WI Barack Obama (Republican)

Just a idea I had, I haven't done any research. What do you think

A more interesting Obama would spend time with his dad in Kenya as a child picking up some language skills and some understanding about living outside America. I have no idea how his father ended up in the US but I assume that Obama still could attend a good US university as OTL.

Then have him recruited to FBI or CIA. He would end up in the area most likely, either as a spook or as a investigator on the embassy bombings. I don't know how much we should wank him here, Super-Obama could wipe out Al Quieda and that would be to big butterflies.

Anyway, he develop a firm belif that the difference in buissness climate is what keept Kenya poor and the US rich during his tour in, most likely, Kenya.

Somehow, he gets recruited as the new national scurity advisor after Condie became secstate.

Hillary became democratic candidate and she met up with Joe the Plummer a few days before the republican convention and things goes as they did OTL. Everybody rant about how Joe the Plummer isn't a plummer.

Obama stand up at the republican convention and defend Joe and attack regulations keeping Joe from beeing a plummer and also about the problems with the lack of a free market in Africa, as well as good speach on national security.

Hillary still win.

He spend two years improving his economics credentials and then Obama run against her critizising her for her lack of expirience.
 
Err, no, how we remember you is through your personality and actions. If you are have another set of personality, then the person won't be 'you' .

Not exactly you no, but still close enough in the same way that you of 5 years ago is not another person. Since both U.S. parties are big tents, for most people, it is quite possible to be of another party with no major changes in personality. For example a person with libertarian leanings may either go Republican due to economics or Democrat due to social policy and a Catholic Hispanic union member can either go Republican due to abortion or Democrat thanks to the union.

Obama is a bit tricky, since he seems to lean rather far left economically, and left of center socially, so something has to be tweaked. Social policy might be the easiest to change, but there is a long tradition of black people going Democrat despite strongly conservative social beliefs. However, an Obama who is say, strong enough against abortion to go Republican or an Obama who is economically right can still be quite recognizably the same person as the current Obama.
 
Not exactly you no, but still close enough in the same way that you of 5 years ago is not another person. Since both U.S. parties are big tents, for most people, it is quite possible to be of another party with no major changes in personality. For example a person with libertarian leanings may either go Republican due to economics or Democrat due to social policy and a Catholic Hispanic union member can either go Republican due to abortion or Democrat thanks to the union.

Obama is a bit tricky, since he seems to lean rather far left economically, and left of center socially, so something has to be tweaked. Social policy might be the easiest to change, but there is a long tradition of black people going Democrat despite strongly conservative social beliefs. However, an Obama who is say, strong enough against abortion to go Republican or an Obama who is economically right can still be quite recognizably the same person as the current Obama.

What you are asking for, is a person with the same amount of popularity and background as Barak Obama.

It is the issues, actions and belief that shape and define us.
 
What you are asking for, is a person with the same amount of popularity and background as Barak Obama.

It is the issues, actions and belief that shape and define us.

And that's exactly what I'm disagreeing with. We are not defined merely by our beliefs, the issues we hold important, or the actions that we have done. Otherwise, there would be no preservation of identity over time. There are millions of former hippies who are now hard right Republican. Their beliefs, their stances on issues, and even their history are completely different, but they still remain the same people. Changed yes, but still the same people.
 

JohnJacques

Banned
I think its hard to get someone of Barack Obama's background anywhere near a base Republican view.

Both of the black scions of the Republican Party tend to hold agreements with Democrats on a lot of issues (Affirmative action, abortion, gun control, etc....)

Barack Obama's background is by a single mother. A background with subsidized housing and food stamps. You don't find opposition to welfare among people who've been on it.

His college was paid for by government loans, some of them by affirmative action. You don't oppose affirmative action and government funding of education after you've relied on it.

In other words, there is no way he could be a Republican who appeals to the base.
 
Another POD would be if the Republican party had kept the support of most blacks from 1932, which they had lost during the Hoover administration. That would mean either no Great Depression, or Hoover having effective policies to alleviate it.

Liberal Republicans dominate the party and Goldwater is not nominated in 1964. It does not become the party of southern whites and is more progressive than the Democrats on the race issue.

Alternatively Theodore Roosevelt wins the Republican nomination in 1912. The conservative wing of the party breaks off and forms a separate Conservative party. Woodrow Wilson wins the election that year because of the split in the Republican vote. The Republican party continues as the progressive party. The Conservative party either declines into a minor party (like the Socialist party), with most of its supporters going to the Democrats; or it becomes a significant third party (winning 20 percent to 30 percent in elections) and its candidates winning elections.
 
He could notice that regulations hinder poor people during his community organizing days. I mean, I remember strories from reason about laws requiering people working as florists or interior decorator and stuff like that to have a licence. We could see a Obama rallying for the small buissnessman or something.

As for poor black must hold certain opinions, here is a counter example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
 
Originally posted by John Jacques
If you make a POD before his conception he will not be born.
Why is that? Why could Barack Obama's mother and father not meet, fall in love and conceive him?
 

Xen

Banned
Why is that? Why could Barack Obama's mother and father not meet, fall in love and conceive him?

That depends on how big the POD is. I mean if you think about something like Barack Obama's mother having a boyfriend before she meets his father, thats a big enough POD to prevent Mr Obama from being born.

Now, if the POD is simple enough as in the Soviet Union Khrushchev farted and burped at the same time making the Politburo laugh, then its not likely to effect much.

Theres also the Barrack Hussein Obama being born, looks like him, but is a different guy altogether as a different semen hit its mark.
 
Do You Have a License to Move that Chair?

Rep. Dan Greenberg takes on Arkansas' interior design cartel

Katherine Mangu-Ward | November 7, 2008
lg.php

"I can understand wanting a sex offender registry. But I have a hard time finding the necessity of a interior designer registry." Meet Rep. Dan Greenberg (R-Little Rock), an Arkansas state legislator who likes to make trouble. For those who aren't going to make it down to Little Rock to meet the man in person, imagine a young Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), without some of his stranger "family values" fixations, transplanted to the Arkansas state legislature. He's worked for the Cato Institute and is a senior editor at the libertarian-friendly academic journal Critical Review.
Legislative sessions have historically occurred only every other year in Arkansas, so there's lots of time for extracurricular activities, and one of Greenberg's hobbies is apparently reading policy papers from the D.C. economic liberty litigators at the Institute for Justice. One of their current hobbyhorses: Interior design cartels. In 22 states, including Arkansas, it is illegal to call yourself an interior designer without going through an arduous and expensive certification process. In Nevada, it's illegal to do interior design without a license. That's right, advising someone about drapes could land you in the hoosegow.
Like many states, Arkansas has an Interior Design Board. The sole purpose of this board is to register interior designers. The IJ paper notes that "consumer complaints about interior designers to state regulatory boards are extremely rare. Since 1998 an average of one designer out of every 289 has received a complaint for any reason. Nearly all of those complaints, 94.7 percent, concern whether designers are properly licensed—not the quality of their service."
In 2007, Greenberg voted against the continued funding of the Interior Design Board, along with his ideological partners in crime in the legislature, former Rep. Jon Woods (R-Springdale) and Rep. Aaron Burkes (R-Benton). Says Greenberg: "My wife, after seeing the movie 300 with me, once commented: 'Hey, you guys are just like the 300—except, for you, it's just the 3!'" For now, funding is on hold for the board, and Greenberg hopes to kill it in the next session.
Greenberg made a bit of a splash in 2007 by trying to prohibit politicians from putting their names on public buildings. House Bill 1035 would have prohibited naming buildings that received 50 percent or more of their funding from the public coffers after people who held elected office within the ten years prior to the building's construction. True fogies—75 or older and retired—were assumed to be past their trouble-making days and therefore exempted from the ban. "I think the other senators thought I was some kind of a class traitor or something," he says.
This session, Greenberg started asking questions about the state's Interior Design Board and ran into opposition right away. "My experience is that a lot of these debates or discussions are driven by sentiment," says Greenberg. "One of the senators got really upset and offended. She said, ‘Look, the work that interior designers do is very important. And furthermore, my daughter is an interior designer.'" That was state Sen. Mary Anne Salmon (D-North Little Rock).
Sen. Terry Smith (D-Hot Springs) wondered why everyone was getting "heartburn" over $11,000 dollars, which is what the agency costs the state. "There's incredible institutional, psychological, and moral pressure" to go along, says Greenberg.
Smith is right, of course. All of this is small potatoes, not much more important than whether the walls in the powder room should be mauve or rose. These kinds of tiny squabbles are utterly typical of state legislative politics. But state level politics can matter. The lobbying wing of the interior design cartel has pushed 70 bills in 20 states over the last few years, for a total of about 6 million dollars, with mercifully limited success, mostly because IJ has been roughing people up and leaving (figurative) horse heads on their Laura Ashley sheets.
David Sanders, a former Huckabee aide and longtime Arkansas political columnist says, "Dan represents a school of thought that has been underrepresented in the state of Arkansas, probably since its founding. We have free market conservatives here, but Dan is really giving heart and voice to those arguments."
Perhaps this is just the warm-up for a chance to be persnickety on a bigger stage: There's a chance that a seat will open up in the House of Representatives next cycle. The current occupant of Arkansas' 2nd district seat, 61-year-old Democrat Vic Snyder, will soon be the proud father of newborn triplets. Wonder if he needs any help decorating the nursery?
Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of reason.
http://reason.com/news/show/129981.html
 
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