Richard:

The key thing about Obama is that he articulates policies, not hot air. Your dismissive approach does him a disservice. Your premise that what a candidate needs is a complete, fully costed plan is, I think, both unrelaistic and possibly tactically off. Treating the Presidential election like a board room squabble is exactly what was repugnant about Bush, Bush, Nixon, and Reagan -- the conversion of the nation into a corporate structure within a corporatocracy.

Obama provides something more important, I suggest -- a guiding vision and the policies which derive from it which can bring together people into a higher quality of organization. Obama will not be able to escape the details, of course -- but they are not his first line of attack and given the conditions it is possible they should not be, because what has been so badly missing from the nation's leadership is not people who can play board-room gotcha but people who can be trusted to represent ideals and principles. Obama's position is principled. This is worth a lot, because it means (if it is true and consistent) you can trust him to grapple intelligently with the projects of government and the collisisons of events in an ethical way.

It depends on whether you place your importance on ethics first, and then on administration, or whether you place them on administration first, and let ethics follow as it can. usually being scrapped or torn up.

A