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12 May, 2008

Refusal of whites to support Obama is racism

That's the "L.A. Times" message below. But one-eyed black support for him (now up to 91%) isn't racist, of course.

In Hardy County, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1. But there is little enthusiasm for Barack Obama in this mountainside enclave, a portent of trouble for the Illinois senator in next week's West Virginia primary and the general election beyond. Nearly 97% white, the county is as conflicted as any rural and working-class Democratic bastion as it struggles to adjust to the likely prospect of the party nominating its first African American presidential candidate.

Obama may have emerged from his double-digit victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton in North Carolina and his razor-thin loss in Indiana on Tuesday with a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. But his performance did little to reassure political leaders here concerned by his sagging numbers among once-loyal white Democrats, who have steadily abandoned their party over the last several presidential elections. "I'm not yet convinced that Barack Obama is more substance than fluff," said Clyde M. See Jr., a former Democratic speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates and two-time gubernatorial candidate who heads a small law practice in Moorefield, the county seat. "He's a fine speaker, mind you, but I'm still not sure he's got the right stuff to win the general election."

The concerns of party members who live amid this rolling landscape of soybean fields, poultry plants and retirement cabins mirror those of many white Democrats nationwide: Some fear voters will be turned off by Obama's black heritage. Others, they say, will find reason to doubt his patriotism or will perceive him to be an elitist. It remains unclear how racial unease will factor into election-day decisions come November. Those hidden impulses are elusively difficult to capture in polling. But seasoned Democratic players here reckon that some racially tinged voting will inevitably occur far beyond Hardy County's cresting hills. "There's a lot of bigotry in the country, not just West Virginia," See said.

Fearful that the GOP will exploit Obama's "otherness," many still insist that Clinton's ebbing campaign offers the Democrats a better shot come November. Even those who say they would support Obama worry about his electability, convinced that many of their neighbors will defect to the presumed Republican nominee, John McCain. "My worry is there's just too many people in this country who aren't ready to elect a black president," said Charles L. Silliman, a retired Air Force officer who is Hardy County's Democratic Party co-chairman. "There's a lot to like about him. But I'm just afraid that too many people will vote against him based on their fears and prejudice."

Silliman and his wife, Carmen, are Clinton supporters, drawn by her healthcare plan and her endurance on the campaign trail. Still, the couple repeatedly have found themselves defending Obama, correcting acquaintances who relay baseless rumors about his name and religion. Carmen Silliman has collected a sheaf of poisonous e-mails that have flowed into her in-box. "We do not need a Muslim to lead the good ole USA," reads one. Obama is, in fact, a Christian.

Neil Gillies, an Obama supporter who runs a local environmental nonprofit group, glumly recounted the gibes that his wife, a schoolteacher, hears regularly from her students. "They're convinced [Obama] is a Muslim, a terrorist, a guy who's coming to take away their guns," Gillies said. "It's just sad."

Slung along the bottom of West Virginia's eastern panhandle, Hardy County was once rock-solid Democratic. Senior citizens fondly recall the day Eleanor Roosevelt arrived to dedicate the opening of Moorefield High School in 1941. But socially conservative church groups and gun-rights supporters here have helped tilt the vote Republican in recent presidential elections. In 2004, Hardy County lined up for George W. Bush by a 3-1 ratio. [So that was racism too?]

"It's just not going to be easy for Obama to woo crossover Democrats back into the fold," said P. Merle Black, a professor of politics and government at Emory University and a longtime analyst of Southern voting patterns. "In addition to the race factor, you've got huge cultural differences between them and Obama on guns and religion and many of the issues that would make those voters think he doesn't represent their interests."

Obama has made an effort to highlight his religious beliefs and his support for hunters' rights. But his former pastor's racially charged sermons -- and the candidate's own comments about small-town Americans who have lost their jobs and "cling to guns or religion" -- have not helped his cause. "I've got 50-some guns, and I wasn't crazy about Obama's talk about small towns," said Sam Vetter, 64, a farmer and lifelong Democrat who regrets voting for Bush in 2000. "Besides," he added, "Obama just doesn't sound right for an American president."

Despite a well-financed television campaign and endorsements from Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV and Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, Obama is expected to finish well behind Clinton in West Virginia's primary, which will award 28 pledged delegates. "We've got our work cut out for us," acknowledged Tom Bowen, a spokesman for Obama's West Virginia effort. Democratic registration statewide is up by more than 16,000 voters since 2006, compared with an increase of 4,000 for the GOP. But that reflects "as much interest in the local races as there is in the national," said Greg Ely, Hardy County clerk.

Source

West Virginian Don Surber has a few comments.




Why Jews MUST NOT Vote for Barack OBAMA

Sometimes, the biggest Jew haters I meet are--well Jewish. It is my own brethren who look at me funny because I am wearing a Kippah in public. In my thirty plus year career another Jew was the only one who ever urged me to work the second day of Rosh Hashanah because, he only took off one day. Then there are the ones who I call "shhhhh Jews." In other words, "shhhhh we don't want to upsent the non-Jews!" One of the biggest issues to the shhhhh Jews is the presidential race. They don't like it when I point out Senator Obama's failings, "what if he wins?" They ask. "If Obama wins," I tell them, "then it is TOO late." If Barack Obama becomes president of the United States, it will be a major disaster for American Jews, Israel and the United States of America.

Although He keeps saying that he is anti terror and friend of Israel, that is a political expediency, just like his Wright Speech last week. Not only is the Senator Weak on Terror issues, EVERY SINGLE ADVISER TO HIS CAMPAIGN SUPPORTS PUSHING ISRAEL TO APPEASE TERRORISTS. If he had Just a few pro-Israel or anti-appeasement advisers he could make a case of being balanced. Lets look at the facts:

* Not only is his former pastor Anti-Israel but the movement his church is affiliated with, the United Church of Christ is Anti-Israel, the UCC's Boston Branch even hosted a worldwide Israel Hate-fest this past October.

* He has no problem supporting terrorist leaders because Barack Obama Says Morality Should not be a Foreign Policy Consideration. He doesn't even believe that Iran's Revolutionary Guard, which is running terrorist operations in Iraq, is a terrorist group.

* Look at his advisers Zbigniew Bzrezinski-- Robert O. Malley-- Samantha Power-- Gen. Merrill A. McPeak-- Joseph Cirincione-- and Daniel Kurtzer one of the "Baker's Boys." Baker's Boys" was the nickname of former Secretary of State James " F**K the Jews Baker's top three middle east advisers, Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, and Kurtzer. All three were Jews (some would say self-hating) and they helped the Baker-run State Department become the most Anti-Israel Department in my lifetime (even worse than Carter's).

* His statement that it is Israel's fault that there is no peace, or the fact that he acted differently toward Israel before he appeared on the national stage

* His Anti-Israel Congressional Buddies, Lugar and Hagel

Folks EACH one of the links above refer to His statements, the statements of his advisers or other witnesses. If there was simply one or two that I could point to one could say that I was over reacting....but there are more than a dozen above and I could have posted triple that . The time for "emotion" is over. The time for racism is over. YES Racism. Jews have been oppressed for over 2,000 years and as such we like to see another oppressed group make it "big." But when faced with real facts that the man would be a disaster when facing major issues involving the United States and Israel, not treating him the same as any other candidate is RACISM. And worse yet, it would be suicide for the Jews, for Israel and for the United States of America.

Source




BUSTED!... Obama Can't Rewrite History When It's Still Posted On His Website!

Charles Johnson caught this attempt by the Obama Campaign and The New York Times to rewrite history today:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that "for political purposes, Senator Obama's opponents on the right have distorted and reframed" his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet "unconditionally" with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called "rogue" state. Mr. Obama believes "that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need," Dr. Rice said. "But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work."

Charles points out that Obama did announce he would meet with Iran unconditionally, in front of a lot of people, at the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate last July. And, Charles even found the video . During the debate when asked if he would "be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?" Obama answers, "I would." AllahPundit at HotAir also found that Obama reaffirmed his position later in an interview with The New York Times itself. And, then there's this... It's posted on his website at BarackObama.com:

[Click here to see screenshot]

Here is what the Obama website says about meeting with Iran: Diplomacy: Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.

That's bad. The next time the New York Times wants to rewrite history they may want to check the Obama website first.

Source

Hot Air has more




Obama ditches another "friend"

Syrian-born Malley really is a poisonous bill of goods. What took Obama so long?

One of Barack Obama's Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas - prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him. Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think-tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama's Middle East advisory council. "I've never hidden the fact that in my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people," he added.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr Obama, responded swiftly: "Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future." The rapid departure of Mr Malley followed 48 hours of heated clashes between John McCain, the Republican nominee-elect, and Mr Obama over Middle East policy.

Mr Obama, who has been trying to assuage suspicion towards him among the influential Jewish and pro-Israel lobby, spoke at a Washington reception marking the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence on Thursday when he promised that his commitment to the country's security would be "unshakeable". However, Mr McCain has high-lighted the Democrat's pledge to negotiate directly with nations such as Iran - whose leaders talk of wiping Israel off the map - and a statement from Hamas saying that it hoped that Mr Obama would win the presidency.

This was denounced as an offensive smear by Mr Obama, who repeated earlier statements saying that Hamas was "a terrorist organisation [and] we should not negotiate with them unless they recognise Israel, renounce violence".

He went on to suggest that Mr McCain's attack showed that he was "losing his bearings". This remark triggered a furious reaction from Mark Salter, the Republican's senior adviser, who said that Mr Obama was "intentionally raising John McCain's age as an issue" - a claim the Democrat vehemently denied. The intensity of this dispute reflects both Mr Obama's desire to move beyond his battle with Hillary Clinton and how Republicans are already beginning to train their sights on him.

The Republican National Committee has amassed a 1,000-page dossier on Mr Obama, with researchers spending weeks in Chicago seeking fresh material. He is already being criticised for his links with Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who has branded Israel an "apartheid system in creation".

Mr Malley, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern issues and part of President Clinton's negotiating team at the Camp David talks, has come under attack in recent months from right-wing bloggers. Yesterday, asked if Obama campaign was aware of his contact with Hamas, he said: "They know who I am but I don't think they vet everyone in a group of informal advisers."

Randy Scheunemann, Mr McCain's foreign policy chief, suggested that Mr Malley was part of an emerging pattern in which other advisers had been repudiated after throwing confusion over policies on trade and Iraq. "Perhaps because of his inexperience Senator Obama surrounds himself with advisers that contradict his stated policies," he said.

Source




Obama Unstained by Chicago Way

The Chicago Tribune's John Kass:

The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate's politics were born in Chicago. Yet he is presented to the nation as not truly being of this place, as if he floats just above the political corruption here, uninfected, untouched by the stain of it or by any sin of commission or omission. It is all so very mystical.

Perhaps viewing Obama as a Chicago political creature would conflict with the established national media narrative of Obama as a reformer. Actually, there's no "perhaps" about it....

[Obama is] a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won't make no waves and won't back no losers.

Obama the reformer is backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Daley boys. He is spoken for by Daley's own spokesman, David Axelrod. He was launched into his U.S. Senate by machine power broker and state Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd)...

Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he's a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists [?]

Many people are aware that Chicago's political system is corrupt, but it is hardly ever described in a concrete way, especially by the national media.

Here's what you'll never read in the national media about the corruption in Chicago: In the last 36 years, since 1972, 27 Chicago alderman have been convicted of crimes. Not accused of wrongdoing, not just accused of lapses in judgment, not brought before an ethics panel for questionable dealings. Convicted of crimes. Sent to the hoosegow. Three more former alderman are currently under indictment.

To put this in perspective, there are 50 alderman in Chicago's City Council. If Chicago's level of corruption and number of subsequent convictions in its legislative body was replicated in the US House over the last 36 years, more than 200 congressman would have been convicted of crimes. All from the same political party.

But it's not just relegated to Chicago's city limits, nor the County of Cook. Since 1960, seven governors have been elected in Illinois; three of the seven have gone to jail. And current Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojavich is presently under an ethical cloud due to startling revelations emanating from the trial of political fixer Tony Rezko.

And some wonder why many of us are totally skeptical of the national media's repetition of the 'Obama as change agent' theme. A 'change agent' from Chicago? Are they serious?

Source




Will Team Clinton Play the Kenya Card?

How much do the Clintons want the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination for Hillary? Obviously enough to loan more than $10,000,000 of their personal funds to Hillary's presidential campaign. But enough to play the Kenya card (that is, call public attention to Obama's Kenyan ties)? Would they dare to do that?

With exits polls showing that rookie United States Senator and now front-running Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is taking more than 90% of the black vote against Hillary, will the Clintons finally play the Kenya card?

The liberal media blasted Team Clinton for supposedly playing the race card when Bill Clinton compared Obama's success in the 2008 Democrat presidential primary in South Carolina to earlier successes of Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The liberal media blasted Team Clinton when a photograph of Obama in traditional African garb was publicized.

The liberal media blasted Team Clinton when Bill Clinton complained that Team Obama had played the race card against him.

So the liberal media would blast Team Clinton for calling attention to Obama's Kenyan ties and call it racist.

But political reality is that Team Clinton cannot beat Team Obama so long as they assert, as Hillary did long ago, that she and Obama might run together for president and vice president, or, as Hillary said during the Pennsylvania debate, that Obama can be elected, or, as Hillary publicly stated during the latest Super Tuesday night, that she would support Obama if he won the Democrat presidential nomination. Reality is that Team Clinton needs to show that Obama is unfit to be President of the United States in order to win.

Obama inadvertently contributed greatly to that perception among non-black voters by the way he handled his Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr. problem, first refusing to disavow Rev. Wright personally as equivalent to disowning the black community or his white grandmother, and finally doing so only after it finally became politically imperative, because Rev. Wright not only reiterated his crazed views at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., but essentially said that Obama had deceived the public about his genuine beliefs when he had distanced himself from Rev. Wright's incendiary remarks with respect to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, AIDS as an instrument devised by the United States government to exterminate blacks and, of course, God damning America.

Since Obama became the Democrat frontrunner, some of Obama's problematic associations--Rev. Wright, domestic terrorist William "I should have done more bombing" Ayers, slumlord Tony Rezko and wife Michelle "America is downright mean" and "Black Community first and foremost" Obama--have received significant public attention, to Team Obama's consternation.

But that scrutiny of Obama associations came only AFTER he had become the Democrat frontrunner, too late for Team Clinton, and Team Clinton has NOT played the Kenya card to show how politically extreme Obama really is and how Obama is tied to the radical Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga (who told the BBC that he is Obama's cousin on his father's side and who ran an unsuccessful race for president of Kenya posing as an apostle of change).

Unfortunately for Team Clinton, the media has not compared and contrasted the Odinga and Obama presidential campaigns and scrutinized the Odinga-Obama connection, although it certainly should have.

If Hillary is to become the 2008 Democrat presidential nominee, Team Clinton will not only have to brave the reflexive charges of racism, but convince the American people, including most Democrats, that the man who disparaged religion, denigrated small-town America and supported Rev. Wright as long as politically possible is a false messiah and an extremist, not a unifier-in-waiting who will solve America's racial problems because he happens to be half-black and half-white.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





11 May, 2008

Barack Obama, Imperialist?

Obama's amazing confusion of America's states with Heinz beans ("57 varieties") can only be responded to sarcastically, which is what we read below

By now you've seen the footage of Barack Obama ruing the fact that he hasn't been able to visit all 57 states in this great union of ours. If you haven't, scroll down a bit and read Goldfarb's post on the matter. I'll wait.

This faux pas is beyond weird; I know the guy is tired, but "How many states are there in America?" is the kind of question they ask you at the hospital after you've had a seizure to see if your brain is still working. I speak from personal experience on this matter, by the way. When I had a random seizure in 1996, the guy at the emergency room asked me how many states there were and then who was president. I responded with a ten minute rant on Whitewater - he urgently ordered up more tests.

But I digress. What I'm trying to say is there is no way Obama could have been so disoriented as to have even momentarily forgotten that we have but 50 states. Besides, there was something about Obama's additions to the Union that rang a bell. Then I remembered - Grand Strategist (and likely Obama supporter) Thomas P.M. Barnett in his seminal work "The Pentagon's New Map" urged America to add several states to the nation, perhaps as many as a dozen.

Has Obama absorbed such expansionist designs to such an extent that he's already counting his proverbial new chickens before they've hatched? Is he planning on adopting Canada? Perhaps he only has his eyes on the cool parts of Canada like Montreal and Toronto, and will let the remainder of our northern neighbor peacefully tend to its hockey playing and curling. And what of our neighbors to the south? Will we find ourselves in an Obama administration forced to refer to Haiti as Really South Dakota?

Regardless, I'm shocked that Obama apparently believes in a hyper-muscular 21st century version of Manifest Destiny. Truly, I didn't see that one coming.

Source




Black Community Is Increasingly Protective of Obama

But no-one is calling it racism!

Bill Clinton is no longer revered as the "first black president." Tavis Smiley's rapid-fire commentaries on a popular radio show have been silenced. And the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., self-described defender of the black church, has been derided by many on the Web as an old man who needs to "step off." They all landed in the black community's doghouse after being viewed as endangering Sen. Barack Obama's chances of being elected president. And the community's desire to protect the first African American ever to be in this position may only grow with his win in North Carolina and his close loss in Indiana this week.

"I have parents who are still living who are very enthusiastic about Obama," said Valerie Grim, the chair of Indiana University's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. "They live in Mississippi. For a time, my parents couldn't vote, and when they could, their only choice was a white person. "This means more than just saying there's a black person on the ticket. It represents the things they had been denied. It's being able to see the unbelievable, that the impossible might be possible. It represents for them a new day, a new opportunity to see that black people can contribute, on the ultimate level, to the social order." Given such sentiment, it has not taken much for other public figures to move from icon to pariah.

When Bill Clinton called Obama's position on Iraq a "fairy tale" in New Hampshire, "I think black people felt betrayed," said Andrea Plaid, a blogger who writes under the pen name the Cruel Secretary. African Americans continued to regard Clinton highly even after he was impeached for lying under oath. "And you turn around and do this to us?" Plaid said.

Smiley, the renowned black author and commentator, took issue with Obama for skipping his "Covenant With Black America" event in New Orleans so he could campaign in Texas and Ohio. The resulting backlash left Smiley feeling "hammered" and "barbequed" by black Americans. "There's all this talk of 'hater,' 'sellout' and 'traitor,' " Smiley said at the time. ". . . They are harassing my mama, harassing my brother." The animus dogged him even on the radio, where his commentaries on black causes for the popular "Tom Joyner Morning Show" were renowned. In a terse statement issued last month, Smiley announced that he was leaving the show to focus on other ventures.

Smiley "did a disservice to the black community," said L.N. Rock, the blogger known as the African American Political Pundit. He noted that Smiley billed the New Orleans gathering as an event for the people. But while the people agreed with Obama's compromise of dispatching his wife, Michelle, to speak in his stead, Smiley balked. "He should have been hammered for that," Rock said.

Wright has been hailed by many in the black clergy as a brilliant liberation theologian. But after his speech and question-and-answer session at the National Press Club last month, people commented on the blog Jack and Jill Politics -- billed as a political sounding board for the "black bourgeois" -- that the minister should have known better than to pick a fight with the media at such a crucial point in the presidential campaign.

Source




Obama: Flawed or Fantastic?

Buyer's remorse was beginning to afflict supporters of Barack Obama before Tuesday's primary election returns showed he had delivered a knockout punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic beginning with his 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa disappointed even his own advisers over the past two weeks, and old party hands mourned that they were stuck with a flawed candidate.

The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Carolina and his near miss in Indiana transformed that impression. The candidate who delivered the victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., was the Obama of Des Moines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy, uneasy candidate who had seemed unable to effectively deal with bumps in the campaign road. Returning to his eloquent call for unity, the victorious Obama in advance dismissed Republican criticism of his ideology or his past as the same old partisan bickering that the people hate.

John McCain as the Republican candidate does not like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gentlemanly contest between the old war hero from out of the past and the new advocate of reform from the future probably would guarantee Democratic takeover of the White House. The Republican Party, suffering from public disrepute, faces major Democratic gains in each house of Congress -- leaving the defeat of Obama as the sole GOP hope for 2008.

Republicans were cheered and Democrats distressed by an inexperienced Obama's ineptitude in handled adversity the past month. The new Republican consensus considered Obama the weaker of the two Democratic candidates. Indeed, Hillary Clinton had finally shaken off pretensions of entitlement and consigned Bill Clinton to rural America, raising speculation that she would decisively carry Indiana and threaten Obama in North Carolina.

Clinton's failure Tuesday was a product of demographics rather than Obama's campaign skill. Consistently winning over 90 percent of the African-American vote, Obama is unbeatable in a primary where the black electorate is as large as North Carolina's (half the registered Democratic vote there). Indiana differed from seemingly similar Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Clinton scored big wins, because it borders Obama's state of Illinois, with many voters in the Chicago media market.

As the clear winner and the presumptive nominee, Obama in Raleigh Tuesday unveiled his general election strategy. Dismissing McCain's "ideas" as "nothing more than the failed policies of the past," Obama denounced what he called the Republican campaign plan: "Yes, we know what's coming. ... We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas."

Thus, Obama seems to be ruling out not only discussion of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but also any identification of the Democratic presidential candidate as "liberal" or as an advocate of higher taxes, higher domestic spending, abortion rights and gun control. These issues appear to be included in what Obama at Raleigh called "attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences."

The test of Obama's strategy may be his friendship with and support from William Ayers, an unrepentant member of the Weatherman terrorist underground of the 1960s. Instead of totally disavowing Ayers as he belatedly did his former pastor Wright, Obama potentially deepened his problem by referring to Ayers as just a college professor -- "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He then compared their relationship with his friendship with conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, as he had compared Wright's racism with his white grandmother's.

Democrats abhor bringing up what Obama calls Ayers' "detestable acts 40 years ago," but it will be brought into the public arena even if it is not McCain's style of politics. A photo of Ayers stomping on the American flag in 2001 has been all over the Internet this week. That was the year Obama accepted a $200 political contribution from Ayers and the year in which the former Weatherman said: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

While McCain will demand no response from Obama, others will. How the prospective nominee handles this in the future will help define whether he is seen as flawed or fantastic in the long campaign ahead.

Source




The Champ Is Here: Will Barack Obama defeat Barack Obama on November 4?

It seems that John McCain's strategy for victory this fall is for Obama to self-destruct on such a grand level that voters consider McCain the only suitable choice on the ballot. McCain and the GOP are not in prime condition: the Republicans are unpopular because of the extended Iraq War and domestic economic anxieties, and McCain is still unpopular among key factions of his own party. Yet, a McCain victory is still quite possible.

An argument can be made that, over the past twenty years, GOP Presidential victories occurred not because the Republican contender was dominant, but because the Democrat contender botched things up so spectacularly that right-minded voters could not cast their lot with that candidate. Michael Dukakis blew a seventeen-point lead in 1988 with his incompetent approach to campaigning and debating. Al Gore had the benefit of perceived peace and prosperity in 2000, but he ran one of the most pathetic campaigns of all-time (remember that idiotic catchphrase of his, "The People vs. The Powerful"?), alienating enough voters to force his loss to George W. Bush. Four years later, John Kerry-who had the benefit of economic worries and the perceived embarrassment of the Bush Administration's failure to find large stockpiles of WMD in Iraq-destroyed himself with such gaffes as his "global test" remark and his decision to vote for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Even with an energized, focused, well-financed left-wing juggernaut behind him, Kerry still couldn't oust Bush from the White House.

The Democrat Party has an appetite for self-destruction-and if Obama satisfies that appetite, McCain will be our next President. For all of his political skills, Obama is still so wet behind the ears he's practically drowning. He waited too long to divorce himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright-and despite the wishful thinking of Obama's supporters, the Wright issue is not likely to fade from public view anytime soon.

Democrats have seemingly exchanged the power of positive thinking for the power of wishful thinking. They have apparently convinced themselves that the Wright issue cannot be further exploited. They also seem to think that Republicans cannot gain any further traction from such issues as Obama's friendships with Tony Rezko and William Ayers and the questionable campaign-trail rhetoric of Obama's wife Michelle.

Has it dawned upon these Democrats that perhaps the best, or worst, is yet to come? Do these guys really think that conservative-leaning third-party groups and 527s have nothing left in the anti-Obama tank? Did it not occur to these Democrats that those who have proof of Obama's political radicalism have even more "goodies" in store?

Some conservatives have given McCain grief for not being aggressive enough against Obama in his rhetoric. Perhaps McCain is using a variation of Muhammad Ali's old rope-a-dope strategy: let Obama and his third-party "progressive" cohorts land hard shots at McCain, while he covers himself up and avoids a knockout blow. Then, when Obama, like George Foreman in October 1974, has worn himself down, McCain will come firing back with the critical blows needed to put Obama down for the count.

In a strange way, both McCain and Obama bear similarities to Ali. Obama is as fiercely antiwar as Ali was in the late-1960s, and like the former Cassius Clay, he has surrounded himself with political extremists fashionable to the left-wing elite (the rhetoric coming from Ali's Nation of Islam friends in the 1960s was arguably worse than the stuff emanating from Jeremiah Wright's mouth in the 2000s). Obama is young, brash, charismatic, and has the gift of gab-much like the "Louisville Lip" himself.

Yet McCain is like the veteran Ali-an experienced fighter who knows how to defeat younger, less gifted opponents. McCain has had high-profile bouts in adverse climates: he hasn't won all of those fights, but he's learned from every battle. He knows what it's like to have hard punches thrown at him, and he knows how to throw hard punches right back. Like Ali in the "Rumble in the Jungle", he goes into this fight against Obama with all the odds stacked against him, with all the observers insisting that he has no chance. Yet he has a clear strategy to win the championship-a strategy that his younger, cockier opponent cannot possibly anticipate.

All McCain has to do is wait for the right opening-for that moment when Obama loses his cool, loses his footing, and loses his nerve. He will then pounce, hitting Obama with so many rights he'll be begging for a left. Despite his clear political talent, Obama does not have enough experience in the sweet science to send McCain to the mat. He will try his best to knock McCain down-but once McCain gets going, Obama's punches will have little force behind them.

Obama's hands can't hit what his eyes can't see-and Obama and his supporters can't see the winning combination McCain is waiting to deliver. Years from now, when we look back upon this fight, we'll say that not only did McCain knock Obama out, he picked the round.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





10 May, 2008

Obama Embraces New Caustic Pastor



Can you imagine the president of the United States attending a church where the pastor says everyone has a bit of "thug" in him and praises a rapper with a criminal record as a prophet? How about a pastor who calls the biblical patriarch Abraham a "pimp" and says Noah and Moses were thugs, Jesus has a "soft spot for thugs," and everyone has some "thug proclivities."

If Barack Obama is elected president, that is exactly what will happen. Now that the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. is retiring from Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama has said he will continue to attend the church. Explaining his decision, Sen. Obama said that the "new pastor, the young pastor, Reverend Otis Moss, is a wonderful young pastor." He said he also still values the Trinity community.

Known as the "hip-hop pastor," Otis Moss III has served as assistant pastor of the church for two years. Moss officially takes over in June. While Moss has not expressed hatred of America and of whites, as Wright did, in a sermon on YouTube, Moss derides middle-class America for not accepting the "prophetic brilliance" of thugs. Referring to these thugs, Moss says sardonically, "There are times when our prejudice keeps us from hearing ghetto prophets, who preach a brand of thug theology which keeps us from hearing the truth from their lips because of their course language and ragged subject-verb agreement."

To applause, Moss approvingly cites Tupac Shakur, a "gangsta" rap star with a long arrest record. Before being fatally shot in a drive-by attack in Las Vegas in 1996, Shakur faced a 120-day sentence for probation violations stemming from offenses including assault and battery and a 1994 sexual abuse conviction in New York. Shakur served 11 months in prison for his involvement in the sexual attack on a 21-year-old woman in a New York hotel room. Judge Daniel P. Fitzgerald of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan described it as "an act of brutal violence against a helpless woman." Shakur had also been convicted in Los Angeles of assault and battery on a music video producer and for carrying a loaded, concealed weapon.

Most Americans look to places of worship for inspiration and moral and spiritual guidance. Moss' message is the opposite. Claiming Shakur's message speaks to our "current condition," Moss blurs the distinction between right and wrong: He says those who don't get that a rapper like Shakur is a prophet and biblical figures are thugs are confined by "bourgeois paradigms." Instead of condemning those who break the law, Moss says to exuberant applause, "Our society creates thugs. Children are not born thugs. Thugs are made and not born." He adds, "This is good news for somebody who has a proclivity for 'ghettoistic' conduct."

Indeed, it is good news for those who do not want to be held accountable for their own conduct. In making that statement, Moss endorses the message of many black leaders who encourage blacks to see themselves as helpless victims of a bigoted society. As outlined in the Newsmax article "Rev. Wright Furthers Black Victimhood," the victim mentality limits blacks' aspirations and torpedoes their chances at success.

What is most disturbing about Obama's continuing attendance at Trinity is the fact that he is exposing his children to its negative message. Instead of uplifting members of his congregation and calling on them to adhere to the best values, Moss denigrates American society and looks to guidance from thugs.

A president is commander in chief and chief executive officer of the government. But he is also a moral leader. When President Clinton was caught having sex with Monica Lewinsky, parents all over the country were embarrassed and disgusted that they had to explain to their pre-teens the meaning of the sexual terms their kids read in newspaper articles describing Clinton's activities with the 22-year-old White House intern. What kind of moral leadership can be exercised by a man who sends his kids to listen to sermons denouncing America and whites and now calling Moses a thug and praising a convicted rapper as a prophet? What kind of example is set by a man who does not denounce the destructive message sent by this church to blacks and whites alike?

Tragically for segments of black society, in belonging to Trinity and contributing $26,270 to it last year, Obama is helping to spread the crippling message among blacks that they are victims. Apologists for Obama will say where he attends church and what he exposes his children to have nothing to do with being president. They are mistaken. It has everything to do with being president.

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Barack Obama Is a Loser

What do you call a candidate who wins 90 percent of the African-American vote, between 30 percent and 50 percent of the Hispanic vote and 40 percent of the white vote in a tight Democratic primary race? A general election loser.

Apply those percentages to the general election, and the candidate will bomb. In 2004, President Bush won 43 percent of the Hispanic vote, 58 percent of the white vote and 11 percent of the African-American vote. That means that John Kerry did better among Hispanics than Barack Obama has done in the Democratic primaries; better among whites than Obama has done in the Democratic primaries; and almost as well among African-Americans. Obama's coalition is Kerry's, but weaker.

In a general election, candidates must appeal to the broadest base of support in order to win. Relying on small coteries of like-raced voters simply will not do it. And the simple fact is that Barack Obama will gain the Democratic nomination by winning intellectual centers, black voters and just enough whites to beat a deeply flawed Hillary Clinton.

This is not a winning coalition. It is, in fact, a recipe for disaster against John McCain. The black vote counts for a far greater percentage in the Democratic primaries than it does in the general election; McCain can lose virtually the entire black vote and still win handily (Bush did it in 2000 and 2004, Bush's father did it in 1988 and Reagan did it in 1984 and 1980).

McCain will do far better among whites than Hillary did. Obama cut especially into Clinton's main base of support -- whites -- by exploiting her gender, winning 40 percent of white males in Indiana and 45 percent of white males in North Carolina. McCain is far more appealing to white men than Clinton. Hillary is perceived as a shrew -- most men find her unpalatable. If Obama could not win more than 45 percent of white men in North Carolina running against Clinton, how can he hope to beat that percentage against McCain?

And then there's the Hispanic vote. For a Democrat, Obama is shockingly unpopular among Hispanics -- he won just 32 percent of California's Hispanic vote in the Democratic primary. McCain, by contrast, is incredibly popular among Hispanics -- he routinely wins 70 percent of the Hispanic vote in his Arizona Senate contests. Such percentages will not translate directly to the general election, of course -- there are more registered Hispanic Democrats than Hispanic Republicans. But those percentages bode ill for Obama, who will struggle to overcome racial barriers, as well as an immigration-friendly Republican like McCain, who also shares many family values with Hispanic Catholics.

These numbers are not likely to change significantly before November. This is because Obama has established himself as a candidate -- he is a mixed-race Adlai Stevenson carbon copy with better rhetorical skill. His association with Jeremiah Wright will not win him additional white votes; his elitism will not win him additional lower-class votes; his racial appeal does not have the same appeal to Hispanic voters.

This leaves McCain in the unexpected position of November front-runner. He will almost certainly win Florida and Ohio, and he will challenge in Pennsylvania. He will retain the states President Bush won, as well. Democrats expected a political realignment in 2008, with a strong new coalition led by young voters. Instead, they may end up with 1972 all over again.

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Obama vs. McCain: Let's Get It On

Barack Obama, the first "postracial candidate," is heading to the Democratic nomination almost entirely because of his near-universal support from black voters in the Democratic primaries. In both states Tuesday, his share of that vote was 90% or more. If one resets the black vote to the norm of earlier elections, Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

The idea that Obama was a postracial politician dates to his famous keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. He set the postracial template himself in the speech's third sentence, describing his father born in a small Kenyan village, herding goats, etc. His mother was "born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas." Over the next three years, writers ratified this postracial definition of Obama's own design. From this idea, a Democratic star arose.

Hillary Clinton, who now resembles the robot's crawling hand in the final scenes of "The Terminator," can plausibly argue to the superdelegates that much of this is electoral bunk. In Indiana, her share of the white vote to his, men and women combined, was 60-40, a huge lead. In North Carolina, 61-37. They won't buy it. Ever. The "first woman" running for president would have to be pulling 90% of her own piece of history, women, to compete with his achievement. Obama has locked up 90% of a constituency that Democrats not only must have to win in November, but that they've elevated to mythic status the past 40 years. As well, the black vote came spontaneously to Sen. Obama, without him having to make an overt appeal for their vote, as she did with women.

The Democratic superdelegates are products of their party - nice liberals, nice people. To stiff Obama's black voters at this late hour, most of the superdelegates would have to be as hard and clinical about politics as the Clintons. They aren't. Obama moves them and validates their commitment to the Democratic idea. Shelby Steele described the force even Hillary can't match in these pages last March: Race lifts the Obama candidacy "to the level of allegory. . . . Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny." The superdelegates are faced with choosing between the Clinton machine's brutal demographic math and thinking well of themselves. No contest.

Will the national electorate sing from the same hymnal as the superdelegates' offstage chorus? Who knows, but let's get on with finding out. Barack Obama is going to run an aura campaign. As it has been from the start, it's going to be a speech candidacy, a rhetorical candidacy, a JFK candidacy, the promise of another Camelot. Listen here to Barack describing what it's all about Monday in Indianapolis: "I believe that this election is bigger than me or John McCain or Hillary Clinton. It's bigger than the Democrats versus Republicans. It's about who we are as Americans." That's as big as it gets.

Will more than 50% of voters want a piece of this dream in November? Will the Rev. Wright specter be gone by then and the "bitter" remark forgiven? Sure. Why not? By any measure, the country's mood is awful. Some of it is gas prices and some the mysterious mortgage and credit crisis (Barack knows how it happened: "We do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators"). Whenever Americans get glum near an election, it's a good bet that pitching their ideals at them will appeal, and thank heavens for that. FDR was an ideals candidate and so was Ronald shining-city-on-a-hill Reagan.

So long as the American mood sits in the dumpster, John McCain will have his hands full. The instinct of the McCain camp will be to compete for the unhappy white vote Hillary leaves behind with lurches toward Obama-like populism. That compulsion was already evident in the demagogic anti-Wall Street passages of his speech on the economy last month.

John McCain needs to find an Achilles heel in this opponent. It's there - not the Wright mess but Obama's dustup with Hillary Sunday on Iran, when he tagged her for "saber rattling" and "tough talk." Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, collector of centrifuges, makes Jeremiah Wright look like Little Bo Peep. Yet this Tuesday Barack Obama said he assumes the American people will see it is "not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but our enemies, like Roosevelt did, Kennedy did, and Truman did." In the here and now, a more apt name comes to mind: Jimmy Carter.

A grand Enemies Tour awaits President Obama - Iran's Ahmadinejad, Syria's Assad, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, an al Qaeda "diplomat" from Osama bin Laden, Sudan's Hassan al-Bashir, Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Burma's junta.

If John McCain can't talk the American people out of re-Carterizing themselves, what has he been preparing for all these years?

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It's Obama, Warts and All

By KARL ROVE

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each took a state Tuesday. But the result was a damaging loss for the woman who was once the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Here are some observations on the race:

- Mr. Obama is now the prohibitive favorite. Tuesday night, he took at least 94 delegates to Mrs. Clinton's 75 and leads the former First Lady by 176 delegates in the AP tabulation. He has 1,840 of the 2,025 delegates needed to win. Mr. Obama needs only 185 - or 38% - of the 486 outstanding delegates (217 to be elected in the six remaining contests, and 269 superdelegates yet to endorse a candidate). Mrs. Clinton needs 341, or 70% of those left to be awarded. Mr. Obama understands this. On Tuesday night, he added a big dollop of general election themes and pre-emptive defenses against coming attacks to his stump speech.

- Mrs. Clinton may battle until June and possibly until the convention in August. There's nothing Mr. Obama can or should do about it. After a long, bitter struggle, losing candidates often look for reasons to feel aggrieved. There is no reason to give her one. No pressure from Mr. Obama or party Chairman Howard Dean is better than pushing her out of the race.

- The Democrats' refusal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at their convention is an unresolved problem. If they insist on not seating these delegations, Democrats risk alienating voters in states with 44 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. And here Mr. Obama is at greater risk than Mrs. Clinton, especially in Florida. He trails John McCain badly in Sunshine State polls today, while Mrs. Clinton leads Mr. McCain there.

- The length of the Democratic contest has been - in some ways - a plus for the party. The AP estimates that more than 3.5 million new voters registered during the competitive primary season. And the hundreds of millions of dollars spent energizing Democratic turnout will leave organization and energy in place for November. Mr. Obama is a better candidate for having been battle tested. And Mr. McCain has to fight hard for attention. He's mentioned in less than 20% of the coverage in recent months, while Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are talked about in 60% to 70% of the coverage.

- The length of the Democratic contest has been - in some ways - a minus. It has revealed weaknesses in Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton came across as calculating, contrived, stiff and self-concerned. Mr. Obama is increasingly seen not as the Second Coming, but as a typical liberal Chicago pol with a thin record, little experience, an array of troubling relationships and, to top it off, elitist sensibilities. Nominating him will now test the thesis that only a Democrat running as a moderate can win the White House.

The primary has created a deep fissure in Democratic ranks: blue collar, less affluent, less educated voters versus the white wine crowd of academics and upscale professionals (along with blacks and young people). Mr. Obama runs behind Mrs. Clinton's numbers when matched against Mr. McCain in key industrial battleground states. Less than half of Mrs. Clinton's backers in Indiana and North Carolina say they would support Mr. Obama if he were the nominee. In the most recent Fox News poll, two-and-a-half times as many Democrats break for Mr. McCain (15%) as Republicans defect to Mrs. Clinton (6%) and nearly twice as many Democrats support Mr. McCain (22%) as Republicans back Mr. Obama (13%). These "McCainocrat" defections could hurt badly.

State and local Democrats are realizing the toxicity of their probable national ticket. Democrats running in special congressional races recently in Louisiana and Mississippi positioned themselves as pro-life, pro-gun social conservatives and disavowed Mr. Obama. The Louisiana Democrat won his race on Saturday and said he "has not endorsed any national politician." The Mississippi Democrat is facing a runoff on May 13 and specifically denied that Mr. Obama had endorsed his campaign. Not exactly profiles in unity.

- As much as Mr. Obama's cheerleaders in the media hate it, Rev. Jeremiah Wright remains a large general-election challenge for Mr. Obama. Not only did Mr. Obama admit on "Fox News Sunday" that Mr. Wright was a legitimate issue, voters agree. Mr. Obama's favorable ratings have dropped since Mr. Wright emerged as an issue. More than half of Mrs. Clinton's supporters say it is a meaningful reflection on Mr. Obama's character and judgment.

- This will be a very difficult year for Republicans. The economy's shaky state, an unpopular war, and the natural desire for partisan change after eight years of one party in the White House have helped tilt the balance to the Democrats. Mr. Obama is significantly weaker today than he was three months ago, but Democrats have the upper hand in November. They're beatable. But it's nonsense to think this year is going to be a replay of George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis or Richard Nixon versus George McGovern.

- Mr. McCain is very competitive. He is the best candidate Republicans could have picked in this environment. With the GOP brand low, his appeal to moderates and independents becomes even more crucial. My analysis of individual state polls shows that today Mr. McCain would win 241 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama's 217, with 80 votes in toss-up states where neither candidate has more than a 3% lead. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton now leads Mr. McCain with 251 electoral votes to his 203 with 84 in toss-up states. This is the first time she's led Mr. McCain since I began tracking state-by-state results in early March.

Mr. McCain is realistic enough to know he will fall behind Mr. Obama once the Democratic nomination is settled. He's steeled himself and his team for that moment. And he's comforted by a belief that there will be plenty of time to recapture the lead. Mr. McCain saw Gerald Ford come from 30 points down to lose narrowly to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and watched George H.W. Bush overcome a 17-point deficit in the summer to hammer Michael Dukakis in the fall of 1988.

- The battlegrounds will look familiar. It will be the industrial heartland from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, minus Indiana (Republican) and Illinois (Democrat); the western edge of the Midwest from Minnesota south to Missouri; Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada in the Rocky Mountains; Florida; and New Hampshire. Mr. Obama will argue he puts Virginia and North Carolina into play (doubtful), and may make an attempt at winning one or two of Nebraska's electoral votes (it awards its electoral votes by congressional district). Mr. McCain will say he can put New Jersey and Delaware and part of Maine (it splits its vote like Nebraska) in play. But it's doubtful he'll win in Oregon or Washington State, although he believes he can.

- Almost everything we think we know right now will be revised and even overturned during the next six months. This has been a race in which conventional wisdom has often been proven wrong. The improbable or thought-to-be impossible has happened with regularity. It has created a boom market for punditry and opinion offering, and one of the grandest possible spectacles for political junkies in decades. Hold on to your hat. It's going to be one heck of a ride through Nov. 4.

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Hamas & Obama: Apparently, It's Only a Smear if McCain Says It

At Contentions, Jen Rubin reports that Barack Obama, the King of Righteous Indignation, is righteously (actually, risibly) indignant over a "smear" by John McCain - namely, McCain's factually true (and totally understandable) observation that Hamas wants Obama to be president.

Remarkable. On the plane ride here to Chicago, I caught up with our Mark Hemingway's superb article, "A Curious Kind of Friendship - Barack Obama's dubious record on Israel," in the current print edition of NR. There are gems throughout the piece, but Mark starts out discussing the Hamas endorsement:

When asked about the endorsement, Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, was flattered that Hamas compared his candidate to JFK: "We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it's flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps."

So what is "flattering" to Obama when Obama's top spokesman addresses it becomes a "smear" of Obama when McCain does?

This is of a piece with the whole kerfuffle over Obama's middle name. Remember how that became a smear, too? Except, as I noted here a while back (thanks to a Bret Stephens WSJ column), the first person to make a point of using "Barack Hussein Obama" turned out to be Barack Hussein Obama. ("Well, I think if you've got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that's a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush," Mr. Obama told PBS's Tavis Smiley on October 18, 2007. "If you believe that we've got to heal America and we've got to repair our standing in the world, then I think my supporters believe that I am the messenger who can deliver that message.")

So, Obama wants to be able to appeal to the Islamic world, which is rife with jihadists, by holding out the likelihood (i.e., the certainty) that he would be more understanding and accommodating (which is to say more prone to appeasement) than any GOP rival, but we are supposed to say nothing about the fact that this is naturally alluring to jihadists (as the jihadists themselves are pointing out)?

I hope Sen. McCain does not decide that this, like the patently relevant Wright matter, is somehow beneath his dignity to discuss.

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(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)



9 May, 2008

One Down, Two to Go

by Ann Coulter



Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to ... wherever it is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ... This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.

Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new taxes" pledge).

By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton's connection to any other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice president and his wife have been defeated in elections they should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid of the Clintons.

The reason two elections in recent history -- the 2000 presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary -- were razor-close is that in both cases there was some strange, foreboding, otherworldly force dragging down the presumptive winner.

Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost an election that should have been his in a walk. In fact, he was the first incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.

What was the mystery factor to explain such a historic loss? The media's pollsters may have lied to the public about Clinton's vaunted popularity, but Gore's pollsters got paid not to lie to him. And they told Gore the truth: Clinton was killing him. After the election, Gore pollster -- and erstwhile Clinton pollster -- Stanley Greenberg told Vanity Fair magazine that if Clinton had helped, he said he would have "had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back." (This was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers went down faster than -- oh, never mind.

Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also blamed Clinton for Gore's loss, saying polls showed that voters who cared about character voted for Bush. (I know, I know. Are there actually people who care about character and vote Democrat? Yes, apparently they exist.) Poor Gore did everything he could to distance himself from Clinton, publicly criticizing Clinton's sexual exploits with an intern, refusing to allow Clinton to campaign with him and taking as his vice president Joe Lieberman -- the first Democratic senator to scathingly denounce Clinton's antics with Lewinsky from the Senate floor. But voters couldn't forget Gore's boss, the purple-faced lecher.

As election predictors go, the Dow Jones has been remarkably accurate. If the Dow goes up from the end of July to the end of October, the incumbent president or vice president wins; if it goes down, the incumbent loses. It has been wrong only four times since the Dow was created in 1896. Thus, on Nov. 1, 2000, an article in The New York Times began: "The verdict of the Dow Jones industrial average is in, and it says Al Gore is headed for the White House."

And yet Gore lost. It was only the third time in more than a century that the Dow went up in the three months before the election and the incumbent lost. The two other times were: (1) Herbert Hoover in the middle of the Great Depression, and (2) Hubert Humphrey in the middle of the Vietnam War. (The only time the Dow went down and the incumbent won anyway was for popular Dwight Eisenhower.)

So we have documented proof: Americans rank Bill Clinton with national misfortunes on the order of the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. (This, of course, is an overreaction: The Great Depression wasn't that bad.) And now Bill Clinton has wrecked Hillary's campaign, too. He's like the creepy guy who graduated last year but still hangs around the high school cafeteria chatting up sophomores.

In a Time magazine poll taken earlier this year, more than twice as many voters said Bill Clinton's involvement in Hillary's campaign made them less likely to vote for her as said they were more likely to vote for her. (Some even said that "having Bill Clinton around makes me less likely to vote for What's-Her-Name." One-third of the respondents were upset Bill didn't call the next day, like he promised.)

So before remembering that we are now left with two dangerous choices for president -- a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy -- take a moment to revel in the fact that our long national nightmare is over. It turns out getting rid of the Clintons was the change we've been waiting for.

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Obama responds to Ayers and the Old Glory Boogie

The Barack Obama campaign responded to the pictures of Obama political and community associate William Ayers stomping on the American flag, first published in 2001 in Chicago Magazine. In a statement reported on Fox & Friends this morning, Team Obama deplores Ayers' actions but rejects any connection between Ayers and Obama:

That distance might be hard to maintain. First, the profile in the magazine wasn't exactly a low-profile article in an obscure publication. Ayers had just published a memoir of his days as a fugitive for domestic terrorism in the Weather Underground, and both the book and the publicity gained national attention, especially after 9/11. Obama continued to work with Ayers after this, appearing on public panels with Ayers into 2002.

If Team Obama wants to disassociate itself from Ayers in this manner, it should recheck its website. Obama still defends William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn as part of Chicago's "mainstream". Does Obama think that stomping on a flag in an alley to celebrate a memoir of domestic terrorism represents the mainstream of political thought? That only makes sense when one supports demagoguery such as that issued by Jeremiah Wright on government conspiracies that created HIV as a genocidal tool and Dohrn's exhortation to "overthrow capitalism" in the United States.

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Why Obama will lose the General Election

While the MSM is crowning Barack Obama this morning and Hillary is cancelling appearances on morning talk shows, let's review the facts of whether or not Barack Obama could win the White House. The old adage, "numbers don't lie" will tell the story.

David Allen at The Politico tells us that Obama still isn't winning the white vote - critical if he would win in November. As I said in the previous post I doubt this changes even if Hillary drops out. If he can't win the white vote he can't win - period, and again just because Hillary drops out doesn't mean whites that supported her will simply turn to support Obama. A few might, but not in great measure. Allen's point that liberal Democrats are voting for Obama while more moderate/conservative dems are voting for Hillary is key. Morever Obama isn't even close in the 60 or over white vote category.

But there are many more problems that Obama will face after the Democratic Convention in the general campaign that simply will derail his quest. Namely a more concentrated media exposure. Divided with Hillary the media has really played more or less coach and mentor to the Wright/Ayers/Rezko connections, but with Hillary out of the picture this will change. The stories and potential further light on some of these connections will be too hard for interpret journalists to miss.

Further with greater media scrutiny Obama's superficialness will become even more apparent he will have to be even more "articulate" about "change" and "hope". True some in the media - such a Chris Matthews will continue their fetish with Obama, yet others like Tim Russert are beginning to circle anticipating increased opportunity for exposure.

This will include increased exposure on Michelle Obama who has proven to be almost the albatross to her husband that Wright has, which is why she has been limiting her appearances of late.

In the end - using a Wizard of Oz metaphor, the curtain will be pulled back, and America wills see that the dreamy idealist is more than anything "The Candy Man" and little else. Obama will get a lot of votes but simply not enough to carry the day. In the end people don't vote for paper tigers but for real flesh and blood reasons. McCain for all his faults has the name recognition, history with the American people that Obama doesn't have. This all adds up to the GOP keeping the White House in 2008.

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The unreality based left and religion

The left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.

The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March - which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken "out of context," Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week - are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.

But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only "understandable," it's laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a "patriot" for speaking uncomfortable "truths" about his country.

John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, "in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America," that is, "an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous." Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he's accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.

Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright "Our Jeremiah," in that he is akin to the "biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless." She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass.

Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. "I'm trying to figure out what it was that got everybody's shorts into a twist," he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff's bewilderment over the reaction to Wright's lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.

The prophetic tradition in the white church is bad, but is "understandable" in the black church? Do liberals have any idea how racist and condescending that is?

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Yeah, Blame It On The White Folks

This whole racism as regards Obama deal is really starting to irritate. As Geraghty points out, Obama is carrying the black vote by over ninety percent. Whites aren't voting nearly as monolithically for the color of the candidate, as are blacks. Yet, because many white voters don't support Obama, obviously the bulk of them must be racists.

So, when will the media start asking the black community why it is so racist in their rejection of the wife of "the first black president?" Oh, I forgot, they'll get a pass. No tough questions allowed, what with the affirmative action-oriented curiosity of the mainstream media. They're an oppressed people, after all. What a crock!

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Obama's gospel is a negative one

By Thomas Sowell

Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story. One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools.

When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell his parents. He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew-- and he also realized that they could not afford it. He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and to have various achievements and honors over the years.

From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it. It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity-- and he wouldn't swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out. By now his brown bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist.

Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years. Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances-- Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record. Later, when the ultimate political prize-- the White House-- loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences. It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?

When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they need for themselves? Will they have the skills of science, technology or medicine? Or will they have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack Obama's stock in trade?

In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people's ancestors.

Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime. We don't need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward.

The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





8 May, 2008

The unpredictable Obama



Andrew Sullivan writes that Ron Paul "seems a little more comfortable with a president Obama than a president McCain" based on, among other things, Obama's "integrity of the Constitution" (except on the Second Amendment - on the rest, we lack any evidence of reliability) and "walking back the doctrines of pre-emptive war." In reality, we never know what a president will do. That's why trust is such an important election issue. But Sullivan's hyper-fawning over Obama has never been about policy, it's about the power of personality and perception. And his take bears no resemblance to the political philosophy of skepticism he wrote about in his book.

"I don't think you have to agree with Obama on many things to want him to succeed," writes Sullivan, echoing his past writing on the topic. Well, why in hell not? In the end it should be about policy, shouldn't it? Obama, outside of foreign policy, believes in the expansion of government control: higher taxation, attack on profit, draconian controls on energy, socialized health care, etc . why would a conservative of any flavor want Obama to succeed? (The best a classic liberal or libertarian can hope for in this election, in my humble opinion, is gridlock government.)

In any event, I thought those thick-headed Americans who voted for candidates they could envision themselves having a beer with exposed a deeply unsophisticated electorate. That's how we got Bush. After 9/11, we listened to Dear Leader, because we trusted him, and found ourselves on our present disastrous course- or so the story goes. Supporting Obama based solely on his messianic allure is just as simplistic. Obama's (untapped and unproven) transformational power to bring folks together hasn't panned out, anyway. Fact is, as it stands now, Obama can't even bring his own party together. He doesn't deserve such adoration. No politician does.

On this topic, everyone would benefit from Gene Healy's superb "Cult of the Presidency." This kind of veneration for a candidate, Bush or Obama or anyone else, just doesn't strike me as something from the "conservative soul."

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning yesterday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.

I realize this Obama quote is from last year, but a unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation which has fallen short of our expectations in the War on Terror seems as adventurous and irresponsible as anything in the Bush Doctrine. Surely Saddam's sins were as dreadful as Musharraf's? Is harboring terrorists enough of reason for an invasion? Or only certain terrorists? What about the unforeseen consequences of such an invasion? Imagine all the anger it will generate on the Muslim street? A new tool for terrorist recruitment and so on . Why don't these issues apply? We may believe bin Laden is holed up in Pakistan but, for all I know, he's in Somalia or Sudan or Sacramento.

Old news, I know. But, looking back at it now, I think it illustrates the problem with the perception of Obama vs. the reality of Obama - and the complexity of the world. He'd be just another president who would have to deal with the Middle East. It's going to be ugly. It always is.

Source




Whites go for Hillary, blacks for Obama

Race again played a pivotal role in Tuesday's Democratic presidential clashes, as whites in Indiana and North Carolina leaned solidly toward Hillary Rodham Clinton and blacks voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, exit polls showed. Almost half said they were influenced by the focus on Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama, the Illinois senator battling to become the first black president, again failed to gain ground with a crucial voting bloc that has consistently eluded him - working-class whites. But he pieced together coalitions that besides blacks included the young, first-time primary voters, the very liberal and college graduates, plus sizable minorities of whites.

According to exit polls of voters, about two-thirds of whites in both states who have not completed college were supporting Clinton. The New York senator could use that to fortify her argument that she would be the stronger Democratic candidate in the November general election. Of 28 states that held primaries in which she and Obama competed before Tuesday, Clinton had prevailed with working-class white voters in 25.

Wright was a looming factor in the voting, with nearly half in each state saying he was important in choosing a candidate. Of that group, seven in 10 in Indiana and six in 10 in North Carolina backed Clinton. Those saying Wright did not influence them heavily favored Obama. In North Carolina, Obama got more votes from people saying they discounted the Wright episode than Clinton got from those affected by it, while in Indiana the two groups were about equal in size.

Among whites, eight in 10 in both states who said Wright affected their choice went with Clinton. That was well above the six in 10 whites overall who supported her. In both states, two-thirds of Clinton's white voters said Wright was important. That compared to eight in 10 white Obama supporters who said Wright was not a factor. Wright has said the U.S. government may have developed the AIDS virus to infect blacks and that the U.S. invited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Obama denounced the remarks last week.

The six in 10 whites in both states supporting Clinton were similar to her margin over Obama among whites nationally so far, showing he continues to have trouble cutting into her support from those voters. Even so, his lopsided backing from blacks meant he didn't need white majorities Tuesday to be competitive.

The two rivals have been trying to win over top Democratic officials, the superdelegates, who may decide who gets the party's nomination. Clinton has argued that her strength with this group makes her the stronger candidate for the fall campaign. Obama's campaign says he will do well with those voters in November once he contrasts himself with Republican John McCain.

Nine in 10 blacks in both states were backing Obama - an even stronger margin than usual for a group he has dominated. That proved decisive in North Carolina, where they comprised about a third of voters - nearly double their proportion in Indiana. In another troubling sign for Obama, independents did not lean toward him as usual in either state. Though Clinton won once again among Catholics in Indiana, she and Obama divided them about equally in North Carolina. Obama also had an edge in both states among first-time primary voters, underscoring his continued ability to draw new voters to the polls. North Carolina was clearly Obama's stronger state. He won there among young voters, college graduates and those earning more than $100,000 a year.

Clinton gave a better performance in Indiana. She won handily among white men, a group she and Obama have split about evenly but whom she won easily in Pennsylvania and Ohio. She and Obama about equally divided the votes of people earning at least $100,000 a year, who usually have leaned toward Obama. In both states, whites who said race was an important factor were favoring Clinton, as they have before. Older voters were also solidly behind her as usual.

Voters in both states overwhelmingly named the economy as the nation's top issue. While voters most concerned about the economy and who said they were affected by it were evenly divided in Indiana, they supported Obama in North Carolina.

In the latest evidence of bitter feelings between the two camps, just under half of Clinton's supporters in both states said they would support Obama against McCain in November. Seven in 10 Obama backers in North Carolina, and slightly fewer in Indiana, would back a Clinton candidacy. Analysts expect those heated feelings to wane once the party finally chooses its candidate.

The results were from exit polling by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for The Associated Press and television networks conducted in 35 precincts in each state. The data was based on 1,881 people voting in Indiana's Democratic contest and 2,316 in North Carolina, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for both states.

Source




More distorted history from Obama

Obama wins North Carolina, concedes Indiana, calls for unity. Here is a transcript of his speech: this detail struck me:

I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.

Obama's supporters are too young to know any of this, but Roosevelt led the United States in the war against Hitler; the Allied policy was unconditional surrender, so there was very little for Roosevelt and Hitler to discuss, and in fact, the two did not meet at all (but they did exchange correspondence before the war).

So my guess is that Obama is thinking of the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin as talking to "our enemies", although of course we were still allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan at that point. Beyond that, is the Yalta Conference something Obama and his advisers view as a success worthy of emulation? Puzzling.

HE'S KIDDING? Maybe Obama's team is finally realizing they have a Michelle problem;from Obama's speech:

I believe in our ability to perfect this nation, because it's the only reason I'm standing here today. I know the promise of America, because I've lived it. Michelle has lived it; you have lived it.

It is the light of opportunity that led my father across an ocean. It's the founding ideals that the flag draped over my father's coffin stand for. It is life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It's the simple truth I learned all those years ago when I worked in the shadow of all those shuttered steel mills on the south side of the Chicago, that, in this country, justice can be won against the greatest odds, hope can find its way back from the darkest of corners. And when we are told that we cannot bring about the change that we seek, we answer with one voice: Yes, we can.

"Michelle has lived it"? Any reasonable person would say that Michelle has lived the American dream, but I am not talking about a reasonable person - I am talking about the woman who whines about loneliness and crushing college loans every time she speaks. Well, maybe they will gently ask her to go to re-write and try to find something to smile about.

ERRATA: "It's the founding ideals that the flag draped over my father's coffin stand for" - shouldn't that be "grandfather"? Presumably granddad was entitled to a military funeral; dad was off in Kenya IIRC, probably not with an American flag.

Source




Pastor Wrong does NOT represent the "black church"

C. Eric Lincoln's mid-1980s survey of the leaders of 2,150 black churches found that two-thirds of them said they had not been influenced by "any of the authors and thinkers of black liberation theology." Indeed, 63 percent did not believe that the black church had "a different mission from the white church." A third did not even think it was "important have black figures in [their] Sunday school literature."

This integrationist vision is at one with the values of most Americans. A glance at the National Baptist Convention and the AME web sites is revealing. They feature what one might expect of any religious denomination-a statement of their creeds, the tenets of the theology and worship practices that distinguish their faith from others. There is almost no indication that these churches are predominantly African American. The closest they come to mentioning race is the AME's statement that its basic beliefs do not "differ from what all Methodists believe." The church, we learn, separated from the main Methodist body two centuries ago because of "man's intolerance of his fellow man, based on the color of his skin."

The web sites of Rev. Wright's Trinity Church and the national body to which it belong stand in shocking contrast. Before the Trinity site was sanitized in early 2008, its material seethed with racial animus and hostility towards America. It described itself as "Afrocentric"; its motto was "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian." Its quasi-literate foundational document, "The Black Value System," devoted much more attention to blackness than to Christianity. It is the manifesto of a church for people of the black race, designed to be an "instrument of Black self-determination." Blacks were depicted as a race apart-the scurrilous perspective that pervaded Rev. Wright's April 27 Detroit speech, in which he contended that blacks and whites had completely different brain structures, one left-dominant, the other right-dominant. This is nothing more than an updated version of the pseudo-science once used to defend segregation in the Jim Crow South.

It is no accident that Rev. Wright's Trinity Church is affiliated with the highly progressive United Church of Christ. The UCC had its first Jeremiah Wright back in the 1960s, when it tolerated the activities of Rev. Albert Cleage of Detroit, a pioneer preacher of the gospel of Black Power. Cleage was determined to "dehonkify" Jesus. Jesus was black, he insisted, and a black revolutionary. He went on to form his own Black Christian Nationalist Church, later renamed the Pan-African Orthodox Church. This racist conception did not trouble the leadership of the United Church of Christ, which saw it as helping to "make the church more sensitive to and aware of its need to respond to the agenda of black people."

The web site of the UCC currently features plans for a May 18 "sacred conversation on race" in which white participants will need to acknowledge "the sins" of their "ancestors" and their own "failures to confront racism." Non-whites who have "suffered the ravages of racism" will be expected only to keep their "rightful indignation" and their "temptation to despair" under control. The conversation is desperately needed, we are told, because "the quality of life for the majority of racial and ethnic people is worse today in many ways than it was during the 1960s"-a ludicrous claim.

Clearly, Rev. Wright does not speak for mainstream black churches-and he has done them a gross disservice by claiming to do so. He shares neither their vision nor their values. Why their relative silence in the face of Rev. Wright's rants? Perhaps they believe they are protecting Sen. Obama, but if Wright convinces white Americans that his hateful speeches reflect the ways African-American churchgoers think and worship, the quest for racial equality will be set back decades.

Source




The politics of bitterness

This past Friday Michelle Obama gave essentially the same stump speech in Charlotte, North Carolina that she had given the week earlier in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Based on the stump speech, Yuval Levin calls Mrs. Obama "The unhappiest millionaire." Levin's NRO column carries a link to the C-SPAN video of Mrs. Obama's North Carolina speech. It is well worth watching.

Levin characterizes the pervasive themes of Mrs. Obama's stump speech as the "gospel of bitterness." Levin finds Barack Obama to be preaching a similar gospel, albeit one that benefits from "a peppier and more upbeat stump speech[.]" Senator Obama's enormous political skills make it much more difficult to discern the somewhat repulsive views and attitudes that are nakedly on display in Mrs. Obama's stump speech.

Michelle Obama seethes with bitterness. While she preaches the gospel according to Barack, she wears resentment and bitterness on her sleeve. It is therefore painful to listen to her. She's apparently even still angry about her SAT scores. She didn't test well in school, she explains. Somehow, she has overcome....

Mrs. Obama mocks the notion that she and her husband are elitists. She implicitly asserts that only those born to wealth are capable of looking down their noses at their fellow citizens. She does not think highly of those of us who want to be left alone by advocates of the administrative welfare state such as she and her husband. Moreover, she finds us guilty of making our children the victims of our fears. We are raising "young doubters." (I confess!)

But aren't those in her audience afraid of the sinister forces struggling to hold the Obamas down? Apparently not any more than she is. If her remarks were to be believed, they would by themselves instill deep fears. Her audience seems to understand that her impassioned whining is not to be taken seriously.

I have often commented on the Obama's assent to prosperity under the Bush administration. They have gone from a family with a maxed out credit card in 2000 to a net worth of over $4 million in less than eight years of a Republican administration they are bitterly complaining about.

While they may think it because he had a popular book or two, but without the good economy, people would not have had the discretionary funds to buy those books if they were in the bitter circumstances the Obama's complain about.

Source




Michelle, Dumbbell, These Are Words That Go Together Well

I would prefer to write about a happier subject than Michelle Obama -- and few subjects are more unhappy -- but I just can't get her dumb-as-a-stump speech out of my mind. Hugh Hewitt was playing it on the radio yesterday afternoon, so I heard parts of it on the drive home from work. It was an odd juxtaposition. Driving up the coast, to the left of me, the beautiful blue Pacific. But further to the left of me, the bluest waves of bleak rhetoric you'll ever hear coming out of the piehole of a would-be first lady.

I'm just kidding about the "dumbbell" crack, of course. I don't really believe Michelle is stupid. Rather, I believe she's psycho. To put it another way, never mark something down to stupidity when it is much more easily explained by mental illness. Hewitt took some callers during the speech, and to a person, everyone thought she was not just deranged, but palpably disturbing in a way that only an unhinged person can be, since they are leaking their mind parasites all over the place, to such an extent that they are the last person to notice them. As the PowerLine boys put it, "she is woefully deficient in the ability to see herself as others see her."

One caller remarked that if Obama can't even cheer up his morbidly depressed and paranoid wife, how is he supposed to lift the nation's mood? Put Zoloft in the drinking water?

I wish I had a full text of the speech, so I could fisk it line by line. (Hewitt's website has the link to it, but don't listen to it if you are vulnerable to depression.) As Hewitt writes, "This is the rhetoric of resentment and victimization.... [T]he radio audience reacted with a combination of astonishment and anger. Michelle Obama discounts all the good that is going on in the country, skips over the deep generosity of Americans, and ignores the astonishing economic and social progress made in the U.S. since the close of W.W. II, as she indicts [every] aspect of American life. Her very grim vision chills those who do not share it, which I guess to be the 'vast majority' of Americans."

You just have to be so ahistorically narcissistic to share Obama's bleak vision of the United States. Your mind has to essentially circle in a tight spiral around your own myopia and provincialism, so that it is simultaneously petty, and yet, grandiose and presumptuous. Far from having doors closed to her, this is a woman who has probably never been confronted and brought down a peg, one of the sad legacies of white liberal guilt. This is the very reason why left wing black "thinkers" tend not just to be such cringeworthy mediocrities, but downright embarrassments, such as Cornell West, whereas conservative black thinkers such as Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele are as brilliant as they come. The left systematically substitutes compassion for standards, which is not a recipe for excellence, to say the least.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with race and everything to do with it, in that left wing ideology systematically rots the mind, but especially in more vulnerable communities (Dennis Prager also discusses this in a column today). In other words, it doesn't so much harm a tenured white leftist professor (at least economically) to adhere to his pathological views, since he's got a lifetime gig at our expense. The people who suffer from the white leftist's dysfunctional ideas are the underclass -- even if they are upper class, like Barack and Michelle, who certainly prove that poverty is not just a state of mind, but more importantly, a state of the soul. When white liberals sneeze their viral ideas, urban blacks catch a head cold. They publish and blacks perish.

I am reminded of P.J. O'Rourke's "graduation speech," in which he mocks those who complain that "Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We'd better close that 'income disparity gap.' It's not fair!"

"Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.'"

That's what I want to say to Michelle Obama: Damn right, life isn't fair. It's not fair that someone as dense as you attended Harvard law school. It's not fair that you pull down $$273,618 for being a "vice president of community and external affairs," whatever that is. It's not fair that that crook Tony Rezko sold you that prime lot at such a discount. It's not fair that the liberal media are in the tank for your husband. It's not fair that he's going to surrender to our enemies, placing me and my family in jeopardy. It's not fair that American blacks are the most wealthy and prosperous the world has ever known. And most of all, it's not fair that your husband made a million bucks from his vacuous book, The Audacity of Hope, but Gagdad Bob hasn't even seen a royalty check for his spiritual classic!

There is also some incisive analysis at PowerLine:

"Michelle Obama seethes with bitterness. While she preaches the gospel according to Barack, she wears resentment and bitterness on her sleeve. It is therefore painful to listen to her. She's apparently even still angry about her SAT scores. She didn't test well in school, she explains. Somehow, she has overcome.

"Mrs. Obama seeks to convey convey the impression -- she expands on the theme at great length -- that Senator Obama's campaign is, to borrow Joe McCarthy's formulation, the victim of 'a conspiracy so immense...' It is not clear whether the Obama campaign can overcome the power of these sinister forces.

"According to Mrs. Obama, the Obama campaign has been constrained by nameless forces constantly changing the rules of the game and thereby preventing Senator Obama from securing the nomination. Who are 'they'?... 'They' seem... (incredibly) to include the mainstream media. These nameless forces have approximately the same specificity as the names on Joe McCarthy's list."

As an example of how clueless Michelle is about her projections, one of the central themes of her speech is how frightened Americans are, and how Obama is going to somehow heal this. But if America is controlled by the dark, conspiratorial forces of her imagination, we have every reason to be frightened, and no reason to believe that Obama is equipped to take on an enemy so simultaneously nebulous and ubiquitous.

In this regard, her cognition has the exact structure of a clinical paranoid -- big on generalities, short on specifics. Rather, the paranoid just knows that someone is out to get them. Furthermore, if you don't agree with them, you're one of the people who is out to get them. You are inducted into the conspiracy. So there's your proof that it exists!

In an amazing display of unintentional irony on stilts, Michelle accuses the rest of us of "victimizing our children" with our bleak and frightening world view. This from a woman who deliberately exposed her own children to the hateful ravings of a racist conspiracy monger week after week, in the one place that should be free of such poison! The Obama's campaign slogan ought to be, We Didn't Make It, And So Can't You!

At NRO, Yuval Levin writes of The Unhappiest Millionaire, and her weirdly nostalgic, dystopian and dyspeptic vision:

"In fact, a great bulk of Mrs. Obama's speech is devoted to nostalgia for a simpler time -- an odd approach for a progressive, yet an altogether common one on the left today. She describes a steady downward path from that golden age of distant memory. 'We know where we're living,' she tells the slightly confused audience, 'this is where we are right now, and this has been the case for my entire lifetime: that trajectory of hope has gotten more difficult for regular folks.'"

What. Is. She. Talking. About.

"This view of America has been a real problem for the Left in the Bush years. As the liberal labor economist Stephen Rose has put it, 'What progressives generally say about the economy is unrelentingly pessimistic -- stagnant wages, rising costs, overwhelming burdens of debt. It's a message that doesn't resonate with the middle class -- not only because it's overly negative (by itself political poison), but because it's simply flat out wrong."

Byron York also has some good analysis. The left always uses and abuses children for political purposes, and he describes a particularly vivid and disturbing example:

"[Michelle] tells the story of a ten-year-old girl she met in Newberry, S.C., before that state's primary.... After the rally, the girl came up to her and said, with great seriousness, 'Do you realize when your husband becomes the next president of the United States, it will be historical?'

"Everybody laughs; what a cute thing for a child to say. But then Obama asked the little girl what that would mean for her. 'It means that I can imagine anything for myself,' the girl said.

"The crowd begins to applaud; they think they're hearing a happy, inspiring story. But that's not where Mrs. Obama is going.

"'And then that little girl started to break down in tears,' she continues. 'She sobbed so hard. She was crying big, huge tears. And I had to think, why is this little girl crying so hard? And I thought, you know what's going on? This little old girl gets it."

"This little ten-year-old girl knows what's at stake. She knows that she's already five steps behind.... She knows that her hopes for college are already dwindling.... She knows that if she gets sick, maybe has an asthma attack, instead of going to a doctor and being treated, she's going to be sitting in an emergency room for hours on end.'"

Again, this is not a stump speech. This is a cry for psychological help. Why on earth would you steal the innocence of your children and indoctrinate them with any political ideology, let alone this deeply depressing, hopeless, fearful, and defeatist view of the world? Indeed, one of the main responsibilities of a parent is to shield your children from such concerns until they are old enough to be "disillusioned" by the world. For in order to cope with the rigors of adulthood and deal with its inevitable disappointments and frustrations, we need to internalize a deep well of love, trust, and security from our parents, otherwise we will spend the rest of our lives searching for the Lost Entitlement of Childhood.

Which it certainly appears that Michelle is doing. She is in essence inflicting her own childhood on the rest of us. Hey, I didn't say it. She did. For this little girl -- who is "suffocating under a veil of impossibility" -- is "in all of us."

Speak for yourself, Michelle. You're confusing projection and empathy, condescension and compassion.

Source

(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)





7 May, 2008

Obama in bed with union thugs

Are there any crooks that Obama doesn't like?

It looks like Barack Obama has taken a page from the Republican playbook, as he's pledged to loosen the federal reins on American business. And which industry does the Senator believe to be in most dire need of deregulation? Nuclear power? Healthcare? Financial Services? Nah - that's the "old politics". A New Kind of Politician deregulates organized labor. Specifically the historically corrupt, mobbed up Teamsters union.

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign. It's an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

As for whether Obama's unusual endorsement bait represents a reasonable policy shift, the campaign notes that the Teamsters are in fact less mobbed up than in the past.

... John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was "pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end" of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Sen. Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed the candidate's position in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, saying that Sen. Obama believes that the board "has run its course," because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." Mr. Vietor said Sen. Obama took that position last year....

[Teamsters President James] Hoffa has spent much of the past month campaigning for Sen. Obama in Pennsylvania and Indiana, which holds its primary Tuesday. Mr. Hoffa has toured the state in a noisy brigade of 18-wheel trucks, stopping at warehouses and distribution centers along the way to praise Sen. Obama.

The special oversight to which the Teamsters are subjected was voluntary, a condition they accepted in order to escape a racketeering charge 20 years ago.

... Teamsters agreed to federal oversight in 1989, signing a consent decree to settle a racketeering lawsuit brought by the Justice Department. The consent decree required the direct election of the union president and other officers by rank and file members, in an election overseen by a court-appointed election officer. (Before, the president was elected by delegates.) It also set up a three-member independent review board to investigate corruption within the union.

But Teamster corruption and mob ties are a thing of the past, right?

Teamsters officials say that over the past 16 years, the influence of organized crime has been largely eliminated from the union, and the consent decree is now an unnecessary burden. The union says it spends $6 million a year to comply with the decree. The review board's caseload has dropped significantly over the years, to eight cases in 2007, from 70 in 1992. In 2006, one union member was permanently barred from the union for associating with a known member of organized crime.

And if they've managed to whittle down the rate of suspicious incidents to a mere eight/year under a watchful Justice Department, just imagine how squeaky clean they could be if everyone just left them alone.

Source




More "White Hate" Discovered in Obama's Church Newsletters

Barack Obama announced yesterday on Meet the Press that he intends to continue attending Trinity United Church of Christ services after Reverend Wright retires in June. So far, the media has not paid any attention to the racist America-hating literature distributed at the church. But, that has not kept BizzyBlog from exposing the outrageous hateful articles included in the church newsletters. Here is an article that appeared in the July 2005 newsletter.



Here is a closer look at this bizarre Trinity Church newsletter article on "rhetorical ethic":

The double standard spoken by Mayor Livingstone is another example of what Dr. Marimba Ani calls "Rhetorical Ethic." Rhetorical ethic, according to Dr. Ani, is defined as: culturally structured European hypocrisy. It is a statement framed in terms of acceptable moral behavior towards others that is meant for rhetorical purposes only. Its purpose is to disarm intended victims of European cultural and political imperialism. It is meant for "export" only. It is not intended to have significance within the culture. Its essence is its deceptive effect in the service of European power.

The rhetorical ethic empowers Bush and Blair to claim to denounce terrorism while refusing to look in the mirror and at the Downing Street Memo to see how they have infected the world with a virus of hate and evil. The Downing Street Memo shows how they intentionally fixed facts and intelligence (or stupidity, depending on how you view it) in order to make themselves a war resulting in over hundreds of thousands dead- Americans and Iraqis. Please do not be fooled by the games these people are playing. It is no more than rhetorical ethic.

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Is Obama henpecked?

Among other exciting things I have done, I was once the Gentile general counsel of a shomer shabbos company owned and managed by Orthodox Jews. It is the only time in my life when I have been an ethnic minority on the job.

Anyway, I learned a lot about Christianity during those years. Once, an Orthodox professor of mathematics asked me whether I went to church, and I said something grumpy along the lines of "when my wife asks me to." His reply startled me: "Ah, yes, I understand that in many Christian sects the woman is the keeper of the spiritual flame." And he was right.

With that in mind, a couple of months ago I speculated that Barack Obama might have attended Jeremiah Wright's church because Michelle wanted to go there. Indeed, I have always thought this was Barack's most probable motive, however politically inconvenient it is to admit now. After all, it would not do to confess that he went to that church because his wife wanted him to, even if some large percentage of the men in church on Sunday mornings feel the same way. Americans want their presidents to have genuine faith.

I had not seen this argument made elsewhere (although I would be amazed if it had not been), so I was delighted to see that no less an eminence than Christopher Hitchens has taken it up.

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company-and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable-then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

Unlike Hitchens, who is a proselytizing atheist, I am not sure it is important (even if legitimate) to ask Barack "about his partner." It is beyond obvious at this point that if her husband is elected Michelle Obama will simply join a fairly long list of annoyingly powerful and tediously opinionated Democratic First Ladies. The party of Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (a very distant TigerHawk cousin), Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton provides ample precedent for Michelle Robinson Obama.

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Obama's National Conversation on Religion

Asked about the Rev. Wright on Meet the Press Sunday, Obama again tried to distance himself:

I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ. And it is a wonderful church. It's a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition.

The problem here is that trying to separate Wright from the UCC - a church body with a long history of radical politics - is near impossible. As I wrote last week:

While American conservatives have focused resources and talent on highlighting the alleged takeover of academic and political institutions by liberal activists since the 1960s, comparably little attention has been paid to the same development in churches......

Jim Naughton, the director of communications for the Washington D.C., Episcopal diocese, claims "[politically liberal church bodies are] dealing with an attack funded by the same donors who have funded the establishment of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, who fund The American Spectator magazine - the whole sort of intellectual infrastructure of the far right wing in this country has decided to target our mainline churches because it doesn't like where they stand on social issues, on economic issues and to some extent on theological issues."

Apparently, Naughton doesn't pay much attention to the Episcopal Church's own membership rolls: It's not just the vast right wing conspiracy that has a problem with the politicization of these churches. It's the laity that objects, and they've been voting with their feet. Nearly every one of these church bodies has been hemorrhaging members for decades now.

Case in point: the United Church of Christ, which has been grabbing headlines as the denomination of Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has lost some 40 percent of its membership over the last 40 years. When the Wright scandal broke, the church leadership vigorously defended Wright and his comments on the church's website and elsewhere. Is it any wonder that a church body that would embrace him is unpopular? The scandal with Wright isn't just that his views may represent a particular politician; it's also that his identity politics and arrogance may reflect those of many denominational leaders.

Indeed, if Obama's trying