OBAMARAMA

Oliver Willis highlights the recent pro-Obama sartorial stylings of stunning actresses Jessica Biel and Halle Berry.

Will they bring millions of voters with them? Perhaps not. But they do represent something even more important: the draw many previously unaffiliated voters feel toward the Obama camp.

And how strong is that draw? According to this article, strong enough to lure “disillusioned supporters of President George W. Bush” into the fold. The article reports that former Bush donors, friends, and even staffers “are defecting to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois, as the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation.”

Click below for more from the article (which is very much worth a read).

Tom Bernstein went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. In 2004 he donated the maximum $2,000 to the president’s reelection campaign and gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. This year he is switching his support to Obama. He is one of many former Bush admirers who find the Democrat newcomer appealing.

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, announced last month that he was disillusioned with the war in Iraq and the president’s “my way or the highway” style of leadership – the first member of Bush’s inner circle to denounce the leader’s performance in office.

Although Dowd has yet to endorse a candidate, he said the only one he liked was Obama. “I think we should design campaigns that appeal, not to 51% of the people, but bring the country together as a whole,” Dowd said.

…But last week a surprising new name joined the chorus of praise for the antiwar Obama – that of Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, which called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Kagan is an informal foreign policy adviser to the Republican senator John McCain, who remains the favoured neoconservative choice for the White House because of his backing for the troops in Iraq.

But in an article in the Washington Post, Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was “pure John Kennedy”, a neocon hero of the cold war.

The article also highlights John Martin, founder of Republicans for Obama, which is listed on our blogroll.

In a million years, you might not find Jessica Biel and Robert Kagan in the same room — but thanks to the unifying politics of a certain Senator from Illinois, now you can find them under the same tent.