McCain Versus Obama

It is interesting how Obama has been evolving toward McCain’s positions rather than vice versa. Take Iran. At first, to Obama it posed little threat; now it is a danger large indeed—as McCain insisted all along. Obama used to ridicule the surge and claim it had failed; now he assures us that it has worked beyond our wildest dreams. Obama was opposed to oil drilling, and was silent about coal and nuclear power. Now suddenly he has dropped mention of inflating our tires, and is referring to oil, gas, coal, and nuclear production as legitimate means to wean ourselves off foreign oil. In political terms, all this is wise, since voters ultimately want to be reassured about centrist positions rather than worry over consistency. As Anbar quiets and we leave, expect him to suggest his pressure and criticism were responsible for the Iraqi government’s turn-about.

On matters like abortion, capital punishment, gun control and FISA, Obama again moves closer to McCain rather than vice versa. Apparently, he realizes that no northern Democratic liberal has been elected since JFK, nearly a half-century ago—an amazing fact in and of itself—and so has to follow the Bill Clinton centrist route, which can be accomplished by a variety of measures.

Thus Biden is playing up his distant Scranton childhood; Michelle is muzzled; Ayers, Pfleger, and Wright are no doubt somewhere in suspended animation; and Obama has suddenly dropped all talk of reparations, oppression studies, America’s tragic history, typical white people, etc. And when he does start in on his preemptory “they’re going after me” stump whine, he doesn’t mention race, only his name and the faux charge of being a Muslim. Again, if he continues, in another month he won’t sound like a Pelosi liberal anymore, and perhaps eat into the working class white voting block.

Where do the candidates then differ? Mostly on taxes and spending. Obama would raise most taxes, albeit mostly (but not completely) on the more affluent, by ending FICA limits, raising income rates, upping capital gains, and raising the death tax. He would use the resulting trillions (if such taxation did not itself stifle economic growth and thus not bring in additional revenue) not to pay off the deficit, but to fund new entitlements in education, health, and housing.

McCain would not likely create new programs or new government health and education entitlements, but hope to cut where he could and lower the deficit by spending restraint rather than by new taxation. In times of recession, I think cutting spending is far preferable to raising any taxes on anyone. Bottom line: for a couple making $300,000, there would probably be at least $20,000 more to pay to the fed, and that money in turn would be redirected to a couple making $50,000 in various additional entitlements. If one lives in a high-tax New York or California, one can imagine paying 60-65% of much of one’s income going to FICA, federal and state taxes, on top of capital gains, property and sales taxes.

Obama would appoint more judges like Breyer and Ginsburg, McCain more like Roberts and Alito. That seems a wide difference. I don’t think the Right will allow another Souter or Kennedy, and the Left would never allow, one time, anyone like Roberts.

On foreign policy, Obama would, to be fair, return more to the Clinton than the Carter model—welcome to some after the blood and treasure lost in the Iraqi war, frightening to others, as they remember the 1990s and the serial terrorist attacks on US soldiers and diplomats that went unanswered and logically led to 9/11.

A forgotten difference is that Obama has navigated a great deal in the Ivy League, Chicago’s corrupt politics, and Trinity Church, without executive or managerial experience and without a lot of knowledge of Middle America. One does not see any antithesis on his part to all this, in the manner Palin took on the old-boy, corrupt Republican Alaskan establishment.

I have led a sort of schizophrenic life, growing up and living in rural Selma, farming, and remodeling various farm houses and buildings, juxtaposed with graduate school at Stanford and years working, speaking, and writing in  academic environments. From my perspective, I have been far more comfortable with, and have far more confidence in, the pragmatic judgment and worldview of rural America than I have found among the blinkered and intolerant sophisticated and educated elite. Out of politeness, I’ll stop there, since I confess that Columbia, Harvard, Chicago wards, and Trinity Church do not offer any stimulus for pragmatism, self-reliance, or American exceptionalism, but are landscapes in which government is the answer, a particular elite know best, politics is the art of dispersing someone else’s money, and America is to blamed first not last in matters of controversy.

Obama would now be far better prepared had he taken a three-year hiatus from community organizing in Chicago and gone downstate to work with struggling Illinois farmers—or better yet, apprenticed for a year on a John Deere and “seen the world” so to speak.

For some reason the nation is arguing over whether the Republican Vice Presidential nominee is as minimally qualified for office as the Democratic Presidential nominee, and that simply can’t be good for Obama.

The Boomerang keeps on boomeranging

I wrote last week in several venues that this media hysteria over Sarah Palin would incite a terrible backlash, manifested in furor expressed at the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, etc., the climb in the McCain-Palin polls, and a surge in Republican fund-raising. I think that has already happened. An outraged Chris Matthews or snide Andrew Mitchell or disappointed Anderson Cooper should in toto  be worth 2-3 points for McCain.

For some Pavlovian reason, the media’s talking heads still harangue about Palin’s oration being written by a speech writer, as they send hundreds of reporters scurrying to Alaska to talk to the sorry miscreant brother-in-law trooper. No such emissaries were sent to inquire about Biden; when a freelance inquirer like Stanley Kurtz tries to wade through the Obama archives, he’s met with institutional obstacles. Isn’t there one honest person in the media who will stand up to the madness, and cry “ENOUGH!”?

My favorite example was the dour CNN reporter interrogating the Palin former brother-in-lawyer trooper. Even he seemed taken back at the fellow’s maze of transgressions, as we inadvertently learned that, as a state trooper, the ex-brother-in-law was drinking on the job, shot a moose out of season, really did Taser his step-son, and is now married and divorced four times. The question is not whether Gov. Palin worried that this miscreant should be fired, or why the poor trooper went public, but why CNN itself thought it could extract anything negative about Palin after talking to this confused employee. If anything, the entire episode was a reminder how state bureaucracies and employee unions have conspired to make it impossible to fire anyone for anything.

In the Palin case, there seems a sort of the straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back phenomenon about the sheer hypocrisy of the elite liberal media. For decades they have been championing the independent, audacious woman, which, we learn, only meant any female that toed the hyper-liberal, secular, pro-abortion, affirmative-action, big government, more entitlement, and power-couple professional agenda. But more importantly, we learn that there is a gatekeeper sect who adjudicates who is a proper feminist and who is not, and its top rung is limited to an New York-Washington DC economic, political and journalistic/media elite, with auxiliary status accorded to the southern California and Bay Area wealthy celebrity crowd.

Perhaps Andrea Mitchell summed up the assumptions best when she explained why no sane feminist would vote for McCain/Palin: “She is not appealing to the same women who were really voting or supporting Hillary Clinton on ideological issues but they think that they can peel off some of these working class women, not college educated, who, the blue collar women who were voting for Hillary Clinton and may be more conservative on social causes.” But wait, Sarah Palin is college educated—with the same degree BA degree that Andrea Mitchell received—at least if non Ivy-League University of Idaho still counts in the mindset of New York and Washington.

As I wrote last time, one artifact of this creepy frenzy is reexamination of how today’s uberwoman really makes it to the top. And the answer is revealing since it is surely not the way Sarah Palin did, with the small-town, rural Alaska, Idaho BA, five kids, calloused-handed, snowmobiling husband resume.

Who Will Police the Feminist Police?

So I invite readers to play a small game with me, and recall in various fields as many liberal feminist icons as they can, especially in politics or the media. Ponder their pedigrees and then speculate just how they reached their present celebrity and influence.  And, lastly, ask whether it has anything to do with the much reviled old-boy patrimonial lineage or the much caricatured old-boy matrimonial connections. Here I mean again politicians like Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Mary Landrieu, Nancy Pelosi, or a media person like Campbell Brown, Gail Collins, Andrea Mitchell, or Sally Quinn.

Let’s briefly collate some, and then see just how many powerhouse-feminists were either (a) themselves the daughters of powerful politicians; (b) married insider politicians or government officials, or influential media figures, or (c) inherited substantial money or found plenty of income by marrying wealthy men who energized their careers.

An Ode to Palin

I predict we will be astonished that in comparison to their normal cursus honorum, Sarah Palin’s up-by-the-bootstraps background is itself nothing short of astonishing. Here, I don’t wish to suggest that one finds enormous success without talent, or is to be criticized de factis for being lucky by birth or in marriage, only to suggest that all these woman who themselves tsk, tsk Palin should take a deep breath and ask themselves whether they would have made it as Vice Presidential candidate should they have shared the Palin background.

The View from the Distant Shore

Apparently the federal government is going to open up coastal waters for wind turbines. But we all know that in key places off the coasts of Massachusetts and California suddenly we will hear that the windmills are either dangerous, harmful to wildlife, uneconomical, and any other reasons to stop these obstructions from marring once scenic views from the living rooms of the blessed. Here I think the left has it all wrong: with new horizontal drilling techniques, it would be far less conspicuous to go after gas and oil.

Letters….

Lawyers Again

Many readers questioned my suggestion that the Democrats should try nominating from a field far wider than just lawyers. I have nothing against lawyers (my mother was an appellate court justice and I remember her advice that “a competent honest lawyer is a treasure”.) My point is only that modern legal training, given the nature of our now hyper-litigious society, should not become the only requisite background for Presidential candidates. I think that worry was no exaggeration, since every Democratic nominee for both President and Vice President, since Jimmy Carter (with the exception of Al Gore who did not finish law school), has been a lawyer. Again, the point was really presidential diversity, not that legal training is not valuable.

Partisanship

I don’t think my comments about Palin are partisan. Read what David Frum, Dr. Laura, Peggy Noonan, George Will and a host of other conservatives have written about the choice. Whereas, as one reader noted, a Michael Savage can tear her apart, or a Charles Krauthammer can worry over her qualifications, I don’t think Democratic pundits expressed worry over Joe Biden, although his own past had plenty of reasons to evoke worry, whether we talk of plagiarism, invented bios, terrible performances as a Senate judiciary inquirer, or hare-brained foreign policy ideas, and so on.

I don’t know yet how Palin will do on the stump as a candidate; I do know her Middle-America credentials and conservative ideas have sent a particular elite into apoplexy not seen since the Clarence Thomas appointment. And why powerful conservative women or independent black intellectuals do that to the liberal mindset (who should applaud the success of “the other”), is an interesting question all in itself.

Robert Novak

I have been following both the medical problems of Ted Kennedy and Robert Novak very carefully, perhaps because my mother Pauline Davis Hanson, an appellate justice at the Fifth District in California, died, in perfect health, in her sixties in 1989 from a malignant brain tumor— initially (her tumors were removed twice by surgery) wrongly thought to have been a benign meningioma.

It was a terrible time, and I now remember most of it as a blur as I camped out for months in the university library (in the days before the internet for me) reading every scholarly article I could find on the typologies, courses, and treatments of various brain tumors, and then trying to cross-reference that information with dozens of surgeons and oncologists. In the end, all was for naught. And I still second-guess myself daily that I might have erred in directing her to a particular course of treatment, among the very many experimental regimens that were offered in the late 1980s, that unfortunately not only did not bring a cure, but made things far worse—and caused her a great deal of discomfort from the effects of that particular toxic chemotherapy.

So I hope both Kennedy and Novak can beat the diagnoses—even if they prove to  be glioblastomas, which, unlike meningiomas, are not so encapsulated and never benign. I disagreed adamantly with Novak on Iraq, and, decades ago, thought both his politics and manner in presenting them were often unnecessarily over the top. That said, I have always liked him, even more so in recent years, since he has a twinkle in his eye, was of good humor, and never seemed to have held a grudge.

I once watched an interview with him about his newfound Catholic faith and found him sincere and at times moving. I read his memoir and, again, found his candor and ‘prince of darkness’ humor admirable. For me the heavies in the Plame affair were two: Joe Wilson who simply could not tell the truth, and exaggerated almost everything he came into contact with, in flamboyant and obnoxious style; and Richard Armitage who knew from the beginning, that he, not Scooter Libby, had first been told about Plame’s status and passed it on to others—and yet reminded publicly silent about it while someone else was demonized for just those supposed transgressions.

So I hope both Novak and Kennedy can beat these tumors and survive well through their eighties—possible perhaps given recent enormous breakthroughs in the treatment of such tumors.

Good luck to both and God bless them!

Palinomania

If the post-Speech reaction of the talking heads at CNN, PBS and MSBNC, or the op-ed ravings of Gloria Steinem, Maureen Dowd, Eleanor Clift or Sally Quinn are any indication, the Secret Service better enlist the Alaskan National Guard for help ensuring the Alaskan Governor’s safety.

A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.

When Palin talks about her present life it sounds as authentic as Biden’s showy populism came off as false. Enraged feminists are apparently the gatekeepers for less well-educated American women, who are supposed to have 0-1.5 children not 5! Their husbands must be professors, lawyers, CEOs, editors—not snowmobile champions, union members, oil workers, and fishermen—or, worse, all in one! And unlike a Pelosi, Quinn, or Clinton, Palin, God forbid, did not rely on a powerful, wealthy husband or father to energize her career. Worse still, she took no women’s studies class, never attended the Ivy League, and shoots moose. The danger is not just that Sarah Palin could win McCain the election, but she could expose the entire flimsy structure of doctrinaire liberalism as the hypocrisy—and chauvinism—it has become.

Dumb and dumber

At about the time that the Republicans were making the case that liberals were hyperpartisan, a little unhinged, and out of touch, hundreds of nutty demonstrators were outside the convention screaming in the usual street theater mode about war crimes et al.—even as Joe Biden announced that when elected, he and Obama may well seek out Bush administration officials to try them for crimes!

Two nations….

The Geraldine Ferraro Democratic Vice Presidential nominee appointment was an inspired stroke of genius that advanced the cause of feminism; Palin’s was tawdry tokenism.

Edwards was a social reformer brought down by the tabloids; Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is white trash and fair game.

Insulting “small town mayors” and “good looking” women is funny; suggesting that “community organizing” is often a farce is a felony.

Obama’s violation of drug laws with a “little blow” was youthful exuberance; Palin’s husband’s DUI was more proof of a working-class messy family.

Joe Biden bravely continued as Senator after the tragic death of his wife and daughter left his injured young sons with a single parent; Sarah Palin selfishly shorted her children by running for VP and endangered her infants by flying while pregnant.

Criticizing Clinton’s engaging in sex in the oval office and lying about it to the American people were once “the politics of personal destruction”; lying that Sarah Palin might not have been the mother of her 5th child is the mere overreach of the blogs caused by the improper vetting of the McCain campaign.

This all reminds me of the 2000 campaign when the media beat the dead-horse of Bush (Yale BA, Harvard MBA) as the lousy, lazy C-student, when, in fact, Al Gore’s undergraduate record at Harvard was full of C’s, F’s at Vanderbilt Divinity School (dropped out), and C’s at Vanderbilt Law School (dropped out). The point is not that quitting professional schools is necessarily a sign of anything, but rather once again that the media is shown to be bending and inventing facts for their higher purposes of liberal utopianism— a continuation of some half a century when we remember the “dumb” Ike floundering before the  “brilliant” and “witty” Adlai Stevenson (who flunked out of Harvard Law School, a fact hidden from the public for decades.)

The Poverty of the Legal Culture

Every Democratic Presidential and VP nominee of the last thirty years, with the exception of Al Gore (law school drop out), has been a lawyer—Obama (s) and Biden, Kerry and Edwards, Gore and Lieberman, Clinton (s) and Gore, Dukakis and Bentsen, and Mondale and Ferraro. And while Carter was a failure, he at least brought a different perspective from someone whose professional training was argumentation.

The Republicans, at least, understood that legal training is not a prerequisite for the Presidency (one in law doesn’t build things, grow, defend, or create anything). The Democrats need to branch out, and find a Reagan, Palin, or McCain. Had the Bushes and Cheney been lawyers, I doubt they would have been elected. I am not suggesting that the products of modern law schools are not articulate, clever, used to arguing both sides of an issue, often rhetorically adept, and attentive to detail; but all that is part of the problem: they simply rarely wade out and solve problems rather than postfacto examining and litigating those who do.

All About  Race, All the Time

Two truths have emerged: after promising to be the postracial candidate, Obama evokes race constantly; after suggesting McCain will, he hasn’t yet.

Remember this from Obama: “So what they are going to do is make you scared of me. You know he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like those other presidents (sic) on the dollar bills.”

Or this Obamism:  “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Or this in Berlin: “I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

Or  his slur of his grandmother as a “typical white person” or the Pennsylvania “clingers” nonsense. No need to go into  the rest of the Obama racial stable: Rev. Wright’s racist outbursts; Father Pfleger’s creepy rants; Michelle’s more subtle “they” “raised the bar” complaints, or Barack Obama’s own promises to fund more “oppression studies” as a result of the “tragic history” of the United States that requires “reparations” in deed, not just word.

And then, of course, there are the self-appointed spokesmen from the nut-fringe, racists like Ludacris or Diddy who have weighed in with creepy attacks on McCain and Palin. Here I include the ever crazy Howard Dean. Remember this from the Chairman of the Democratic Party: “If you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in the (chuckles) Republican Party, because we just give more opportunity to folks who are hard-working people who are immigrants and come from members of minority groups.”

Then there are the op-ed writers weighing in on cue, like Philadelphia Daily News columnist Fatima Ali: “If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness — and hopelessness!”

Or this from Harold Meyerson (who earlier accused Hillary and Bill Clinton of playing the race card) in the Washington Post: “In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.”

Or Bob Herbert’s fantastic claim that a McCain ad showing Obama speaking in front of the Berlin Victory Column was really a racist attack juxtaposing the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa as phallic symbols to scare the public about black male/white women coupling. About all Herbert revealed was that the New York Times columnist can’t distinguish America’s best known obelisk from a European monument to Prussian militarism.

Bottom line: expect more of the race card, especially if Palin gives the Republicans a bounce after the convention—and anyone who objects to it will be preemptively charged—of course—with racism.

The Great Liberal Crack-up
Sarah Palin has not even been widely known nationally for a week. We await her speeches, interviews, and grace or lack of it under fire. There will be examination like none other.

Yet in anticipation, the liberal establishment has gone simply haywire this last week. Joe Biden—anyone who has followed his career knows that it is only a matter of time before he makes something up about himself, says something inane, or claims something is true that is not—has announced her “good-looking,” in a way he once dismissed Obama as “clean.” (You see, most others lack Biden’s brilliant intellect, and so only advanced on their looks, which he apparently acknowledges through his own hair transplants as marginally important in politics).

The former head of the Democratic National Committee, Don Fowler announced that Hurricane Gustav was God’s payback to the Republicans—apparently not so unusual a liberal quip since caring Michael Moore hyper-ventilated about the same phenomenon. Their point apparently is fourfold: 1) people who believe in God get ironic payback; 2) it’s nice to see political opponents’ best laid convention plans disrupted by natural disaster and Obama helped; 3) My God!—there is no Obama post-convention bounce!; 4) who cares about what happens to millions in Gustav’s path?

It did not take a vicious Andrew Sullivan and the Daily Kos long, in despicable fashion, to start directing our attention to pictures of the Palins’ sixteen-year-old daughter, with the unhinged suggestion that she was really the mother of Sarah Palin’s recent child—all this from liberal humanists who lecture the nation hourly about Rovian politics. In their world of the self-anointed, the filthy ends of smearing a teen-ager always justify the noble ends: who cares about destroying the reputation of the Palin family if it brings us the Messiah? (Watch the retreat to victimhood when the untruths from these purveyors of slander are exposed as absolutely false; it will be something like: if you allege I’m a smear artist, then you are thereby a smear artist.)

Then terrified feminist columnists, whether at the New York Times or the Huffington Post, wrote furiously that anyone is clearly a  sexist who might suggest that a  woman out of solidarity would vote for Palin—this after the nation has witnessed 18 months of Hillary’s campaign calling for women of the nation to unite, and Obama has raised the issue of race in ways that ensured 95% of the black vote.

You see there are apparently problems for many “powerful” feminists with Palin: she’s a happy mom of five; she made it in the world by partnering with men on her own terms; she likes real physical challenges whether shooting, fishing, or snowmobiling—or running an entire state. Had Palin announced that she was pro-choice, liberal, the mother of one or two children, a graduate from Harvard—and were she not so attractive—we would be hearing about her stature and seriousness.

The liberal mindset is so funny—and so predictable. A Joe Biden or Barack Obama, both lawyers and senators and residents of mansion-like houses, whose associates are for the most part lobbyists, insiders, and wheeler-dealers, claim that they are men of the people. No matter that they both went to private prep schools, had parents of a rather different sort than steel workers (Obama’s were both PhD candidates, Biden’s dad worked for an oil company and was a business executive), and obviously enjoy the good life (few who work at Wal-Mart get hair-plugs or eat arugula). This disconnect is all accepted by the liberal establishment, and encouraged, since elites are supposed to have a speck under their fingernails—but not much more.

Suddenly Palin comes along with a real middling class upbringing (her parents were out hunting when her nomination  was announced), and a husband that is a state snowmobiling champion. We won’t have to worry, in other words, that she will put on spandex and be caught wind-surfing, wearing the obligatory Democratic camouflage and being seen in a duck blind, or fumbling all over herself at the bowling alley. But if the smirks about her looks, family, and inexperience are any indication, liberals find all this a  sort of raining on their parade. (You are supposed to occasionally talk or look middle class—but NOT, God forbid, actually be middle class!). Middle-class concern is a sort of tsk, tsk that allows an Al Gore to fly Gulfstream or John Edwards to have that extra 27,000 sq. ft. of housing.

Bottom line: we are supposed to turn our lives over to a particular sort of lawyer, Ivy-League deity, who knows far better than we how we are supposed to live. If one understands that condescension, then all the talk about race, class, and gender is about as serious as communitarianism was to those bloated figures who used to stand on the podium at the Moscow May Parade. They are, again, means to an end, the end being perpetual power.

In short, Sarah Palin in just a few days has proved to be a sort of nightmarish liberal banshee. We heard how impossible it is to balance work and family (remember the old wonder stories about how Hillary raised Chelsea while being a lawyer?)—but we don’t wish to hear about a working mom with five children. That suggests just too much family solidarity and bliss. We praise the distant middle class, but don’t want  a rural beauty queen and happy governor of Alaska in Washington. We want to agonize about women’s dramas and abortion, but not someone to deliver a child known in advance to have Down syndrome. We want a superwoman, but that means going to Harvard or Yale, not standing in waders on a boat or carving up a bloody moose.

I don’t know what the ultimate political result will be of the Palin appointment. I do know that as Vice President she would be every bit as qualified and experienced as Obama, who, after all, wishes to be President.  But if the first week’s liberal crack-up is any indication, John McCain has just out hoped and changed Barack Obama.

The Hillary voter who saw sexism in the primaries is now examining every word from Obama (“sweetie”) and Biden (“good-looking”). Is McCain still the DC “insider” after Obama nominated the apparatchek Biden, while McCain goes with Palin? The working white class voter is anxiously examining what the Obama hit teams do with a fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, pro-drilling Alaskan mom of five. Is she a clinger? Someone who likes her guns and church?  A “typical white person?”

And the hardcore old white guy of the rightwing base, who has been demonized by the hip Obamatti as staid, boring, and predictable, just played his own trump card—and is now crowing that he has a younger and more charismatic face of his own:  ‘You really want to play the media ga-ga hand?  Ok, I just matched your Obama and raised a Palin!’

The election race for the nth time just started from square one—and in  a year like this that only helps the old war horse McCain.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Let us hope that the Republicans avoid the teary-eyed, drippy stories that almost all these Democratic speakers insist on inflicting on us: in this Oprah world, one would think that there is mass starvation, depression, and general mayhem. In every introduction, we hear that the speaker to come was poor, deprived, and a multifaceted victim. Not since reading the Attic Orators has one heard how horrible life has been to such heroic figures, who nonetheless somehow ended up in such a cruel country with big salaries, enormous homes, and influential jobs.

On Satellite Radio’s Potus station, they are playing clips of conventions long past, and one simply does not hear a Truman, Stevenson, or Eisenhower indulging us with tales of their own brushes with cruelty, illness, death, poverty, etc. and how only their own character allowed them to survive their absolutely singular experiences.

Eloquent Distortions

Did Clinton in his speech tonight really think that Reagan ending the Cold War was part of a 25-year long foreign-policy catastrophe, while his own record of doing nothing much about the World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the attacks on East African embassies, and the USS Cole in bin Laden’s serial path to September 11 was inspired leadership?

I don’t recall Clinton signing a Kyoto Treaty, or giving $15 billion for AIDs relief in Africa, or passing universal health care, or going to the UN or Congress to bomb Serbia, so why attack Bush on such similar topics?

Biden’s speech drew praise, but in candor he was almost on the verge of constant tears and right on the crest of an hysterical wave. And when he talked about McCain’s integrity, I almost choked—given Biden’s past complete fabrications about his nonexistent coal-mining family, serial plagiarism, and crudity when interrogating Supreme Court Justice nominees. Remember this was a politician who once boasted he would like to run for Vice President with McCain and is now accusing McCain of poor judgment, again from someone who voted against Gulf War I, and then flipped several times on the second Iraq war, and then pontificated about his  bankrupt plan of trisecting Iraq.

Why evoke Georgia and Obama—when Obama had a three-strike-out response: 1) initially both sides were equally at fault; 2) then go to the UN and find resolution; 3) then suggest our taking out a genocidal dictator was equivalent to Russia attacking a democracy.

And why would Biden evoke timelines as proof of Obama’s wisdom on Iraq? It only reminds us that Obama wanted all troops out by March 2008 that would have ensured defeat. The only reason why there is a discussion of timelines at all is due to General Petraeus’s success in stopping the violence. The present plan is Petraeus’s; the notion that an Illinois Senator had any input, influence, or effect on it is ludicrous.

Hubris to Nemesis: Obama and his Temple

Why and how did McCain catch up? Let us count the ways: the disastrous European victory lap of Obama’s; the uninspired professorial pontificating to Rick Warren; the deer-in-the-headlights serial responses to the Georgia crisis; and the McCain ads that were as cleverly effective as they were derided as childish by outraged liberals.

But perhaps the greatest consideration is Obama’s Hellenic hubris, which is different than simple arrogance. Hubris is a sort of fit, a haughtiness steeped in delusions of grandeur and divinity that takes over a weak individual, and soon encourages recklessness and overreaching (atê), all culminating in ruin and divine retribution (nemesis).

Go figure: Obama/Oedipus goes to Berlin. There he speaks in front of a grandiose Victory Column commemorating Prussian arrogance (after begging in vain to have a JFK/Reagan presidential moment at the grander Brandenburg Gate). He reviews American sins, revises the history of the Berlin Airlift, and claims (falsely) he’s the first black high official Germany has dealt with before. Then to hysterical applause from 200,000 Berliners, eager for subsequent free music and beer, he prances home, convinced that this was a success rather than an Apollonian trap.

Meanwhile an Ethel in Tulare turns on the TV and sees thousands of Europeans (who habitually make fun of her country) applaud Obama—and makes the logical assumption that they apparently think he is one of them, rather than one of us.

Next, drunk with pride, Obama thinks that such a losing paradigm (again, really a warning from the gods) apparently was not only successful, but will work again in Denver. So he transfers his speech to an outdoor forum, where tens of thousands of raving fans can watch him apotheosize in front of a faux Doric temple and accept nomination.

Isn’t there one sane person on his staff who can stop this divine madness, a single henchman who can whisper in his ear as puts on his golden crown not Vero possumus (”Yes! We can!”), but as was true of returning heroes during  Roman Triumphs—”Respica te, hominem te memento” (”Watch behind you; remember you’re just a man!”)?

The Democratic Ball and Chain

Many readers have written asking why I have given up on the presently constituted Democratic party, at least at the national level (I vote consistently for my local Democratic Congressman Jim Costa). I think a lot of us might call it the ball and chain effect.

There was a time when Republicans were weighed down with a lunatic fringe. I remember as a boy those pink letter-ads that would arrive in the mail, listing prominent Americans from Earl Warren to George Marshall as “reds” and “commies.” The poor Republicans had to deal with John Birchers who were convinced fluoride was a communist plot to sterilize, a la Dr. Strangelove, virile American males. And while the Democratic South was the bastion of Jim Crow, there was a live and let live attitude on the part of too many Republicans about matters of racial separatism that hurt the Party of Lincoln.

But now it is the Democratic Party that drags around a clanky, rusty ball and chain. Ayers and Rev. Wright are typical, not exceptional, furniture in the left-wing study of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton hugs the race-hustler Al Sharpton who was deeply involved in lies, riot, and racism. The vicious Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, just a few years ago, were courted by Democratic politicians as useful idiots to bash George Bush. And so on.

Why wouldn’t Obama have problems?

We are surprised that Obama, in an ideal Democratic year, is running neck and neck? But why so?

The man has only three years of experience in the Senate; yet in that brief window he has managed to be acclaimed its most liberal member. Every northern liberal—Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry—since the centrist JFK simply has not won general elections. Now Obama, who only shed Ayers and Wright when forced to by popular outrage, has picked whom?

Yes, another northern liberal with the third-most liberal ranking in the Senate. Neither can appeal to red-staters on the basis of centrist positions, or past military service (I think this is the first election that a Democratic ticket did not have either a President or Vice President that had been in the armed services, at least since the 1940 ticket of Roosevelt and Wallace ; compare the heroic service of a George McGovern or Lloyd Bentsen), or executive experience in the business world or as a governor. Given all that, it is surprising not that Obama has not capitalized on a Democratic year, but rather has not already blown it altogether. Bottom line: what got Obama here was fluff; apparently what must finish the race is not more fluff; ergo…?

Obama’s Dilemma

Obama now has hinted that he won’t hope and change his acceptance speech (a sort of damning admission ipso facto that his prior fluffy orations were, well, fluffy). But the problem is that ‘hope and change’, the teleprompter, and the Rev. Wright cadence, mixed up with white guilt, African-American pride, and weariness with the Clintons got him here. If he is wonkish, then he is not different from better informed wonks in his party; if he is an attack dog, then he is not the transcendent healer; the Clintons are gone (but not forgotten). In other words, to win Obama must do something unaccustomed to what got him here. He may, but I suspect he won’t and will instead sound like a saner John Edwards.

I was watching Sen. Obama speak on the stump the other day. After the hope and change mantra, he walked around the stage, unsure, and with Dan Quayle’s cartoonist spiraling eyes. The audience was baffled, a sort of collective quiet ensued: “You mean this is what all that uproar was about?”

Stanley Kurtz

I was surprised to see the Obama people call Stanley Kurtz “a slimy character assassin,” “smear merchant,” etc. for trying to figure out exactly what former terrorist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama were doing in their tandem distribution of foundation monies to various community action groups. Chicago’s Milt Rosenberg evening radio program is hardly a forum for extremism, but a reflective evening of cultural discussion. The very notion that a Presidential candidate’s staff would urge his supporters to call a radio show and disrupt and complain about a guest is Orwellian.

I know and respect Stanley Kurtz. He has a Harvard PhD in anthropology and is a meticulous scholar and a soft-spoken, circumspect journalist. He is engaged in legitimate inquiry and trying to find textual support for a nebulous relationship involving the possible next President. Obama should welcome the scrutiny, urge full release of the archives, and then in a professional manner seek to refute Stanley’s conclusions. Their present reaction is not merely shameful, but will prove counter-productive.

Biden—Pros and Cons

Plus Side

He’s been around in the Senate about ten times longer than Barack Obama, and offers age and experience to Obama’s thin (”above my paygrade”) resume and blank slate. Biden understands Washington after more than three decades (Obama made a ludicrous claim when he announced today that “Joe Biden… for decades…has brought change to Washington.”).

He has endured personal disasters and crises with courage and resolve, both the tragic death of his wife and daughter, and his own brain aneurisms. He can be blunt, and is used to the Beltway braggadocio, and as the old stag can advise Bambi about the ways of the forest. He’s run two campaigns, so Biden’s negatives are already out there, and there will be few new surprises. He can start in mediis rebus, unlike a Quayle in 1988 or Edwards in 2004. He’s friends with Hil, and might have a good chance to woo her voters back. While a liberal, he’s not in the Barbara Boxer/Harry Reid Pluto orbit.

Downside

Some “hope and change!”

I don’t see how anyone can attribute singular foreign policy expertise to Biden. He is all over the map on Iraq—take Saddam out; my perfect war is now your fouled-up peace; hurrah for the elections; it’s now George Bush’s war; the surge worked; etc. Each new position was always predicated on the perceived pulse of the battlefield, and the assurance that no one amid the pontifications would check to see that his latest sermon was usually at odds with his of last month. Biden voted against Iraq #1 in 1990-91, and for Iraq #2, so let Obama figure that out.

I’ve written too many dissections of Biden’s idiotic idea of trisecting Iraq. Every one of Obama’s criticisms of Hillary on the war could be trumped in the case of Biden, perhaps quieting him about hammering McCain for wanting to take out Saddam. Biden’s inquisition of Justice Alito is now the locus classicus of Senatorial arrogance and self-absorption—but not surprising given his prior unprofessional hit on Justice Thomas.

The problem is not just his past record of plagiarism or silly gaffes, but the continuing hubris that fuels such corner-cutting and logorrhea. Biden is affable and smiles, but listen closely to what comes out of his mouth; it often is  wierd, whether silly or savage, rather than “scrappy”. If Obama thought he was getting an old pro, scripted explicator likely to contrast with his own gaffes or unteleprompted disastrous declarations, think again: Biden will match Obama, slip for slip, gaffe for gaffe.

Pundits keep evoking his more embarrassing evaluations about Obama as comparable to Vice Presidential Pick George H.W. Bush’s early dismissal of Reagan tax cuts as voodoo economics in the 1980 primaries. But Bush never said, in the manner of Biden, that Reagan simply was not qualified to be President, or boasted that he would be honored to run with Jimmy Carter. So there is a lot of material for McCain ads (cf.#1: Biden praises McCain, and trashes Obama).

More concretely, we now have two lawyer-Senators, neither with executive experience, or any knowledge of the private sector. Both are liberal–no southern or Midwestern governor here, or even Hillary’s latest blue collar reincarnation.

Both simply left law school and abruptly ended up in politics and the rest is history. Their shared frame of reference is the collection and spending of someone else’s money. Delaware won’t offer too many electoral votes, and I question punditry that suggests “working-man” Biden will really ensure nearby Pennsylvania.

Bottom line: other than the fact that VP won’t matter that much by November—unless Biden does something analogous to what ended his two earlier Presidential runs—Hillary would have better united the party, more likely picked up the independent voter, and her advantages and savvy far outweighed the problems of leashing Bill. After all, she got more primary Democratic votes in one state than did Biden in his entire campaign, and would have offered the ticket another historical first.

Look to McCain to pick up 20% of her votes–and watch her facial expressions as poor Hil professes her hope for an Obama win.

Olympian Afterthought

To the extent the Chinese put on a splendid Olympics, it was due to their uncanny emulation of Western organization, protocols, and economics. To the extent they did not, it was due to their rejection of Western notions of freedom and human rights.

The Europeans, for all the hype, were boorish, time after time—whether the Brit middle-distance runner taunting his opponent, or the Spanish racist eye antics. Often they seemed just creepy, like the Swiss male beach volleyball team.

After watching the Olympics, one is always reminded that the US is a veritable UN, but one that works. Our coaches and athletes are from all over the world, to the extent that it is almost impossible to ascertain what an American looks like—not true of almost all other countries.

And in sports like swimming, basketball, and track, again and again winning non-American athletes, well, turn out to be sort of Americans, given their frequent training and residence at American universities and colleges.  No decline of America evident here.

A Few Embarrassments:

The robotic and exploited underage Chinese gymnasts;

The crass track and field post-event interviewer Bob Neumeyer, who insisted on jabbing his mike in the faces of the recently defeated with questions that were as stupid as they were cruel;

Why the hours of diving? Finally left the television on, conked and used it as Sominex…

The Tragedy Continues

McCain is already in mid-August matching and sometimes besting Obama in the polls. It should not have been so.

Gas prices, the economy, Iraq, Bush Derangement Syndrome, lack of energy production, Republican scandals in Congress, out-of-control spending, the Bush dunce appointments like Scott McClellan and the Texas crowd, all this and more created a sort of perfect storm for conservatives. Meanwhile, a disenchanted electorate was mesmerized by a new Pied Piper from Chicago-town who pranced in promising deliverance, while poor, pant-suited ‘ole Hil was crying out to the hypnotized, lockstep villagers in a scratchy voice, “Wait,wait! He’s dangerous!”

So the Democrats went with the Pied Piper who is leading them over the precipice. They wanted a post-racial, landmark candidate, a sort of Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice topflight national figure, but with a hard liberal edge.

Instead they got “typical white person” and “clingers” rants, the nut Rev. Wright (whose long-awaited literary masterpiece should soon be out) and the nuttier Father Pfleger, one too many preemptive-victimization “they will play the race card on me” whines from Obama, Michelle’s “raise-the-bar”, “downright mean” and “no pride” resentments, the Clinton-Obama 19th-century Race Wars, the lop-sided ‘it’s OK for some to vote 95% along racial lines, but not for others along 60%’ sophistry, the peripheral lunatic “black house” rants by Ludacris (of Obama’s I-pod fame) or Bob Herbert (of Leaning Tower of Pisa architectural expertise), and more still. And remember, as Obama slips in the polls, given his lack of content, expect that the current tough-guy, bash’em strategy to easily descend into race once more. Apparently Obama each morning gets up and thinks, “How can I give Sean Hannety more talking points for his evening barrage?” and “Have I done enough for Rush today?”

The Democrats wanted a cigar-chomping populist who could portray the Republicans as elitists who stomped on the Joe little-guy. Once again they got a flashier version of a John Edwards-John Kerry-Al Gore preachy liberal, who whines about the price of arugula and thinks stepping off a jet in shades and polo shirts is an Esquire photo-op. The backdrop to Obama’s European rock tour, after all, was Edwards ‘two-nations’ scandal and Al Gore’s jetting between motor-running, on-the-tarmac SUV and lake yacht.

The Democrats wanted a can-do, help-the-middle class doer (sorta like Hillarysoft 4.0 in Pennsylvania), who some day might drill more cleanly than the polluting Russians and Arabs, keep the money at home, and restore US yes-we-can pride. Instead, once again they got the worldview of the Santa Barbara estate-holder/Greenwich Village Bohemian: Drilling would spoil our ocean views or is messy and icky; my gas-guzzling Volvo SUV is not as crass as those awful Hummers; my Gulfstream V sermonizing is vital, your NASCAR and jet skies are Neanderthal. The Democrats hoped “Sí, Se Puede! meant no more fears about drilling, more nuclear plants, turbines, and everything else under the sun to produce power, not Nancy Pelosi on a failed, “I’m saving the planet” book tour as Congress vacations.

The die-hard savvy Democrats (some still exist) wanted a brawler and wade-into-crowd fiery Truman. They got instead a prissy (and masterful) Teleprompted day-time soap actor, whose impromptu brand is now a string of “ahs, ums, huh? You know’s”. What they failed to note was that a Truman or Eisenhower couldn’t speak on the podium a hoot, but they were great in off-the-cuff repartee. And in the long run that is better than blow-dry platitudes. McCain can’t lecture a lick, but in the melee and tussle, he’s actually quite good. Ask Rick Warren.

If you go the Chicago route (always unwise), then at least go the Mayor Daley way, the guy who exudes the city-that-works ends justify the dead-voter means. But an Obama would choke on Daley’s cigar or even a Mayor Washington’s Big Mac. So what Democrats got instead was all the Chicago downside—the Tony Rezko shenanigans, the Trinity race-hatred, the loony left Ayers/Pfleger ranting, the shady house/yard deals—without the boilermaker, sweaty competence.

Democrats wanted a bison and got Obambi, whose new ‘take no prisoners’ rhetoric in front of the VFW sounds like the Italian army in North Africa not the Desert Rats. Just imagine had Obama written “Dreams From My Grandmother” about a working-class white woman who moved to Hawaii sacrificing her all, stressing integration, conciliation, character, and hard work (all true), rather than future career-in-mind idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father? Had he done the former, he would have gotten a small advance, few sales—and now bankable proof of his character, rather than money, sales—and an embarrassing revelation of his PC credentials. Harvard Law Review is as essential to wowing a tiny irrelevant Eastern elite as it is meaningless to proving to mid-America that you can easily size up a thug like Putin, see through Euro-trash nonsense, or get some energy leverage back from the mullahs and House of Saud.

The Democrats expected an in-the-tank liberal press to publish charts and graphs of how the “progressive” FDR Obama was better for the blue-collar-worker than the Tom Dewey Republican. Instead they got the last gasp of the 1960s spoiled-brat loudmouths, ranting and frothing how an Obama could at last reify their own narcissistic, guilt-ridden pretensions. The amen-stable at Newsweek, for example, would not have been hired there as copy-editors in the 1960s. If Chris Matthews thinks his tingle up the leg giddiness helps Obama, or Sen. Obama’s race speech is the new Gettysburg Address, he doesn’t know Bakersfield or Dayton. A Keith Olbermann rant is a veritable McCain campaign ad.

I like Barack Obama. He’s a good father, husband, hard-working and refreshingly pleasant sort, enormously bright and a gifted speaker. He doesn’t need the faux-Trinity Church cadences and falsetto black-preacher style to come across as sincere and well-meaning. I think he really does believe that he simply jump-started a Chicago political career using the race card on the way to becoming a liberal Illinois Senator, on the way, in turn, some day to a centrist Humphrey-like national candidacy—and that such contortions were just politics as usual and not disingenuousness or worse.

But something has gone terribly wrong with the Democratic hopes and dreams. Obama, ten points behind Hillary last autumn, ran to get experience, so that in eight years after the Clintoni’s third and fourth terms, a three-term Senator, with campaign savvy, and a long, not-too-liberal voting record, in his late fifties, would have a landmark Presidency. I don’t think that he imagined that anyone would ever really believe the teleprompted hope and change vacuity, and ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’ gears and levers. Now he is the ultimate “Being There” phantasm.

Bottom Line? Watch the Convention. Obama will, of course, still be nominated, but Hillary will play Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Joan of Arc all in one—and to the hilt.

The tortoise crawls on…

Citizens of the World at the Olympics

Obama, like Socrates, announced in Berlin that he was a citizen of the world. We see many such citizens at the Olympics, but I am not sure I would wish to be counted among them.

There were the Chinese hosts, staging a Triumph of Will-like opening ceremony with Red Army soldiers, and computer-enhanced, Cecil B. DeMille backdrops. Tiny girls, some apparently with their baby teeth, were passed off as 15-year olds in the gymnastic competitions. A Newsweek or Time was not about to do an expose such a gargantuan Olympian fraud—not when journalists were muzzled or deported.

The utopian Europeans were, well, Europeans, eager to point out the pimple on the American nose, blind to the wart on their own. So the Spanish posed in group portraits with fingers pulling at their eyes, mimicking the Asian look of their Chinese hosts—just the sort of racism that they usually allege boorish Americans engage in.

Fast forward to beach volleyball. The Swiss duo, defeated by the Americans, were classic poor sports—Jan Schnider alternately whining, pouting, and bragging in the worst sort of showmanship. The French swimmers boasted, in empty fashion, of the defeat to come of the Phelps and the Americans. And so on. If we sometimes imagine that collective European utopianism and sermonizing are psychological recompense for rather self-indulgent, self-absorbed private lives, no better window exists on that than at the Olympics.

A Purpose Driven Obama on Justice Thomas

In tonight’s Rick Warren interview, I don’t know why Obama chooses to insult a Supreme Court Justice at a religious forum, but his comments that Justice Thomas was not qualified to be on the Court were revealing. Why would Obama think, given his own credentials, that he was better qualified for President than Clarence Thomas was for the Supreme Court?

As far as working at University of Chicago Law School, the real question is how is it that Obama, without any major publications, would be qualified to teach law at Chicago? There were literally thousands of law professors who would not be hired at Chicago, even as adjuncts, who had far more impressive records of scholarship than did Barack Obama. His other comments on the Court were incoherent: Roberts gave away too much power to the executive branch—but no examples follow  as evidence (especially not the FISA laws!). Scalia is bright (after all, he taught at Obama’s Chicago, we are told), but he too shouldn’t have been appointed.

More on the Warren Interview—St. Nuance

One is struck by Obama’s postmodern worldview. There are no absolutes, just nuances and contexts that preclude certainty.  Evil for Obama: “A lot of evil’s been perpetuated based on the claim that we were fighting evil.” Could he be specific where we have perpetrated “a lot of evil?”

Again, the gut instinct for Obama—whether talking about our “tragic history”, or the need for more “oppression studies” or evoking our sins in front of the Germans—is always to start out with the premise of a flawed America, rather than appreciation of the vast difference between us and the alternative. Never a word here about evil abroad, or bin Laden or Dr. Zawahiri. No, instead, we need humility about that “lot of evil” perpetrated by you know whom.

Somehow he is pro-choice, but anti-abortion, for man/woman marriage, but not in the legal sense, not for merit pay, but for rewarding good teachers—all this is in the manner he was against the Russians and for them while for and against the Georgians. His mushy responses were emblematic of the therapeutic style—empathy with everyone, judgment on no-one. We may soon be back to Jimmy Carter, paralyzed how to divvy up the White House Tennis Courts among feuding subordinates. He can’t say much pro or con on abortion, other than there is an ethical and moral element to the issue. And any of you who deny that, well are just darn wrong.   He is against late-term abortion— but only if the mother’s life is in danger. And so on.

After watching some of this, I don’t think Obama will be having many town hall debates with McCain.  However undeniable his calm and presence, he is simply incapable of extemporizing. A written transcript of this interview would be embarrassing, since it would be largely streams of meandering—and, but that, ah, you know, that, and, with uh, uh, I don’t think, ah, ah, that, that, I think, that, that, on, on, an issue…”

The Obama Effect

When Obama is asked a question he has not prepped for, he sort of goes into the spinning-eyes mode that one used to associate with the young Dan Quayle in his first weeks on the campaign trail. He knows he should not mouth his postmodern banalities, pauses, and then says something he knows simply won’t work. The wisest three people he knows? The first, of course, is his “raise the bar”, “downright mean” America, and “no pride in America” spouse Michelle. The second? His grandmother, whom he once told American was a “typical white person,” as he exposed her supposed racism. I’ll stop there.

America’s greatest moral failure for Obama? Poverty, racism, sexism—the same old race/class/gender mantra. As someone who just minutes ago walked out of the jammed-packed Selma Wal-Mart, in the poorest sector of a rather poor Fresno County, I would say a more likely moral failure is a sort of unthinking consumerism, where people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have. I didn’t see poverty in the store there today, but a real poverty of the spirit, if the contents of the stuffed shopping carts are any indication.

Obama’s most gut-wrenching decision? Apparently as a state-legislator in a far left-wing district in Illinois, he opposed the war in Iraq! In fact, his “decision” had zero influence on anything other than his political livelihood in a ward of Chicago, where being anti-war was  easy for a liberal politician in the Democratic Party.

Back to the 19th-century

We saw a glimpse of the back to the future world with the neo-czarist invasion of Vladimir Putin. Russia knows the great truth about the West: it will pour a half-million people into the street to protest the United States removing a homicidal dictator to foster democracy, but not a half-dozen to object to Russia attempting to remove a democratic government to foster dictatorship. Absolute standards of morality are passé; for the Left grandstanding about Abu Ghraib brings some sort of psychological recompense for being a blessed Westerner; objecting to Russian or Chinese behavior either is futile or gives no kick to a sense of self-loathing.

The Russians understand the Thucydidean truth that ‘the strong do as they please, and the weak do as they must.’ Putin et al. , as in the case of the Russian leveling of Grozny, have sized up the world—the sanctimonious EU, the blow-hard UN, the self-important World Court—and in response have rephrased Stalin’s quip “How many divisions do they have?” And they are right, of course. Old Gorby has been writing his usual post-Marxist nonsense with barely disguised glee over the resurgence of Russian pride and power. Most Western talking heads on television blather about “Bush and the neo-cons,” “We gave the Georgians the green light,” or “We went into Iraq”, in-between a sort of poorly-disguised respect for raw Russian power.

The only upside to this disaster is that Georgia was not in NATO and thus spared the alliance the humiliation of yawning while a member evoked Article V and learned its allies are out to their accustomed latte.

Child Abuse?

All week I also watched fourteen-something children in China competing in gymnastics, with the assurance that no Olympic committee would ever dare inform the communist party there that it is a making a mockery of international rules. Meanwhile if we are not to hear anything about Tibet, then spare us the cute stories about the Pandas.

All About Race—in Orwellian Fashion

Going through letters and email of the last two weeks, and getting very tired of the supposedly outraged who write in to cry “racist” anytime one worries about the neo-socialist agenda of Barack Obama or his utter lack of experience. We are witnessing a sort of national liberal outrage that, in a year when everything favored the Democrats, Obama is still running near even with McCain—something that therefore must be explained as attributable not to his inexperience, gaffes, inability to speak extemporaneously, and messianic self-image, but instead to American racism.

Consider: Obama on several occasions evokes his race in a fashion other national black figures such as Colin Powell have not, whether addressing Berliners or the campaign faithful (“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”)

He talks of Pennsylvanian working classes as near Neanderthals who cling to their guns, race, and religion. “Typical white person” sums up his grandmother. His minister Wright is an abject racist; associates like Father Pfleger are even worse. He puts the racist rap singer Ludacris in his I-pod, who, returning the attention, weighs in on the campaign in sick fashion. He and his wife evoke the nebulous “they” who raise the bar and allegedly practice racial bias. He lectured on the need for deeds when it comes to government reparations for minorities, and called for more”oppression studies” in our schools. All this and more drove Bill Clinton to near insanity as he complained the “race card” was used constantly against him.

And the reaction? Pundits strain to interpret recent polls, showing that over 90% of the white electorate has no problem voting for an African-American, as somehow racist—at a time when the black voter is polling 90% for Obama. Obama compares his celebrity to Ms. Spears; McCain’s ad that does the same thing is racist, and supposedly, according to Bob Herbert, flashes phallic images of the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa as black/white sexual innuendo—although both towers are not even in the film.

Columnist after columnist talks of the “race” issue, and the white worker who won’t vote for Obama on racial grounds. Let me get this straight: a particular demographic group that rejected Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry is leery of a candidate to the left of all four, no doubt because of the usual reasons (try legitimate concerns about (rather than “clinging” to) defense, taxes, abortion, religion, social issues, guns, welfare, etc.) and yet now is written off as racially motivated?

The purpose of all this? Threefold: To solidify the hard left and African-American base. Two, to play on white guilt, and suggest that a vote against Obama is racially motivated, while a vote for him is likewise, well, racially motivated, but in the positive redemptive sense of alleviating deserved guilt. Three, to preempt the McCain campaign and suggest all sorts of attacks to come will be race-based and therefore taboo.

I worry about all this because it is reaching a saturation point at which the electorate will go into backlash mode, infuriated by the smug elite that constantly questions their character. Another chilling prediction: when this is all said and done, Barack Obama will prove the most racially–manipulative national figure we’ve seen in our lifetime. It didn’t have to be this way: we are currently watching Secretary Rice center-stage deal with the Russians and the last thing on anyone’s mind is her race; ditto Justice Thomas; and the same was true of Colin Powell.

In a strange way, the fact that Obama was not African-American, but only of half -African ancestry and largely brought up by white relatives perhaps explains his racial self-referencing and overcompensation, as he invented a politically-useful hyper-identity, from grafting the Rev. Wright-like cadences to the faux-African-American Chicago credibility. One does not easily throw under the bus what worked in the past, so the problem for Obama is that now the stage is 300 million people, not the politics of race in Chicago: what got him here, from Rev. Wright to all the talk about “they”, must now be shed.

America the resurgent

Beneath all the doom and gloom, what strikes one this late summer is the sheer resurgence of the United States. I am up in the high Sierra this week and decided to drive to a couple of lakes, visit campgrounds, and talk to vacationers, with laptop and ears open. This is not America’s elite at Tahoe or Carmel, but the working classes who drove up from Fresno County to the nearby Sierra National Forest.

One from Mars would be hard-pressed to see poverty. Shaver Lake (50 minutes above Fresno) is a traffic jam of jet-skies, power-boats, water-skiers, and houseboaters churning up $6 a gallon boat gas. The campgrounds have none of the simple tents and cook-out gear of my youth. Instead mammoth SUVS, Winnebagoes, and trailers cram in, with satelitte dishes, plug-in microwaves, and all sorts of kayaks, canoes, and others lakecraft. Every race imaginable was here, every class, every age.

Next I walked around Huntington Lake: the camps—boy scout, religious, and private— were stuffed with boats at the docks, camping gear, and all sorts of conveniences. The parking lots are full of massive 4×4s, double-cabbed trucks, and all-terrain vehicles. This is not the 1930s, crede mihi.

I drive a 2004 Honda Accord with a 105K on it, and feel lucky to have it. The vehicles ahead of me were all in the $40-50K range, half of them towing something more expensive than my car.

I talked to one fellow who was backing his 26-foot sailboat down the lake ramp, via his Honda Ridgeway truck, complaining to me about gas prices and the “Depression”. He said he came up for two days of sailing, a rented condo, and partying. The snacks in his boat would have fed the Joads ten times over. Why the appeal to poverty? He couldn’t afford driving to Yellowstone this summer, he said.

Some summer of our discontent

The War in Iraq is no longer a war as we would usually define it, and the unthinkable is occurring—a consensual society rising in the middle of a nightmarish region. The US military has been superb—despite its top general derided as a traitor, movies, one after another, depicting our soldiers as animals and terrorists, and our politicians declaring that our military was either incompetent or amoral. And yet, here we are with the unimaginable: a working Iraq, and our greatest enemies either dead or in hiding.

The economy should have tanked long ago, we are told. But despite the mortgage collapse, fuel spikes, and spiraling deficits, millions get up every morning and create billions of dollars in goods and services beyond the comprehension of most economists. The truth is that Americans work more efficiently in a climate of legality, meritocracy, and nonviolence than any others in the world.

While the world salivates over our misdemeanors, the Russians threaten Georgia, the Orwellian Chinese lock up whom they please, the Europeans finger point and snooze—and the US just plods along without the slightest of praise. I pass on the other continents where corruption and killing make no news.

Energy

Despite the political acrimony, we can begin to see a WWII-like push to more energy production on the horizon, as we will build nuclear plants, more refineries, drill, conserve, and press ahead with alternatives. Oh, the Obamaniacs will, as in the case of the surge and Iraq, damn these multifarious efforts— and then quietly sign on to them as they gain steam, postfacto sermonizing that their principled opposition in fact explains their sudden success.

The truth is we have been in a collective slumber and are slowly wakening to the reality that the U.S. is blessed with coal, natural gas, and oil. Nuclear power and hydro were once American trademarks. Wind and solar are likewise American specialties. I watch during the week in Palo Alto the so-called nerds of Silicon Valley in cafes as they type and jot; I don’t think there are any smarter, more competent engineers in the world, and their blood is up to find something better than gas.

Tar sands and shale are ubiquitous in North America. All we need is a push, and then the momentum would be unstoppable and the national enthusiasm likewise cascading. We forget that offshore, ANWR, the shelf, coal, nuclear, are not merely mechanisms to greater self-sufficiency, but unappreciated national assets worth trillions in today’s market.

“Tragic history”

I didn’t care much about Obama’s decision not to wear a flag lapel. And I expected the usual cant from him about reparations, the need for more oppression studies, and the feigned charges of racism. But finally when one collates it all up (and here I am thinking about his latest, Michelle-like sermons; try “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged” or “America is — is no longer what it could be, what it once was”), I get tired of it all.

In other words, there starts to emerge a portrait of someone who always thinks first of what is wrong with America and only later what is right. Given his meteoric rise in the United States, one would expect some acknowledgment of what a wonderful country this, without the weepy qualifiers especially given his rudimentary knowledge of how life works in Indonesia, or second-hand, in Kenya.

Yet each time Obama recites American history or mentions his country in the abstract, one of two things follow: either a brief narrative about its protest movements, or some such “not perfect” or “tragic” adjective. I know his handlers, who muzzled Michelle, Trostkyized Ayers, Wright, Pfleger et al, and teleprompted his speeches, can do better, but in their defense they are working against a quarter-century of saturation in which Columbia, Harvard, Trinity and Chicago politics have drummed into him that starting with what is wrong with your country ends up with you doing pretty good by it—a hard habit to break, that siren-song of grievance.

A different election

Some liberal posters note that the world won’t fall apart should Obama win. I agree. But I still believe that we have not seen as liberal a candidate on the national scene since the Henry Wallace Vice Presidency. With two houses of Congress in his camp, Obama’s agenda, to the extent we can ascertain it due to his many metamorphoses, seems the final reification of the European socialist dream: Our top tax rates would reach 62-5%. Inheritance, payroll, and capital gains taxes would spiral. The ensuing cash—to the extent that it materializes given the suppression of aggregate economic growth—would not pay down the debt, but rather fund ever more entitlements, that would in turn increase the Bush deficits, further erode personal responsibility, and add to the national crybaby malaise in which every particular group claims victimization to garner more cash.

We would defer to the UN and EU in foreign policy, back peddle out of Iraq, talk tough on Afghanistan but do less than we do now. And as in energy policy, America would lecture the rest of the world, while doing little ourselves. Nothing has hurt the Democrats more than this image of an America that cries, borrows, threatens to sue, begs for more oil abroad, and then with nose up in the air refuses to put an oil rig in ANWR or another off Santa Barbara. These elites evoke images of fallen aristocrats, strolling on the croquet lawns, flat broke but humiliated by the thought of working.

Under Obama, high gas prices would be seen as good, the higher the less the carbon footprint, the more government-controlled mass transit, and the more the restless American lifestyle is turned down.

Of course, as was the case of Jimmy Carter when his utopianism met the Soviets in Afghanistan, the communists in central America, the mullahs in Teheran, double-digit interest rates, and the genocide in southeast Asia, this latest liberal perfectionism would not last too long, though just long enough to do a great deal of damage.

Europe, as is always the case with the contemporary Left, is the model. And that is scary. On each occasion I visit, I come away struck by the secularism, the scarcity of children, the ubiquity of government, the unassimilated minorities, the weird religion of anti-Americanism that has devolved into jeans on the legs, I-pods in the ears, and venom out of the mouth, the sensualism and gratification of the appetites.

Leftists here seem almost obtuse to European intrusion into the private sphere: do they visit Europe and see the omnipresence of video cameras on corners, on highways? Or government cards and regulations everywhere? Or the degree to which the judicial system simply is not guided by law?

A Final Note

I had a wonderful grandfather, born, raised, and died in the same house, where I still live, who, born in 1890, was absolutely mystified by modernism and especially the 1960s (he still called my bike “the wheel”). Before dying in 1976, although a strong Harry Truman Democrat, he once asked me, “Victor, what will happen when all these crazy people have to take over from us?” I think if one were to collate Al Gore’s lifestyle with his ‘10-years all wind or solar–or else’ rhetoric, John Edward’s personal and professed morality, the radical failure to use our own energy resources, the vapidity cum coarseness of Hollywood, or the antics of a Moveon.org or Media Matters, one could understand his worry and how the twenty-somethings of the 1960s are aging badly. Before they are gone, they will have given us a lot more than Botox and bankrupt Social Security.

A final note. I get hundreds of emails a week on the Tribune column, NRO postings,and here at Pajamas, many of them outraged and worse. I’ve noticed a rule of thumb. Those on the right who are angry, lecture me, and often point out something I missed, an article to read, or a logical fallacy; those on the left are more likely to use profanity, name-call–and, yes, refer to themselves in self-absorbing fashion. The almost unconscious resort to profanity, four-letter words, and quasi-threats is quite astonishing, especially when juxtaposed to the titles and self-referencing that accompanies their screeds.

That too is a legacy of the 60s…

McCain and Obama are essentially even in many of the polls. We all know why—the flip-flops, the evocation of the charge of racial politics, the serial gaffes, the playing up to European crowds, the lack of experience, and public weariness with the media bias, etc.

What should Obama, then, do to reclaim his “hope and change” mania of last spring? I think it is going to be difficult at anytime to elect a Northern hardcore liberal (not since JFK in 1960), even in a year perfect for Democratic politics, but nonetheless in the pursuit of fairness, here’s a blueprint… (in no particular order).

1. Outlaw the use of the word “they.” He recently claimed “they” would evoke the race card, in the manner of Michelle’s serial use of “they” raised the bar. Who is “they”? (The mean University of Chicago who paid the Obamas quite well? The parsimonious state legislature of Illinois? A racist Harvard?). The result of this “they did it” is the image of a sort of whiny elite, well-off victim claiming that a nebulous posse (conservative white Republicans?) is out to get him. Victimization, conspiracies, and whining lose, not win, elections.

2. Avoid sermons: no more lectures about guns, religion, and clinging, or what we eat, how we cool our homes, what kind of cars we drive, how we should pump up our tires, etc. It all comes off as a lean charismatic arugula-eating metrosexual talking down to a nation of obese NASCAR flag-wavers (who outnumber the former by the millions). Play Harry Truman, not Jesus Christ (and get rid of the silly first-year Latin Obama seal; fire the guy who wrote the oceans recede line; demote anyone who tries to get more mileage out of the corny “this is the moment” refrain; and get grainy pictures of a sweating Obama, not that airbrushed haloed Obama gazing off into the powder-blue sky of the sort they photoshop up at the County Fair booth).

3. Europe really doesn’t vote. Obama should have learned that from the disastrous Kerry experience in 2004. What draws tens of thousands out to Berlin (beside free beer and music—and an ugly totem reminding them of lost Prussian prestige and victory over the French) doesn’t necessarily do the same among the American electorate. Most Americans, rightly or wrongly, don’t want to be citizens of the world if that means something akin to the values voiced in the UN General Assembly or lectures from the Euro public.

4. Enough of the flip-flops. Changing course on FISA, campaign-financing, faith-based initiatives, drilling, the strategic oil reserve, late-term abortion, capital punishment, gun control, Iran’s level of threat, the surge, Iraq timetable, et al. may have been what a liberal candidate must do in the general election, but there is a limit beyond which expediency turns to the carnival. Anymore and the public will burst out laughing every time Obama starts a flip-flop with “As I have long said…”

5. Stick with the teleprompter. Almost all of Obama’s gaffes—the 48/58 states, the Pashtun Arab-speaking translators, the 10 years as President, the clingers’ rant, the Rev. Wright praises, the tire pressure sermon, the new civilian Pentagon-sized bureaucracy, the reparations “deeds” promise, all that and more come when he is thinking out loud extemporaneously, and, to be fair, often exhausted. Of course, that is true to some extent of all candidates, but in an inexperienced Obama’s case, the adoring crowds egg him on, and confidence leads to hubris and then onto what the Greeks called atê. I would still “hope and change” it, and play out the fourth quarter rather than expect that a charismatic Obama will dazzle in impomptu rock-star settings. He won’t after the first 30 seconds.

6. Don’t mention race. The public gets it that a racially aware Obama is not Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice, for whom racial solidarity is admirably incidental. It realizes that he looks different from past candidates for President. So he should just cool it and be content with the fact that his race in the past at Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago was no drawback, but often a real advantage—and count his past blessings and move on. Now he should evolve, stick to issues, and not look back at Chicago racial ward politics. Not even in-the-tank CNN and MSNBC pundits really believe that a John McCain is biased, and calling a war hero’s campaign de facto racialist is insane. Obama’s 90% majority of African-American base voters long ago accepted his racial fides thanks to Rev Wright, rappers, and all the rest. They won’t forsake him when he transcends race as promised, but simply sense, as Rev. Wright scoffed, it’s just “politics.” Expect his handlers to look for an Obama staged Sister Soulja moment, or a subtle phase-out of the faux-Trinity Church affected cadences and folksy, southern-spiced mellifluousness that was always somewhat awkward for an Hawaiian-born Barry Obama.

7. Pick an antithesis in every category for VP. The ideal selection for Obama would be crusty, sloppy, blue-collar, non-arugula eating, southern or Midwestern, white, conservative, old, experienced as an executive, and knowledgeable about foreign affairs that would convince Hillary’s old constituency that someone like themselves doesn’t look silly running with Obama. He will have to go the Dukakis/Lloyd Bentsen route. The problem? They’re aren’t that many Hubert Humphrey/Scoop Jackson looking sorts still around in the Democratic Party.

8. Avoid all town meetings with McCain. I know Obama looks hypocritical in side-stepping his promises to meet McCain anywhere, anytime; but, after his gaffes and deer-in-the-headlights pauses and stuttering, now you can see why he backtracked. If he looks unsure with sympathetic interviewers, he will look even worse in a one-on-one contrast with a grizzled war veteran and Senate pro who will cut the ring down to size and haymaker him on the ropes. Don’t let his lock-step worshipers convince Obama otherwise. Sigh, beg-off, quote the Untouchables, boast, threaten, but skip them!

9. Don’t get near the Hard Left--Moveon.org, Michael Moore, the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, the Hollywood Set, etc. They are hungry for a return to power and ego-stroking and will put up with, and explain away, anything from Obama. There is no need to reassure the assured–who in a millisecond can on stage let loose with a creepy obscenity or go ballistic in Bush-Derangement Syndrome fits for a clip on Fox News. In contrast, the election will be won or lost in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, etc. where such extremists hold no sway. To the extent they are unknown, or, if known, mad at Obama, it will only help his campaign. If he wins, there will be plenty of time to have Ludacris play at the White House, hang the Medal of Freedom around Noam Chomsky , or small talk in the Rose Garden with George Clooney. It is not that Obama doesn’t remember Ayers all that well, but rather he simply never existed.

10. Do an “ipsa dixit” with Hillary. Praise her, refer to her, thank her, quote her. Wake up each morning thinking “I must coddle Hillary” and go to bed every evening sighing “I didn’t do enough.” Obama is in trouble with wealthy mainstream Democratic donors, the white working-class voters and professional older women, who can’t quite express how they were sandbagged by Obama, but feel it keenly nonetheless. He needs to assure them all that he adores Hillary (and even petulant Bill). Once the frantic October campaigning begins, he wants a smile on her face on the stump, not the infamous Clintonian snicker. Maybe he should play a Fleetwood Mac song and then on stage do a duet with Hil. All that requires swallowing his swelling pride—and thereby may be impossible.

That’s it—and a nod to fair and balanced.