vague - it is not time specific, it does not say for what period profit is being maximised - whether this year, next year or 5 years hence, each perhaps at the expense of the other, or of other longer term periods of profit. It makes no sense to have one year have the largest profits imaginable at the expense of profits for the next ten years. Similarly owners do not want to sacrifice profits for the next ten years in the hope that at the end of that period there will be one year of huge profits.
The answer is Net Present Value. I find it a little difficult to explain in totality the concept of Net Present Value except mathematically, and I don't wish to go into too much detail - you can read the 
I'll try and make that a little more concrete. When you have a given amount of money, and you don't do anything with it other than stuff it under your mattress, you are losing money. Not just because of inflation, that makes your money less valuable, but because you are not investing it in order to create more wealth. This investment is not "funny money" - on the contrary it is very real. Whenever you put money into capital markets, that is the money that business users borrow to fund their businesses - to make more and better widgets. It's the money that people borrow to buy a house or car. These are things those people couldn't otherwise do, and you are allowing them to get those things done, for which they are paying you back your investment plus interest. That return on investment is the base level at which someone who doesn't stuff their money under the mattress operates. If you have $100 and you do nothing with it, at the end of one year you have $100 (before inflation). If you put that $100 towards buying government securities that give a 7% return at the end of one year, at the end of one year, you have $107.
What maximising NPV argues is that if you are investing in something at the same level of risk as a govenment security, it needs to provide a return of more than 7% in order to be a rational decision. Otherwise you are not making as much money as you can given the level of risk. Put another way, you are taking on too much risk for too little reward - when the going rate of that risk is lower than that of your investment.
