We really need to acquiesce to Republican demands.  I have simply forgotten what a reasonable bunch of people the Republicans in both houses of Congress are.  I have forgotten how closely their solutions for things mirror our own.  It is so silly of me to have ever thought we can't just join hands and adopt bipartisan solutions to everything.  If only Democrats had been more accommodating in those years where Republicans ruled the roost, things would be so much better today.  Hurray for ideological unity!  Thank you Senator Nelson for showing the rest of us the way!   ;)

more accommodating in those years where Republicans ruled the roost?

Yeah, I wonder who bent over backwards during the march to war in 2002 while Obama was warning Democrats to oppose it?  

While I'll be pleased if any of the 3 Democratic candidates win the White House, let's throw in a little bit of realism here:  

Obama is not a moderate.  

The Republicans will use his liberal voting record against him and rightfully say that he is not a moderate.

Johnathan Alter's Alternet website had this to say about Obama's record (which, as a liberal, I support):

Obama got a perfect 100 rating from the NAACP, National Organization for Women, National Education Association, the Children's Defense Fund, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, and the Illinois Environmental Council (during his stint in the Illinois legislature), and a huge plus rating from the ACLU.

He got his perfect rating from them for his Senate votes on labor, education, the environment, choice, civil rights and civil liberties. These are America's top liberal advocacy groups, and they are some of his most ardent cheerleaders.

Meanwhile, Obama bombed badly in the ratings he got from the conservative National Taxpayers Union, National Right to Life, the Gun Owners of America, the NRA, the Federation for Immigration Reform, and the American Conservative Union.

I can imagine what the Republicans are planning to do on this liberal record.  Bottom line is he hasn't gone to the middle on most votes.  I don't know if he can overcome that.

I'm sure hoping the Independents (and maybe the "intelligent" Republicans) support his quite liberal voting record.  Because he will need those voters once the Republican's smear machine gets to work on him.  

The Nation magazine reported that "...Obama has received a lot of corporate and Wall Street money too--in fact, he's received more money from hedge funds than Clinton." ...so maybe that will redeem him on Wall Street.

Gravitas is great but voter fear (promoted by Repubs) can and has trumped gravitas.  Let's hope reason trumps fear and ALL three Democratic candidates are given a fair shake and a fair look because so far the discussion about qualifications and issues has been a mite thin.

and his voting record is basically the same as Clintons. That's completely besides the point.

Josh Marshall:

Nelson, Napolitano and McCaskill. Nelson and Johnson are from very red states while Napolitano and McCaskill are from swing states.

Now, there are a bunch of things you can draw from this spate of endorsements. One is that these folks don't seem worried about themselves running or having their supporters run with Obama at the top of the ticket. And these are people from either very conservative or somewhat conservative states.

Also, I wrote:

Nelson endorsed Lieberman over Lamont in the general election in 2006

not in the primary, and the fact that both Nelson and Lamont support Obama is very telling. These are two Democrats that would never associate with each other in a million years and they both agree on Obama.

We who know his voting record know he votes liberal but I'm not sure, at this point, if the average voter knows that he generally votes liberal (which I hope he will never veer away from).  For example, do we Democrats really think that his support of Bush's Immigration Reform Bill will attract enough Independents and Republicans to make a difference?  

Obama's statement on Bush's Immigration Reform Speech

...."We also know that border security is only one side of the equation. Comprehensive immigration reform cannot succeed without a plan to bring the undocumented out of the shadows and offer them a path to citizenship, after they pay a substantial fine and back taxes, learn English, satisfy a work requirement, and pass a background check. Whether or not the President can repair the divisions in his own party so that we can pass this type of reform will be the true test of our ability to secure our borders in the months to come."

While I agree with Obama's position, the Rethugs are already going after his record and will characterize his position on this as one of amnesty (hey, they are already doing that to themselves).  I hope I'm wrong ... but Prince Williams' experience on this issue is too close to home to believe otherwise.

It seems his comments about Edwards and Barrack are strangely similar to the comments made by some suggesting Kerrey (a Medal of Honor recipient and honorable Senator) led a massacre against civilians in Vietnam.  
  I would think the Kerrey would have more dignity than that.  I guess not.

I tracked back to what one of Chris Guy's sources called "repeated" statements by Kerrey about Obama's Muslim background.

Well, here's one statement:

I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his  father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim," Kerrey is quoted as saying. "There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.

The one about the madrassa was this:

I've watched the blogs try to say that you can't trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite the opposite. I feel it's a tremendous strength whether he is in the United States Senate or whether he's in the White House, I think it's a tremendous asset for him.

This last quote was posted by Fred2Blue as an example of Kerrey's "smear campaign" on Obama.  

I would suggest that, given the context of the statements, and that Kerrey issued a letter to Obama apologizing for any misunderstanding and seeking to clear things up, the only smearing going on here is by people either too careless to look at the actual meaning of the quotes or too invested in trashing Kerrey to give him a fair hearing.  Kerrey did not smear Obama.  On the one hand he tried to give him a compliment, and on the other he was attempting to refute the imputation that Obama's time in an Indonesian school should be held against him.  Madrassa, of course, means school.  All the Obama critics have been using the word "madrassa" to infer that it was a religious school for burgeoning Muslim fanatics.  Kerrey was using the word in its proper context to emphasize that it was in fact a school.  

As for Kerrey's Vietnam service, let's keep in mind that he was an officer leading a SEAL team on nighttime raids of very volatile, dangerous areas of Vietnam:

Kerrey's SEAL team first encountered a peasant house, or hooch, and killed the people inside with knives. While Kerrey says he did not go inside the hooch and did not participate in the killings, another member of the team, Gerhard Klann, said that the people killed there were an elderly man and woman and three children under 12, and that Kerrey helped kill the man. Despite the differing recollections about who actually stabbed these people, Kerrey accepts responsibility as the team leader for their deaths: "Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with," he told the New York Times Magazine.[1] Later, according to Kerrey, the team was shot at from the village and returned fire, only to find after the battle that all the dead were women and children, clustered together in the center of the village. "The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so, I don't even know what the number was, women and children who were dead," Kerrey said in 1998. "I was expecting to find Vietcong soldiers with weapons, dead. Instead I found women and children."[1] Klann, and a Vietnamese woman, Pham Tri Lanh, who says she witnessed the assault, gave a different account, saying that the SEALs rounded up the inhabitants of the village and shot them.

Regardless of what actually occurred that night, Kerrey expressed anguish and guilt over the incident:

   You can never, can never get away from it. It darkens your day. I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don't think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse.[2]

We weren't there, and we don't know what it's like to fight a guerilla war with a determined opponent who often hid behind innocent civilians.  All wars are dirty, but Vietnam particularly so.  Let's cut Kerrey some slack.