Remember what happened the last time we elected a president with whom we could "have a beer?"

As the race for the Democratic nomination rages on, the most important question of this election season is being overridden by a more mindless one: please tell me why we are thoughtfully enquiring about: "who stands for change?," and better yet, "who stands for hope?" instead of "who can undo the mess that the Bush administration has done." The fact of the matter is that both democratic candidates have their appeal and are not without intellectual qualifications. Further, both would represent a significant break from the era of nepotism, reckless spending, faith-based initiatives, spying on American citizens, dismantling science and education, fear-mongering, outing CIA agents, incompetence, wedge-issues, and (who could forget) torture. Whew. Because of this, I will gladly support whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination. However, I am very disappointed with how quickly one of the Democratic candidates has resorted to Bush tactics.

No, not Senator Clinton--she's merely getting her fair share of "Clinton Rules" from the media that wait, as if in ambush, for any. I'm talking about Obama.

By now every time we hear the words "hope" or "change" we are made to think of Mr. Obama in a way that would have made Orwell squirm. In a Bush-like fashion, Mr. Obama has wrapped himself in these abstract concepts, and has repetitively abused them to the extent that they have lost all meaning. After all, who could forget that Bush equated himself "freedom" and "values"?

After Bill Clinton tried pointing out Obama's abuse of the abstraction "hope," Obama flipped through the Bush rhetoric book and came up with another Bush tactic: do not address the issue but accuse the person of hating the abstract concept. In other words, the Clinton's hate hope much like Democrats hated freedom/the troops/ security/ America because we wanted the war to end. "There's nothing false about hope," Obama told his audience, implying obtusely that there must be, therefore, something wrong with the Clintons. But Obama neglected the truth behind the statement; Clinton wasn't calling all hope false--just the one on which Obama has a strangle-hold.

Yet another tactic Obama has flawlessly integrated into his campaign is leveling the most devastating fact about a candidate into an accusation against the opposing camp before they can accuse that candidate. For example, even though Bush had a shaky Vietnam record (to say the least), in 2004 he accused Kerry of it first, and Bush's campaign kept repeating the message--never mind the fact that of the two, only Kerry was actually in Vietnam. Likewise Obama aired radio ads across the country, most notably in South Carolina stating, "Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected"--never mind the fact that he tried to misconstrue Mr. Clinton's words about Obama's Iraq-war support being a fairy-tale into something racist and vulgar. Who's playing the race card now, Mr. Obama? In reality, Mr. Clinton merely pointed out that in 2004 Obama said there was no difference between him and George Bush on the war.

Obama plays the quick and dirty rhetoric card because he can't otherwise convince the democratic voting base of his experience on international relations, on the economy, or on the military; he essentially has neither experience nor a voting record. In a sense he's almost as inexperienced and as unknown as Bush was in 2000.

Simply put, voters don't know Obama well enough--all he's got is one real year in federal office (running for a presidential campaign is a full-time job), eight years voting "present" in state office, and before that, four years building up a constituency to run for that state office. Everything he does seems political and intended for the purpose of climbing to a higher office.

He substitutes his voting record and his experience with his unsubstantiated (by definition) hopes and promises in order to build a cult of personality. But all of these murky selling-points tell us about as much about him as what he got on the SAT. And a cult of personality is nothing new: Bush had that too--remember when the entire nation wanted to "have a beer" with him? We really don't know Obama as well as we should know our leader.

For this very reason, Obama's the candidate into whom you can cast all your hopes and dreams and they reflect back shimmering, but they are just that: pale reflections. I will admit that he speaks very eloquently and that he's brilliant, inspirational, and charismatic. But at this point it would be a mistake to send him up in a general election with literally one of the least amounts of experience that any modern presidential candidate has ever had--especially against one of the longest serving Senators in our nation's history.