Roger’s Rules

October 30th, 2008 6:21 am

Obama: Moderate, Or Radical in Moderate’s clothing?

For many voters, I suspect, the choice next Tuesday comes down to an exercise in risk assessment. Is Barack Obama, despite his dubious connections (William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi, et al.) and euro-socialist spread-the-wealth-around rhetoric, is he, when all is said and done, a moderate, centrist character who would govern pragmatically, not ideologically?

Or is he a more radical character who has cultivated suit-and-tie respectability in order to get elected, after which he will pursue radical, redistributionist policies economically, socially, and in foreign affairs?

Both possibilities have their partisans. I incline to the latter, partly for the reasons Andy McCarthy outlined in “Obama’s ‘Redistributive Change’ and the Death of Freedom“. Obama, as he made the move from radical “community organizer” to the national national stage, “put on mainstream airs.” It has been a stunningly effective makeover. As late as 2001, in that now-infamous interview he gave on Illinois public radio, Obama advocated breaking free “from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution” in order to address “issues of the redistribution of wealth.” Increasingly, though, Obama modulated his rhetoric, if not his aims. Sure, the mask would occasionally slip, as when, in an unscripted exchange, he acknowledge to “Joe the plumber” Wurzelbacher that he didn’t want to punish success; no, never that. He merely wanted to “spread the wealth around.”

But that was a rare, and inadvertent, moment of candor. Note that Obama has not repeated the mistake, which may yet cost him the election. Instead, he speaks vaguely of “economic justice.” As McCarthy notes, however, although Obama tends to couch “his radicalism in soothing euphemisms,” the underlying goal is one that Karl Marx would look upon benignly. “Economic justice,” for example,

is simply the finance angle of “social justice,” the idée fixe of Obama and his coven of Change-agents — like Michael Klonsky, the communist educator who ran a “social justice” blog on Obama’s official campaign website. Such radicals give the Warren Court high marks on non-economic rights, but flunk the justices on redistribution: the purported right of society’s ne’er-do-wells to pick the pockets of its achievers through the coercive power of government.

There are, as I say, many who believe that Obama is a far more anodyne character–after all, he is well spoken and, as Joe Biden said before he became Head of the Office of Gaffes and Obama’s choice for VP, he is “bright and clean.” He doesn’t look scary.

But the more I know about Obama–and the more I know we don’t know about his past–the more I worry. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger captured my concern–well, part of my concern–in his column today:

I don’t agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, “progressive” Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its “social market economy.” Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create “wealth” so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

This really is an “historic” election, Henninger notes, not simply because of the changes Obama wishes to make in the American system but also because the political environment–a predicted Democratic super-majority in Congress–is shaping up to give him carte-blanche for his radical initiatives.

Obama said everyone making $200,000 or less would get a tax cut; a day or two ago, Joe Biden declared (Gaffed? Let slip? Prepared the ground? Put us on notice?) that tax cuts should “go to [people] making under $150,000 a year.” What happened to that extra $50,000? As The New York Post put it yesterday, commenting on Biden’s speech, we have been given “fair warning.”

Let those who have ears to hear . . .

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10 Comments

1. mtraven:

Don’t forget his connection to Lucifer!

The best reply I’ve found to this redistributionist nonsense is here.

Oct 30, 2008 - 7:24 am 2. Roger L. Simon » Obama: The candidate as Rorschach test:

[...] would do in office (not easy to ascertain under any condition). In typically wise articles today Roger Kimball and Cliff May fear the worst. They could be right, of course, although, if Obama is elected, I hope [...]

Oct 30, 2008 - 8:49 am 3. cfbleachers:

For many voters, I suspect, the choice next Tuesday comes down to an exercise in risk assessment. Is Barack Obama, despite his dubious connections (William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi, et al.) and euro-socialist spread-the-wealth-around rhetoric, is he, when all is said and done, a moderate, centrist character who would govern pragmatically, not ideologically?

Perhaps, but where is the proof of that in deeds… any act in furtherance of such? I hear the rhetoric, witness the calm demeanor, absorb the dulcet tones…and then am jarred back into reality by the fits of pique upon rare inquiry of this ticket and slips of the tongue in unguarded moments that betray the subconscious mind by Obama/Biden.

When they said that he would bring about change that was revolutionary, perhaps I misunderstood what they meant.

I don’t know…I can’t know. He has spirited away to a secret vault virtually all of the remnants of his past. What is available has been shuttered from view and vaporized upon discovery. The entrenched media operates as a shill machine, alternately pumping out glorified advertisements posing as “news” coverage, and then clubbing the opposing ticket with everything from faked magazine covers, withhheld tapes, and catty fashion attacks and beyond.

What do we know about Senator Obama? I mean, really know? Facts, evidence…that hasn’t been filtered through a prism, but is just a basic catalogue item about his life until this moment in time?

We do know that his life has been surrounded by people who hold some pretty radical extremist views that are antithetical to mainstream America. This cannot be denied. Frank Marshall Davis, radical professors at college, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Michael Klonsky, William Ayers and his wife, Rashid Khalidi etc…perhaps Khalid al Mansour, maybe others.

To suggest that none of that lifelong pattern of voluntarily seeking and choosing to attach to that very familiar ideology, was because of some reason other </i? than a fatal attraction to it…is to suggest something that has not witnessed one shred of proof or evidence by deed or act. I would be willing to listen to an explanation, perhaps there is one…but nobody seems inclined to even ask. Certainly nobody that the campaign will speak with, anyway.

This is not to say that Senator Obama attaches to the methodology espoused by these folks. Nor does it suggest that he approves of the means. It does, however, suggest a kindred spirit in achieving the ends.

In his own words, talking in a soothing manner…will ratchet back the fears. If that makes Senator Obama’s words more acceptable, it still does not move the goalposts. The end game remains the same.

Barack Obama, Sr. wrote passionately about how he viewed the government’s obligations to distribute wealth. “Frank” spoke and wrote passionately about not selling out and buying into the American Dream. Saul Alinsky wrote a primer on how to achieve radical infiltration. Ayers and Dohrn and Klonsky and Davidson have an exhaustive record of espousing cultural revolution and meeting with sworn enemies. James Cone built a political cover for venom disguised as religion. Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger took Cone’s ball and ran with it. And they did so while lionizing Louis Farrakhan. Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said and Ali Abunimah link the Ayers/Dohrn flag stomping with an Israeli flag stomping.

And upon which road do all these voices intersect? How do we explain that? What does it mean? We don’t know and we can’t know. Because nobody seems to want to ask, at least nobody that the campaign will speak with.

Is this fatal attraction not some “passing youtful fad”, but a glimpse into a worldview that defines a lifetime attachment? Where is there any…any…evidence that his divergence from their worldview is not on substance, but rather on the mechanics of achieving it?

By all outward appearances, he is drawn to radical extremism like a moth to a flame. The blazing heat of that boiling anger, fuels his passions. He seems to want to captain a ship upon a raging sea. In what way has he moved to quiet the rage or bridge the divide?

Ever?

In putting a Mideast pre-cabinet together, the Walt & Mearsheimer bible apparently must be sworn upon to gain admittance. Foreign money may fuel his campaign coffers. Anti-Semitic despots cheer on his ascendancy.

When the truth is held hostage, who pays the ransom?

Oct 30, 2008 - 9:02 am 4. Steve Skubinna:

I don’t consider it reassuring when the best argument people can make for a candidate is “Maybe he doesn’t mean what he says.”

Oct 30, 2008 - 12:49 pm 5. ricpic:

A great and recurring motif in history is that people DON’T learn from the past. They sleep through its lessons unless, unless they have directly experienced its horror. Make no mistake, communism is a horror. The loss of liberty is a horror. Subjugation is a humiliation of horrific proportions. Communism ruled Russia and Eastern Europe an eye-blink ago. It’s horrors were broadcast far and wide by its living victims and in their writing. But we did not experienced it directly and so it WAS NOT REAL. Well, now it is coming here. Now we will learn.

Oct 30, 2008 - 4:15 pm 6. mtraven:

And an answer to the Rashid Khalidi nonsense, here and here. The stream of garbage never stops. Fortunately it is having little effect, since the McCain campaign has been singularly inept in its mudslinging. Republicans used to be good at this, what happened?

Meanwhile, noted radical communist rag, The Economist endorses Obama.

The Republican ship is sinking; the smarter rats have swarmed off long ago, but there’s still time. Kimball is determined to go down, apparently he’s not one of the smarter rats on board.

Oct 30, 2008 - 9:11 pm 7. Gerad Meehan:

Hello Mr. Kimball,

I’d like to comment, if I might, on the Obama phenomenon, this as one who has now spent 30 months in Iraq as a civilian advisor to the Iraqi police.

My comments, however brief, I think touch upon, however anemically, at least some of the things upon which both you (The Long March) and have Roger Scruton (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Culture) have already poignantly and mellifluously written.

As has been observed, one can certainly concede how voting for McCain might not exactly confer upon one the Matthewsesque tingle up one’s leg (however irksome the imagery). Nonetheless, the Obama phenomenon has left me deeply concerned about the state of our society and democracy; this, as so many people seem to be so fully taken in by the theatrics of Obama’s soft, or “benign” demagogy. That rhetorical style and aesthetic imagery in this presidential election should now so dramatically come to trump executive substance and character, particularly in such troubled times, is truly stifling. That a man who, by virtue of his utterly self-absorbed biography and very self-serving life story, and very dubious “accomplishments”; that a man who is so little connected to the traditional narrative and values of this country, can ascend to the presidency– on a platform of implicit international apology for who and what we are as a nation– is to me both staggering and demoralizing.

For some time now, I’ve been concerned that our society has been becoming more and more debilitated by a culture of victimization, entitlement, and self-deluding fantasy. To my mind, the social and cultural phenomenon of Barak Obama is very much a product of this cultural malady. At the same, Obama, through his cult of personality, feeds into and perpetuates this cultural disorder, enjoining people to surrender the very real challenges of freedom for the illusory and nebulous promises of security and “change”. The Obama phenomenon, I suppose, is now but the logical consequence of this slowly metastasizing civic pathology in America– of social escape, cultural amnesia, and existential surrender. By my lights, it is a malignancy stoked by, among other things, the ceaseless proliferation of surreal forms of technology and superficial distraction in our very post-modern society, all of which tend to make the challenge of real living but an undeserved and inconvenient imposition, at worst, and a strange and curious mirage, at best. Meanwhile, amidst the creeping darkness of this election cycle (when we learn, by stark observation, that the democratic institution of the media in a free society, whose existence we once very much assumed, no longer exists in this country in any legitimate sense); amidst this growing dusk that announces the gathering storm of our American social and political infirmity; the values of personal discipline, responsibility, focus, and individual accomplishment/achievement are nowhere to be found.

It is not that America and Americans do not need myths. We do. In fact, it is the essence of human beings that we live through symbolic representations. Rather, it is a matter of asking what are the myths, and who are the myth-makers: what, exactly, is the national vision, the civic ideals, set forth? As for the mythmakers, what is their character? What are their accomplishments? What values do they represent?

All this, then, in a time of war and terror, leads one to ask: what exactly is the national myth that Obama is creating? What is his vision for America that will inspire Americans like myself, both in the military and in law enforcement, to render themselves willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for this country’s welfare and defense? To defend, after all, is to preserve. It is to conserve. It is not to “change” and subvert. But radical and careless subversion under Obama, however subtle and nuanced (or perhaps not), is, I suspect, exactly what we should prepare ourselves for.

Though, this impending demolition of America’s history and her traditions, the Great Erasure of America’s sacred myths, will not be borne out of malice, per se. Rather, it will be one borne of sheer carelessness, of fundamental ignorance. After all, from a man totally unconnected, on any personal level, to America’s sacred narrative and its traditions, little awareness about the value of what is being destroyed can be expected. So just as Hegel’s owl of Minerva flies at dusk, we may only be able to survey the full gravity and extent of the national damage after the smoke of the Obama presidency clears, at which time, we’ll hear the familiar refrain: “Oh. I didn’t know…”

For a man who joined the military at 17 inspired by the social, political, and cultural revolution of Ronald Reagan, and then who, at 34, sat for 3 days transfixed, and in tears, as he watched the Reagan funeral (the event that inspired my decision thereafter to deploy to Iraq as a police advisor), this, the “era of Obama,” is truly a journey of wandering in the wilderness.

For my part, the Obama myth is simply not one that I recognize.

Best,

Gerard Meehan

Oct 30, 2008 - 10:02 pm 8. airth10:

Roger: An intellectual, Or a simpleton in intellectual clothing?

Oct 31, 2008 - 9:11 am 9. Steve Skubinna:

Mtraven, it must frustrate you no end that your political opponents do not take your well meaning advice.

Oct 31, 2008 - 12:59 pm 10. mtraven:

Skubinna: your reading comprehension isn’t too good; I was not offering any advice, just cheerful observations. Hence, no frustration. Like I said, the smarter conservatives have bailed already; people who are still in the tank for the Palin/McCain ticket are probably lost causes themselves.

Oct 31, 2008 - 8:06 pm