Do we see crucial difference here between Hillary and Obama? Following McCain's gambit on gas tax summer holiday she offers her own summer plan - but with plans to have oil companies cough up dough to cover lost revenues which would be used to upgrade roads etc, she thereby appeals to working class concerns over rising gas prices and manages to look more thorough in her managing of the plan than McCain. Obama opposes tax relief - for all the right, sensible reasons: the cut will offer but token relief and possibly send the wrong signal viz consumption. But isn't it kind of naive to think Hillary doesn't realise the tax holiday is a bit silly? Isn't it more accurate to believe she guessed or reasoned that the more important thing was to counter McCain's gambit viz working class sympathies and not get bogged down with ostensibly intelligent declamations against the folly of it? Don't we see Hillary as the shrewd one here and Obama as the smooth talking academic out of his element in the real world of harsh and sometimes crass machinations? I don't know - I think yes. It's this stain of idealism evident in the way Obama approached the seemingly innocuous issue that troubles me: he's an academic, and not a particularly interesting one at that. Academics may have some utility in describing things, as they were, are and maybe should be - but running things is a different job altogether.
Update: Hillary campaign pushing heavily the elitist tag against those opposing the tax break - pretty clear evidence to me that they made a calculated decision that the politics of the issue was much more important at this point than sound policy considerations. You could certainly argue that this is a bad thing - but to me it suggests that in the high stakes game of being world's only super power she'd be a much better poker player than Obama.
