In his great book Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, the British theologian, satirist, and mystery writer Ronald Knox notes that, “these days,” America “is the last refuge of the enthusiast,” i.e., one who is convinced of his personal possession by the divine.

I thought about Knox’s book–which focuses primarily on the 17th and 18th centuries and the heresy of Montanism–while watching the crowd cheering Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention last night. There, surely, was one variety of enthusiasm, understanding the word in the modern, not the theological sense.

I thought the speech a splendid breath of fresh air–an “electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking” as one British paper put it–and I would surely have been cheering wildly along with the rest of the crowd had I been there in St. Paul.

But one of the things that struck me most forcefully about the crowd’s response to Palin’s speech was how the quality of its enthusiasm differed from the enthusiasm that greeted Obama’s Greek-temple oration last week. The crowd went wild for Palin, as it did for Obama. But in her case the enthusiasm was directed more at the performance than the performer. The crowd liked what it heard, and reacted accordingly. Palin came offering a new approach to Washington politics: an approach that featured an effort to make government smaller, to keep it our your life and pocketbook, and that emphasized traditional “small town” virtues like hard word, entrepreneurship, family loyalty, and fiscal responsibility. She also came bearing a refreshing quota of humor: what other candidate for high office would gladly describe herself as a hockey mom and then go on to explain that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was that the hockey mom wore lipstick?

By contrast, Obama came offering–himself. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said in his Super Tuesday speech. I fear that he–and, what’s more, that his acolytes–really believe it. The enthusiasm that greets Obama is not the acknowledgment and approbation of an ambition, as it was in the case of the enthusiasm for Palin’s speech, but rather a coefficient of a personality cult. All those McCain ads portraying Obama as a Messiah-like figure are caricatures. But like any good caricature, they are revelatory precisely because the seize upon and exaggerate an obvious truth. Obama really did say, after all, that his nomination marked the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

So, it is with enthusiasm as it is with so many other things: there is enthusiasm of the good sort–which describes that natural ebullience we feel in the face of some important good–and there is enthusiasm of the narcissistic sort, which is fervent but blind in its uncritical endorsement of an abstraction: The Leader, The One, be he right or wrong.

I am beginning to worry about the sanity of the Left. Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad enough. Could any human being so thoroughly epitomize the quintessence of evil that the Bush of the Left’s imagination conjured up? But watching BDS suddenly displaced by an epidemic of Palin Hysteria Syndrome has left me positively alarmed. Have these people taken leave of their senses?

Like many observers, I fully expected to Left to attack her. We are, after all, in a partisan political race and criticizing the other side is a large part of what politics is all about. A few days ago, I quoted William Kristol, who observed in The Weekly Standard that

what we will see in the next days and weeks . . . is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise [the spectre of Sarah Palin]. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

And so it has transpired, but with a virulence and panic-driven hysteria that I find astonishing. Sarah Palin has acted like a sort of locoweed on the media and Team Obama. She stunned them, not into silence (alas) but into a frenzy of groundless vituperation. Watching it is like watching someone suffer an epileptic fit. Quick, fetch me a tongue depressor!

If (mirabile dictu) I were asked to give one bit of advice to the Obama campaign (a group whose membership includes, ex officio, as it were, the professoriate, the main stream media, and other representatives of the so-called cultural elite) it would be this: give up criticizing Palin for her supposed lack of experience. Just give it a rest. As has been repeatedly pointed out in the last few days, Palin has run a company, a town, and the largest state in the republic. No only does she have more executive experience than Obama, she has more executive experience than Obama, Biden, and John McCain put together. Experience is not the issue. As my friend Jay Nordlinger observed with his customary pithiness, “The reason — the main reason — to oppose Barack Obama is not that he lacks experience but that he is a leftist. The reason [for those on the Left] to oppose Palin is that she is a conservative.”

What worries me is how the Left is going cope come the election. Their hysteria about Sarah Palin simultaneously shows that they know deep down that something has gone terribly wrong with Obama’s Children’s “Yes-we-can” Crusade and that they are unable to acknowledge the damage. Their hysteria signals both their panic and their blindness. I predict that on the morning of that fateful day in early November they are going to be like Pauline Kael the day after the 1972 election when Richard Nixon won 49 states: “How could that be?” a bewildered Kael asked. “I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.” The disillusionment this time will be even more bitter. I suggest that caring Republicans consider establishing emergency telephone hotlines and outpatient trauma centers in demographically susceptible areas–New York City, for example, Ann Arbor, all of the states of Massachusetts and Vermont, etc.–in order to cope with the shock that their burst bubble will undoubtedly cause.

At bottom, this election is not about “change” or “experience” but about culture, which is to say it is about what we value as individuals and as citizens. It is about some very basic questions: what matters most in a society? How should we live our lives? What place does love of country, of family, of freedom have in the economy of our hopes and ambitions? The crises of the last several years–the threat of Islamic terrorism, economic instability, a newly rampant Russia and Iran–have pushed such questions out of the limelight. But Sarah Palin–the pro-life, gun toting, seriously religious hockey mom and aggressive political reformer–has suddenly brought them back into vogue. As Thomas Lifson notes, “Liberals have long lamented the existence of two nations in America. They are right to do so today, but in a way they never meant. It is not the divide between rich and poor which soon will be causing serious pain on the left. Sarah Palin’s pending nomination for Vice President is exposing the depth of the cultural divide between Middle America and the leftists who have taken over the education, media, and cultural establishment of our country.”

With the victory of John McCain and Sarah Palin, the hegemony of the left-wing establishment in those cultural redoubts will be fundamentally challenged. The Left senses, even if it has yet to face up to, this reality. That is why they are so hysterical. And it is one reason they will wake up repeating the Pauline Kael lament in November.

From the mailbag: John Frary (who by the way is running for Congress in Maine) provided this thoughtful comment (# 138) on my post of a couple days ago about Sarah Palin:

Frederick the Great on the value of experience: “A mule who has carried a pack for ten campaigns under Prince Eugene will be no better tactician for it, and… many men grow old in an otherwise respectable profession without making any greater progress than this mule.”

The experience argument, whether applied to Obama or Palin, is not all that conclusive.
Both have more experience than Lincoln had when he was first elected.

For me the most pertinent comparison is this: Palin clearly rose to prominence as an opponent of a corrupt Repbulican establishement in Alaska, while Obama nestled comfortably in the Chicago political sewer without ever causing a problem.

Are you favor of an informed electorate? Of course you are. You want people to know about the candidates and the issues so that when they vote they know what they are voting for. I hope some public spirited Democrat will come along and provide a precis of the McCain-Palin ticket, pointing out, for example, that it advocates drilling for oil in Alaska and elsewhere, that it is pro-life, that it supports The Surge in Iraq, that it condemns Russian aggression in Georgia, etc., etc. There is a long list of items that might be compiled to give us a good sense of what McCain-Palin stands: what it thinks of America’s place on the world stage and what it thinks of you, the ordinary voter.

A different list could be made about Obama-Biden ticket. Compiling a really thorough inventory would be a big task, but I am happy to share a preliminary effort sent to me by a friend. It leaves a lot out of account, but it does provide a first lesson for those who may have heard about Obama but are not quite sure who he is, where he comes from, or what he stands. I hope that this and similar documents will enjoy wide circulation as the campaign unfolds and the public endeavors to get a better sense of who the candidates are and what they espouse

(Detach Here)

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STATEMENT OF INTENT TO VOTE FOR SENATOR BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

I, ______________________, a Citizen of The United States of America and a legally registered voter (or, with the help of ACORN able to pose as one), from the State of _______________________, hereby declare that I will cast my vote for president, in the upcoming November 2008 election, for Senator Barack Hussein Obama. As such, I make the following declarations:

1). I fully understand that Senator Obama served on two boards with, and launched his political career at the home of, William Ayers, a former leader of the terrorist organization called The Weather Underground. I further acknowledge that William Ayers bombed the Pentagon in Washington D.C, long before Al Queda attacked it with an airplane full of innocent people, that Obama’s associate and friend, William Ayers was involved in numerous other violent attacks against my country, for which he has never apologized or expressed regret. I also acknowledge that William Ayers told Rolling Stone Magazine years after those attacked that, far from regret, he felt “[he] didn’t do enough.”

I am comfortable with the fact that Senator Obama keeps company with this unrepentant terrorist. ______ (initial here)

2). I acknowledge that Senator Obama voted against a Bill that would have made it illegal to kill a baby which survived a botched abortion.

I am in full support of Senator Obama;s tacit endorsement of infanticide. ______ (initial here)

3). I am aware that, despite earning $4.2 Million dollars in 2007, Senator Obama lives in a $3 Million home partially paid for by convicted Felon, Tony Rezko. I support Senator Obama’s decision to vote to give the same Tony Rezko $14 Million in taxpayer moeny to build slum-like housing developments which later went bankrupt.

4). I am of the firm, established position that Senator Obama is incapable of doing anything which could dissuade me from voting for him. ______ (initial here)

I do so affirm:

__________________________________

Full Name

__________________________________

Date

Don’t be fooled: the left is terrified of Sarah Palin. Just savor, if your stomach is strong enough, Gail Collins’s sophomoric effort yesterday in The New York Times, “McCain’s Baked Alaska” (Get it?). “The idea,” sniffs Collins, “that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong.” I wish it were so, Gail. But the distaff side was queuing up in droves to vote for HRC and not, as you said, “as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack,” but precisely because of the plumbing.

And folks are electrified by Sarah Palin not because she’s female, but because she’s a breath of fresh air: a tough, attractive, conservative, pro-family, patriotic candidate who is as articulate as she is unbeholden to the beltway, business-as-usual pork-barrel machinery. She represents exactly the sort of change that Obama invoked but never managed to articulate.

William Kristol, in a splendid piece in The Weekly Standard, gets it just right. Palin is a frightening “spectre” to the Left precisely because she is everything they despise: “a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

And Kristol is right, too, in what we can expect in the coming weeks:

So what we will see in the next days and weeks–what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination–is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

I spoke to a savvy, politically connected friend yesterday who told me that MSM journalists were already packing into planes, trains, and automobiles to hie themselves thither to Alaska in order to prospect for the gold of D.O.P.–dirt on Palin. Well, good luck to ‘em. What the Clinton’s called (and, even more, what they practiced) “the politics of personal destruction” is never pretty. But I suspect that, like most gold prospectors of yore, they will come up empty handed in this case. The only thing I’ve heard is the story about her getting her unstable brother-in-law fired: not much there for the fourth estate, especially since Palin has been so cooperative with the inquiry that they haven’t even had to issue a subpoena.

In the larger sense, of course, it is a good thing for the public to learn more about Sarah Palin, her origins, her passions, her associates, her behavior as a young politician. The same scrutiny should be directed towards Obama, McCain, and Biden. I suspect most people will like what they discover about Sarah Palin. Will they like what they discover about Obama? How do you spell “Tony Rezko”? What do you know about Jeremiah Wright? Would you want your daughter–or your President–consorting with Bill “the bomber” Ayers?

Noting that for the next weeks Palin will “be swimming in political waters infested with sharks,” Kristol cautions the McCain team to react swiftly but proportionately to the inevitable attacks that will launched against Palin in an effort to preempt the public’s image of her. That’s good advice, but I suspect that Palin will be an even more formidable candidate than the Democrats fear. Kristol quotes a liberal commentator who gleefully adapted a a mot from Secretary of State Jim Baker: “putting Sarah Palin into a debate with Joe Biden,” he said “is going to be like throwing Howdy Doody into a knife fight!” Maybe so. But it’s not at all clear who will be Mr. Doody, and who will be wielding the knife. In early day, when he was a young, arrogant politician, Joe Biden famously bragged about his high IQ (probably higher than yours, he told them). I confess that I rather admired his brass in that exchange. And, probably, the young, arrogant Biden was correct in his assessment. But what of the old, arrogant Biden? What will he be like pitted against a smart, articulate debater who is, at least, his intellectual equal? Anyone care to make a bet?

Many observers have commented on the high style of Obama’s campaign. The logo, the kiddie Latin slogan (”amo, amas, amat, vero possumus”), the be-columned stage set, etc., etc. It’s all very well, or at least very thoroughly orchestrated, but the more I think about it the less appropriate the word “style” seems. Really, it is a matter of political theater.

Not, I hasten to add, that the Obama campaign does not have a style. It does, as of course does the McCain campaign. How do they differ? Well, the day of Obama’s big speech, McCain himself takes to the airwaves to congratulate the Senator. Tomorrow, he said, we’ll get back to campaigning, but today he wanted to take a moment to praise his opponent for a job well done.

Yesterday, when McCain annoucned that his running mate would be Sarah Palin, the Obama campaign instantly issued a response:

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Bad move, boys! First, it was ungentlemanly–not because Palin is a woman, but because etiquette demands a civil expression of congratulations on such occasions. Second, raising the question of experience naturally leads to the question: “OK, the pick for VP doesn’t have much executive experience, but how much experience does the Democratic nominee for president have?” There is the further issue that the less Obama says about foreign policy the better. Just uttering the phrase might sow a seed of doubt in people’s minds: they might put down yesterday’s paper, the one describing what the Russians are doing to Georgia, the one with the pictures of US and Russian warships in the Black Sea, and they might say, “Gosh, how would Obama deal with a fellow like Vladimir Putin?” In an earlier time, President Bush said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul; more recently, John McCain looked at the same spot and said he saw three things: “K, G, and B.” In the case of Georgia, Obama’s first response was to say there was fault on both sides and then to suggest that we refer the conflict to the U.N. McCain forthrightly condemned the aggression and supported the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, that “aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.”

But back to the question of style. Sarah Palin, in her brief speech accepting McCain’s offer to join the ticket, paid homage to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro, two Democrats, for leading the way past glass ceiling for women in American politics. A handsome gesture, no? Within hours of her speech, team Obama must have realized that their sour-grapes response wasn’t playing well, so Senator Biden issued a congratulatory statement and Obama himself, asked about the discrepancy between the initial statement issued by his campaign and Biden’s more temperate response, hemmed and hawed about campaigns being, um, on a hair trigger, uh, and, um, yes he, um, agreed, uh, with um, Senator Biden’s sentiments.

Gee, thanks! (Mr. Eloquence was without his teleprompter, you see.)

There is a big difference in style between the McCain and Obama campaigns. If you go to Obama’s web site, you’ll find lots of complaints about the “smears,” “outrageous lies,” etc. supposedly perpetrated by the other side. An example? The most recent is the hysterical attack on the journalist Stanley Kurtz who has been looking into Obama’s early political career, not least his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers. In fact, Stanley Kurtz is simply doing what political journalists do: filling out the historical record and illuminating the origins, associates, and early career of a man who has put himself forward to be President of the United States.

On the McCain web site, by contrast, there is no whining about how unfair the other side treats him. Obama asks us to “believe in” him; McCain asks us to consider what is best for the country. For him, action, not belief is the issue. (A lot could be written, in fact, about Obama’s quasi-religious rhetoric: it’s one thing to ask people to believe that one candidate has the better vision for the country; it is quite another for a candidate to ask us to believe in him and his vision.)

Watching Sarah Palin’s speech yesterday I found myself almost feeling sorry for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Almost. Here they are campaigning on “change” and optimism and the common man and transcending politics as usual. And their campaign is the same old business and usual, Chicago-style swamp politics. If it were an athletic contest, McCain/Palin would probably have to play with some sort of handicap. But it wouldn’t matter. Even with a steep handcap they would eat Obama and Biden for lunch. The carnage will not be pretty. But perhaps it will finally get the message through to the DNC: you don’t win elections by vapid talk about change. You win them by sound policies that offer change where change is needed and continuity where change would be irresponsible.

What can I say? McCain got it exactly right. Sarah Palin is an inspired choice to fill out the McCain ticket. Not only is she sound on the issues (drilling, right-to-life, corruption, etc.) but she is a brilliant campaigner who also, by virtue of her sex, trumps the “we’re all victims together” rhetoric of the Democrats. Hugh Hewitt sums it up beautifully: “McCain has turned the race on its head, and if Palin proves to be as able a campaigner as her fans say, GOP and American politics will have been changed in a way that fundamentally celebrates opportunity and talent.  What a contrast to Obama’s rhetoric of last night.”

Note: when first posted, I said “Welcome Ms Vice-President”: I am grateful to the reader below for pointing out the solecism.

Here’s a little parlor game while everyone waits around to see who will be the next Vice-President of the United States: Connect the dots and discover the answer to the $64,000-dollar question:

Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

This is a game for advanced players because:

You cannot see many of the dots!

For example:

1) We are not supposed to use Obama’s middle name, but why not? Other politicians are fair game for every sort journalistic tweaking, why is Obama exempt. His origins are shadowy, to say the least, why shouldn’t we signal our acknowledgment of that by mentioning, when we choose, his middle name?

2) Obama and Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist (involved in at least twenty bombings across the US in the 1960s and 1970s) with whom Obama worked closely in Chicago in the 1990s. How closely? That’s a dot that Obama’s people don’t want you to discover. Obama said Ayers was “just some guy in my neighborhood.” In fact, Obama’s political life was launched from Ayers’s living room and Obama was chairman of a foundation started and largely guided by Ayers Ayers. Rather more than “just a guy in my neighborhood.” Fortunately, Stanley Kurtz and Andrew McCarthy are working away to uncover that dot and present it and its many tentacles to the public.

As you proceed with the game, you’ll find many other dots missing–but persevere! In his column today–aptly titled “The Perfect Stranger”–Charles Krauthammer describes Obama as “the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby.” I seem to be immune to the dazzlement, just as I have never been susceptible to Obama’s “eloquence” (I find his oratory a teeth-grinding congeries of clichés), but I think Krauthammer is on to something with the allusion to Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant, corrupt, anti-hero. “Who is this Gatsby anyway,” one character asks “Some bootlegger?” Well, it is hard to say. Gatsby worked hard at the art of self-creation and he burned with a ferocious but shatteringly evanescent light. “The truth was,” Fitzgerald says elsewhere in the book, “that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”

Mark Steyn once wrote that he couldn’t listen to a speech by Obama without giggling. I know what he means. Obama’s campaign is like some histrionic Children’s Crusade, from the O-Bobma-the-Builder slogans (”Yes we can!”) to the Wizard-of-Oz-Meets-Wagner histrionics (who will ever forget the Greek theater stage set?). Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote, “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” Just so.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Gatsby–I mean, about Obama–is the interweaving of charm and the authoritarian imperative. The steely face of the latter shines through whenever anyone tries to collect and connect the dots and answer the question “Who is Barack Obama.” Hence, for example, the disgusting and hysterical attack on Stanley Kurtz by Obama’s minions when he was interviewed on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 a few days ago. A while back I noted in this space that “I used to think that Obama was a sort of updated version of George McGovern, with a generous helping of Jimmy Carter’s self-righteousness thrown in for good measure. I now believe I misread Obama. He is something far more grandiloquent, and far more toxic. He is a reprise of 1960s radicalism, burnished by a Harvard education, underwritten by the simmering resentments of an anti-democratic elite that never recovered from the shock of Ronald Reagan, the end of the Soviet Union, and the stupendous, historically unprecedented, prosperity of the last two decades. They will not easily forgive America for those victories, and an Obama presidency would make sure they were not repeated.”

I continue to believe that, only I now believe I underestimated the extent and virulence of those resentments and the disaster that an Obama administration would represent for this country. Fortunately, I grow more confident daily that Obama as about as much chance of becoming President as the Wizard of Oz.

George Will, in the guise of offering Obama some advice for his speech tonight, provides a partial but alarming inventory of the shortcomings of Obama’s O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ (”Yes we can!”) political platform. I am not in Denver, so it is difficult for me to gauge with any precision the mood of the party faithful as the Democratic convention wobbles to its climax. There have, I know, been some paroxysms of enthusiasm, but that comes with the territory and, after all, Denver is famously the “mile-high city”: the air is thin, thin, in that part of Colorado, and a certain giddiness is the predictable result.

Personally, I think John McCain is going to win, and I’m not talking about a hanging-chad squeakeroo. No, I think it will be a blow-out for McCain. He won’t take the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, of course, or New York, Vermont, and the half a dozen other reliable left-liberal bastions of incipient socialism. But, absent some serious mis-steps on the part of the McCain campaign, Obama will, I predict, not only lose, but lose big.

This is not a popular opinion on the Right. (Though, curiously, it is a possibility that seems to be making unhappy inroads among Democrats.) Many of my friends have glumly accepted the prospect of Obama’s victory as an historical inevitability. I think they are precipitant. First of all, nothing is historically inevitable except the unpredictable. But, second, and more to the point, Obama is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a fact that the media’s love affair with him can only partially conceal. As of last night, Obama is officially the Democratic candidate for President. But the road has not been the smooth thoroughfare his acolytes would have us believe. Forget about the still-simmering dissatisfaction among Hillary’s girls. Think instead of what happened in the final weeks of the primary season. Obama lost 9 of the last 14 primaries. Why? George Will suggests that Obama’s poor showing “might have something to do with the fact that when he descends from the ether to practicalities, he reprises liberalism’s most shopworn nostrums.”

That sounds right to me, and the fact that Obama pronounces those nostrums in pulpit tones adds only a superficial patina of plausibility to his O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ “Yes-we-can!” message. (Can what? Change! Change what? Yes-we-can, yes-we-can, yes-we-can.) Maybe, to alter the childhood reference, it’s more like the Little Engine That Could, bringing toys and universal, taxpayer-funded health care to the poor children on the other side of the mountain.

But it is not only Obama’s general vapidness that is the problem. A O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ approach to politics may be OK, may even be considered cute, in a world that is reliably stable, prosperous, and secure. If, per impossible, Francis Fukuyama had been right that we had arrived at “the end of history,” an elysium in which all the important problems were solved and the chief difficulties politicians faced were figuring out novel ways to increase taxes, diminish individual initiative, and redistribute the country’s wealth. But we have not achieved that utopia, even though many are behaving as if we had. No, history is still very much with us. Ponder, if you doubt it, the issues that George Will instances:

Russia, a third-world nation with first-world missiles, is rampant; Iran is developing a missile inventory capable of delivering nuclear weapons the development of which will not be halted by Obama’s promised “aggressive personal diplomacy.” Yet Obama has vowed to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.” Steamboats, railroads, airplanes and vaccines were “unproven” until farsighted people made investments. Furthermore, as Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute notes, Democrats will eventually embrace missile defense in Europe because they “will have nowhere else to go short of pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Obama, who might be the last person to learn that schools’ cognitive outputs are not simply functions of financial inputs, promises more money for teachers, who, as usual, are about 10 percent of the Democrats’ convention delegates and alternates. He waxes indignant about approximately 150,000 jobs sent overseas each year — less than 1 percent of the number of jobs normally lost and gained in the creative destruction of America’s dynamic economy. U.S. exports are fending off a recession while he complains about free trade. He deplores NAFTA, although since it was implemented in 1994 the U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies have grown 50 percent, 46 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

Recycling George McGovern’s 1972 “Demogrant” notion, Obama promises a $1,000 check for every family, financed by a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Obama is unintimidated by the rule against legislating about subjects one cannot define.

Obama thinks government is not getting a “reasonable share” of oil companies’ profits, which in 2007 were, as a percentage of revenues (8.3 percent), below those of U.S. manufacturing generally (8.9 percent). Exxon Mobil pays almost as much in corporate taxes to various governments as the bottom 50 percent of American earners pay in income taxes. Exxon Mobil does make $1,400 a second in profits — hear the sharp intakes of breath from liberals with pursed lips — but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a second in operating costs.

Obama’s rhetorical extravagances are inversely proportional to his details, as when he promises “nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy” in order to “end the age of oil.” The diminished enthusiasm of some voters hitherto receptive to his appeals might have something to do with the seepage of reality from his rhetoric. Voters understand that neither the “transformation” nor the “end” will or should occur. His dreamy certitude that “alternative” fuels will quickly become real alternatives is an energy policy akin to an old vaudeville joke: “If we had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some ham.”

I think Will is right in his estimate of voters’ understanding. Which is why, frightening though I find O-Bobma-the-Builder’s ™ messianic socialism-by-another-name, I am reassured that, come election day, it will once again be consigned to those grumbling purlieus where move-on-dot-orgers rub shoulders with college professors and reporters from The New York Times, CNN, and other organs of puerile self-satisfaction.

OK, so Hillary “did her duty” last night and delivered a speech that caused the sort of “modifed rapture” Nanki-Poo experiences when he at last gets his tête-a-tête with Yum-Yum only to discover that his rival Koko, whom he thought beheaded, is alive and slated to be married to his beloved that very afternoon. Hillary really was dutiful. As Tom Bevan says over at RealClearPolitics, she got off a couple of zingers, e.g., “with an agenda like that, it makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities. Because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart.” But being dutiful is not exactly the same as being wildly enthusiastic. At the end of the day, she bowed to the inevitable, she lay back, and thought of 2012. As Bevan notes, nowhere did Hillary say that Obama was ready to be Commander in Chief (an omission, he points out, that the McCain was quick to call to the public’s attention). Personally, I do not blame Hillary for this omission. The gag reflex is not generally subject to conscious suppression and, as Gertrude Stein said in another context, even Hillary knows how far she can go in going too far.

Of course, the issue of “experience” has been one of the two leitmotifs–or, rather, one of the two slogans–of this campaign. The other slogan is “change.” Both are like ancient coins whose identifying marks have been all but effaced by being handed around promiscuously for so long. It would be a useful exercise to try to give some content to what Obama means by “change.” Were I to attempt it, I would probably start by going back to the start of Obama’s political life in Bill “Weatherman” Ayers’s living room. Critical question: exactly what sort of “change” does Obama really want? The sort that Bill Ayers wanted in the 1960s, and, indeed, as late as September 11, 2001 when (as the gods of coincidence would have it) he was the subject of a flattering piece in The New York Times (natch) in which he said, inter alia, that far from regretting his efforts to bomb the Capitol, the Pentagon, and various police stations, he and his pals “didn’t do enough”? Well, that is a subject for another day, and, besides, Stanley Kurtz has been doing yeoman’s work uncovering the Barack Obama’s original political agenda. Obama now says that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” but Kurtz shows that Obama was chairman of The Annenberg Challenge, an activist, left-wing educational foundation in Chicago founded and inspired by Ayes. Really, so far as Obama is concerned, Ayers, who was pictured as recently as 2001 stomping on an American flag (the idea that America is decent society, he said, “makes me want to puke“) was “just a guy who lives” in Obama’s neighborhood and with whom he just happened had a close professional and political relationship.

In any event, “change” is a slogan I’ll leave for another day. But what about “experience”? It’s that quality that McCain is supposed to have lots of, Obama is supposed to lack, but what, really are we talking about? We all know that length of time by itself is no measure of learning let alone wisdom. “We had the experience,” T.S. Eliot lamented in Four Quartets, “but missed the meaning.” But we also know that experience, i.e., time served, counts for something. And with this in mind, I am happy to share the bulk of an email a friend sent me that compares Obama’s experience with John McCain’s. It was titled “The Executive Summary” and offers, I believe, a thought-provoking comparison:

John McCain in Congress: 26 years; in the military: 22 Years

Barrack Obama in Congress: 143 days; in the military: 0

The email went on to offer these reflections:

From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United States Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory Committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate.

That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.

The one single Senate committee that he headed never even met — once.

After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.

Think about it……. 143 days — 20.4 weeks — 4.7 months …

The email concluded with a line printed in large type:

Our children spend more time in pre-school getting ready for kindergarten.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? As I say, experience, measured simply by time passed, isn’t everything. But surely it is something.