A thoughtful and balanced article. I remain a genuinely undecided voter, and I wish more people like you would write up some similarly fulfilling food for thought.

That’s a pretty standard refrain against Obama – he talks very lofty, but I don’t know what he stands for. If you’re relying on the American media to inform you, you’re in trouble – they view elections as somewhere between a high school popularity contest and a freak show.

But a few points:
1. Obama actually does talk a lot about his specific policies. He released a detailed tax plan - Rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans and lowering taxes of the middle class. He released a specific health care plan - and debated the specifics with Edwards and Clinton. The press might not emphasize it in their coverage but that, and investing heavily in green energy to develop jobs and energy independence, getting the US out of Iraq, etc. are part of his stump speech. He comments on specific disagreements with McCain all the time – this week he pointed out that he supports habeas corpus for people in Guantanamo.

2. Also, he’s a Senator, in the past year he’s supported expanding SCHIP, passing the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he backed the FISA “compromise” bill. That gives you a pretty good idea of where he stands on a variety of issues.

3. If you want to know about Obama’s stance on the issues, why don’t you google Obama and Issues? You’ll get to the Issues page of his website. If that’s not enough google the Democratic party platform. In less time than it took you to write this post you could have found more policy details than most sane people can stomach.

So, the problem isn’t that Obama doesn’t have policy specifics, its that the media that you consume doesn’t inform you. That and that you didn’t take the minimal amount of effort to educate yourself.