Many of my moderate friends, neighbors and extended family believe there are compelling reasons to vote for Barack Obama including the fact that he comes across as fairly moderate on issues. Obama's style and positions against the war along with his accusations of a failed Bush administration during disastrous economic conditions are tempting many moderates and independent voters to think twice before casting their  traditional votes. I now believe however there is a conflict for fiscally minded voters to resolve before November 4th if they plan to vote for Obama.

Until recently, the contradiction that moderate voters face has not been so obvious. Obama seems moderate when he addresses us and talks about his positions. His campaign seems to have adequately addressed many questions we've had about his left leaning tendencies. Many are comfortable, believing his spending agenda will not hurt America. But now there is new information that promises to pose more than just a vague conflict; These facts create a full-on compromise of fiscal values for moderate voters.

For most of us, the middle isn’t a place where we, from election to election, simply change our values. Of course not. Most of us would not simply toss our fiscal values out the window in the pursuit of other ideals at stake in an election. For example, it is a complete contradiction and compromise of my values to say “I will give up my fiscal values this time in order to fix the government spending problems”. Wait... What? No, we would not do this intentionally, but I believe this is exactly what is happening with many voters. They don't realize the contradiction because Obama a) exposes his compassion and empathy rather than his true ideology and b) he has not been truthful about his extreme social agenda.

The public record of Obama's voting history is available for anyone to review but this has not changed the minds of some who believe Obama will shift more to the middle and will do things differently as president. But, what is much more concerning to me are the records that have not been available for public review until recently and this is where I become convicted:

During the primaries and earlier this summer concerns were raised about the strong endorsements for Barack Obama coming from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the DSA’s “New Party”. It is not a problem nor unexpected that these organizations would endorse Obama (of course they will support the democratic nominee); The problem is that Obama denied he was ever a member of the DSA’s socialist New Party. But, according to this New Party documentation (and many other references and articles NOW available) Obama was injected by the New Party into the senatorial race in 1996 (which he won) as an existing member of the New Party:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010306031216/www.newparty.org/up9610.html

“Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).”

Why wasn’t this record available for public review before now? It was, until it was removed from public servers. However, this information and much much more had already been archived in Google’s history databases before the New Party records were removed from public servers. This October, Google re-released its history archives as a celebration of Google’s 10th birthday. Many documents and links have resurfaced in the last 2 weeks that seem to indicate Obama was a member of the DSA’s New Party. The people who discovered the new information on the web quickly alerted others. Searches started turning up all kinds of interesting history including information that shows how closely the New Party and ACORN organizations worked together in those days to achieve success in the elections in which New Party members were running.

This link will allow you to search the old archives yourself: http://www.google.com/search2001.html as long as the archives remain available from Google. Don't rely on this or similar posts for the facts, do the research for yourself and you will find the same archived records. You may may need to select the "view old internet archive" option to see the pages.

Can these links and records be removed from Google's history databases as well?  I’m not sure, but Google could remove access to the archives. Of course all the relevant data that has been unearthed about all the candidates and issues of this election have no doubt been backed up by many many people by now.

Do democrats care? Probably not.

Then who cares? The fiscally and socially moderate and independent voters who think Obama is moderate and voters who believed the campaign was truthful regarding this important and pivotal ideology of Barack Obama. We can only assume that those who covered up this history must also believe that this proof of Obama's ideology would not be good for his political career. If only Obama had demonstrated a shift to the middle in his record, then we might believe he has left behind his extreme social agenda. But there is no shift to the middle to go on. With the increase in evidence recently and enough discussion, it becomes more and more difficult for a moderate voter to resolve the conflict of fiscal matters and avoid the contradiction of voting for Obama.

I have shared my thoughts and what I have learned with my middle-minded friends. Some have found this information helpful for making a decision in November. Others are less impacted. The good news is this - in America we get to decide. But we need to vote with careful consideration on how to keep those very freedoms well represented in our government; We vote in good faith that the president and the members the congress, the senate and the supreme court will put forward, at the very least, their basic ideology and the reasons for their beliefs. At least we voters try very hard to gain that perspective as best we can before we vote in a process that is often less than forthright.

But isn't McCain just 'more of the same'? No. McCain will uphold fiscal conservative values and maintain strong national security but differs from Bush in many matters ranging from global warming, his views on torture, stem cell research and energy alternatives. What we can be sure of in casting a vote for McCain is that he is much more fiscally and socially centric than Barack Obama - much more so than we even realized just 2 weeks ago.