Related: Obama's Rangers
"Obama's conciliatory tone gives GOP critics pause; A moderate stance taken on social issues" by Sasha Issenberg, Globe Correspondent | May 23, 2009
PHOENIX - Republicans are wrestling with how to respond to Obama's promises of big changes to the nation's healthcare, energy, finance, and foreign policy.
That's all they are -- promises.
But it may be his lack of interest in changing the status quo on social issues that most vexes parts of the conservative coalition. Can Obama make his most organized opposition obsolete just by giving them nothing to be angry about?
In addition to his conciliatory rhetoric validating the views of abortion opponents, Obama dismissed the Freedom of Choice Act - a bill designed to enshrine abortion rights in federal law - as "not my highest legislative priority," as he put it at a press conference last month.
While Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has said that the administration would like to see a new ban on assault weapons, it too does not seem like much of a priority on a busy legislative calendar.
Good!
The White House is similarly uninterested in stirring a public appetite for new regulations: when 14 people were killed in an upstate New York shooting rampage in April, the president released a mere three-sentence statement that made no mention that a gun had been used in the attacks.
How ya' feeling, lefties? Little betrayed?
Yesterday, Obama signed a bill changing regulations on credit-card companies even though it included a Republican-sponsored amendment allowing visitors to bring guns into national parks, a priority of NRA officials.
Obama has stalled plans to lift the military's ban on openly gay personnel, and has remained quiet about same-sex marriage even as more states have approved the practice in the early days of his term. When the White House included gay couples in its Easter celebration for the first time, it did so with little fanfare....
Related: Globe's Easter Egg Cracked
If anything, liberal interest groups and House Democrats have been the ones so far disillusioned by Obama's tentative approach to cultural and social issues....
--more--"
Related: Obama Breaks Wind Over Environmentalists
Obama's Prime-Time Insults
Obama Lets Down Liberals
Obama Drops Nuke on Liberal Base
Obama's Face Fart
Can't you smell it, 'murkn?
Also see: The Power of Gay
