Obama observations

The Democratic Party has made a mistake. In choosing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for their presidential nominee, Democrats have got themselves one of the very most radical, under-qualified, America-disdaining, elitist, empty-suited, almost cult-leader-like major party candidates ever to run for president.

It's bad enough that pathetic sycophants like Oprah Winfrey call him "The One", or that idiot celebrities line up to make cultish videos in worship to him, or that Soviet-style poster artists make Stalinesque portraits of him -- all completely sincere, and without irony. What is worse is that Obama himself, and his wife, clearly believe these most lunatic fantasies of Obama's most deranged supporters.

The Obamas are remarkable in American political history not because they use messianic language, but because they speak in messianic terms about themselves. Many presidents and candidates for president have used messianic language -- the Bushes, Reagan, Kennedy, etc. -- but they did so in speaking about America and its role in the world and history. The Obamas don't think enough of America to speak of it in messianic terms, but they evidently think enough of "The One" to apply the messiah rhetoric to him.

It goes beyond the vacuous, New Age-y "We are the change we have been waiting for" and one-word slogans of "Hope" and "Change", as if "change" must necessarily mean "improvement". This remark by Michelle Obama in February was a perfect exposition of a totalitarian, messianic vision: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." This is not the language of politics and government in a healthy representative democracy; It is the language of the Bible Gospels appropriated in the service of radical left politics and the deification of an empty-suit politician from Chicago.


The Wright/Pfleger/Ayers revelations may be old news by now, but they led to one of the most unusual developments of this primary campaign: The likely Democrat nominee lost the great majority of those primaries which came AFTER he had become the likely nominee. It was those revelations that brought Obama down to earth, and had they emerged earlier, when he was winning the delegates that made him the frontrunner, he might well be angling for the vice presidential spot today.

But if Republicans have any sense at all, and I believe that they do have some, they will make an affirmative argument for John McCain but also a devastating argument against Barack Obama, that does not focus on Obama's attachments to anti-American, crackpot, racist radicals, but only takes them as a reference point. Obama's real problem may not be that he's had long associations with radicals, so much as that his own most candid statements reveal that he truly does come from their rarified corner of the political universe after all.

There was Obama's San Fransisco fundraiser remark in April that demonstrated his disdain for Bible-believing, Second Amendment-supporting Americans. And this recent remark from Obama is a ready-made campaign ad against him: "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen." What sort of candidate for president even thinks of determining the caloric intakes or room temperatures of Americans, let alone determining such things according to foreign resentments? The sort of candidate who cannot possibly win a national election in America.

Plus which, Barack Obama is a gaffe factory. It is only because he is the favored candidate of the press that he has not already been destroyed by his appalling stupidity like poor Dan Quayle was for misspelling "potato". It must be nice to be Barack Obama and sleep assured that the main press will voluntarily sit on the stories that hurt you, and push the stories that hurt your opposition. But this is not the bad old days of Walter Cronkite's one-man show. There has been an exponential proliferation in the voices heard in American public life today, and the friendlies in the press can't save Obama from himself forever.

If President Bush had miscounted the number of states in the Union, as Barack Obama has -- twice -- it would surely be known to all 6 billion people on earth by now. But Obama has been above blasphemous ridicule for such trifles as failing to remember the number of U.S. states. Or claiming that the Iraq War had taken America's Arabic translators away from the Afghan War, when Afghans do not speak Arabic. Or holding out the 1961 summit meeting between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev as an example of the successful negotiating he intends to pursue, when the Soviets followed it by building the Berlin Wall and placing nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, and when Kennedy himself immediately acknowledged that the summit was a disaster. Or claiming that Roosevelt and Truman negotiated with America's enemies, when they took the hardest line possible against our enemies and expressly rejected negotiation, in their demand of "unconditional surrender".

On many of those issues that are primary ones for a president and commander-in-chief of the United States, Barack Obama's head is as empty as his rhetoric, and the Walter Cronkites can't always cover for him in an age when a free YouTube video can be seen by millions in a day.


Americans distrust a cult, and that is what Barack Obama's core supporters are. Americans abhor deification, and that is what Obama's candidacy does. Americans have little patience for seeing no evil in the world except within the United States, and that is what Obama's worldview shows. And the American people positively hate being told how to live their lives -- especially in the service of ideological pieties and international opinion -- and that is what Obama's policies amount to.

Add to that Obama's index-card resume and stunning ignorance, and Barack Obama is looking very much like a man who will never be president of the United States.