From Obama’s speech in Toledo:

I won’t pretend this will be easy or come without cost. We’ll have to set priorities as never before, and stick to them. That means pursuing investments in areas such as energy, education and health care that bear directly on our economic future, while deferring other things we can afford to do without. It means scouring the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do work more efficiently and cost less.

I can’t wait to find out what these “other things we can afford to do without” are. Certainly not socialized health care, alternative energy, welfare disguised as tax cuts, or any of his other campaign promises.

He also mentioned (though not in the transcript) canvassing a neighborhood street on which there were already two foreclosures, and pointed out that this drives down the neighboring homes’ values. One might expect him to point out that this is decreasing the most valuable investment that these individuals have made. But instead he pointed out that decreased home values mean decreased tax revenue for local government services. It was such a telling moment. When he ad-libs and attempts to analyze the current situation, he defaults to his government-as-mommy socialistic view. All his pseudo-conservative talk of personal financial responsibility and increased individual savings, targeted at undecided my-fear-just-may-overwhelm-my-reason Ohioans, can’t cover up his deeply liberal welfare-state mentality.

Some hope that his past associations with far-left individuals and groups, along with his “most liberal senator” voting record (don’t worry, that was only 2007 - he was a very mainstream 16th and 10th most liberal in 2005 and 2006 [note the direction of this change]) are just that - the past. It’s always shocking to see the amount of promises and double-talk tolerated by starry eyed voters during a campaign year. I can’t wait till 2012 when President Obama is running for reelection and trying to explain, like Democratic congressmen after their utterly dismal performance in the majority, why exactly none of his promises have (yet) come true.

Personally, I’m pretty excited about having a magician as a president.

Hmm, but Jennifer Rubin seems to think perhaps we cannot fully take him at his word?

The surest clue to a politician’s intentions is his record, not his campaign rhetoric. Obama’s is fairly clear. Up through 2002 he sat on the Woods Fund and gave out money to a hodgepodge of left-leaning groups including ACORN and the Arab American Action Network. As a state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and favored strict gun control. As a U.S. Senator he was rated the most liberal (with some pretty liberal competition) — voting to cut off funding for troops and against both Justices Roberts and Alito and supporting the Democratic party line on everything from taxes to offshore drilling. He has been exquisitely sensitive to Big Labor’s agenda (e.g. opposing the Colombia Free Trade agreement, helping to sink immigration reform, and favoring the Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act).

Please try not to spoil the act, Jennifer! Even McCain is playing nice. As Krauthammer points out, McCain gambled too many times while Obama has sat back, played it safe, and let the clock continue to run out. All he has to do is be the “not from the same party as George Bush” candidate, and the Oval Office is his. McCain made a decision not to run as himself, and instead to run as “generic Republican” while Obama somehow duped the public and successfully positioned himself in the political center, the “uniter” with the leftist record.

Excuse me while I go dig a hole to hide in for the next four years.