Mr. Soul, lots of excellent points made by you in the last few posts. While I'm an Obama fan, I have some problems with how he goes about things. I think he's too political, and I do think he is trying to take advantage of the current economic crisis to push an agenda which is too far left for me.
That said, I think he wants to improve the country and the world. And while I agree with the general points you make relative to left and right, and agree that the right uses arguments that amount to scare tactics, the left uses a lot of hate based stuff that tries to get people to really dislike their opponents.
Although dems and repubs have gone at each other for years, it just seems so much worse since the Clinton impeachment, where I think the repubs went too far. Facilitating it all is the media and the internet where you can't utter two syllables without everyone knowing about it.
Although I like many of the ideas of the left, the problem to me is in the implementation. People in general just take too much advantage of whatever breaks are available. That might manifest itself in greed or in fraud or in illegally entering the country, or in whatever other way, but for me, that's it in a nutshell. The left generally likes programs that give more, and there are way too many people willing to take, thus breaking things down and making it bad for most everyone.