Clintons Snark on Obama

Our good friends at Clinton Central are shocked, shocked that Senator Barack Obama has been lifting chunks of his speeches out of other peoples’ speeches.  And they want us to be shocked too.  Mark Hemingway retails the Clinton spin weaved by Howard Wolfson:

“Senator Obama’s record as a legislator and a public official is thin. He has not had a long record in public life, so he is really asking us to judge him on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises,”

So, the argument goes, if his rhetoric belongs to someone else, well, you voters know what to think!

Then there is Michelle Obama who is getting an earful from conservatives by  suggesting that America had little for her to be proud about.  Until now.

“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeback,” she said.

Well, you could think that if you believed that all the great achievements of the past twenty-five years were for naught. 

Even though an average American might feel that his country had not done anything lately, it is hard to imagine that this could be true for the daughter of a city pump operator like Michelle Obama who went on to graduate from Princeton and Harvard Law School.

Of course, it is probably a lot harder for the daughter of a white city pump operator to get to go to Princeton and Harvard Law like she did.  So maybe she has a point after all.

All this exquisite outrage is fine, of course.  But the question is: Do the American people give a darn? 

That is why we have elections.

Castro Steps Down At Last

Lefties say the darnedest things.  That’s because they regard the continuance in power of left-wing tyrannical regimes as a natural and harmless thing.  But they hate every moment in power of right-wing regimes, elected or not.

So you’d expect the left-wing BBC to take a benign view of the tyrannical Fidel Castro’s decision to step down after nearly 50 years as the dictator of Cuba.

After taking the line that Castro was provoked into aligning with the Soviet Union by US intransigence, we get to the payoff line.

But Cuba under his rule has made impressive domestic strides.

Good medical care is freely available for all, there is 98% literacy, and Cuba’s infant mortality rates compare favourably with Western nations.

Is it?  That’s not what I hear.  What I hear is that medical care is strictly rationed and only the elite get good medical care.  Even then, of course, Castro has a Spanish surgeon flown in to perform his abdominal surgery.   I hear that Cuba’s infant mortality rates are skewed because questionable infants are aborted in Cuba.  So as to keep the mortality rates favorable.

And as for the literacy rate?  How do you define literacy?  Does anyone know the methodology of Cuba’s literacy statistics?  Or is it a state secret?

In other words, the BBC is talking rubbish.

But, at least, Castro has stepped down.  In the last 50 years he has come as close as anyone can get to ruining his country.  All because, as the BBC says, as an impressionable youth,

shocked by the contrast between his own comfortable lifestyle and the dire poverty of so many others, he became a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.

It might be more accurate to say something like this.

“Like many another ambitious young man of good family down the ages, Castro’s ambition tempted him into the excitement of violent revolutionary activity rather than the boredom of democratic politics.”

Obama's Immigration Problem

It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is a lot more “liberal” on immigration.  That’s partly because the political elite is pro-open-borders.  And partly because the Democrats are the party of Latinos.  And Latinos with relatives back home want their relatives to be able to immigrate to the US.

But Senator Barack Obama has a problem with Latinos.  And the problem is simple.  Latinos don’t like blacks.  For instance, while there remain a few whites who think that blacks are lazy, according to opinion polls, a majority of Latinos think that blacks are lazy.  You’ve got to be carefully taught, and that takes time.

It’s no secret that the major Democratic constituency remaining unexcited by Obama is Latinos.  It’s got to the point, as reported by Hugh Hewitt, that liberal organs like the Los Angeles Times are publishing editorials like "Hola, Obama," to plead with Latinos to get on board the Obama train.

But the strained relationship requires effort on both sides, from Latinos and from Obama.  That means, according to Hewitt that:

If Obama is the Democratic nominee, he will have to bid up the immigration proposals that cratered last year, even above the positions he has already taken.

But a broad majority of the American people strongly resist an “amnesty” on immigration.  So that could but Obama on the wrong side of a big issue.

Of course, if the mortgage meltdown continues, and a recession fully develops, immigration will be a secondary issue in November.

But who knows?

Obama-the-Empty-Suit Day

Funny how our noble punditoriate all manage to write the same story on the same day.

Yesterday, everyone was writing a Valentine to John McCain. Today it’s “Obama the Empty Suit”.

You might think this is shameful, or a sign of laziness. But I think it is the same phenomenon as the idea of the Japanese as one hundred million hearts beating as one.

The fact is that the same idea is always occurring to a bunch of people at the same time. You could look it up.

Let’s start with minor league John Hawkins.

If even Paul Krugman is willing to publicly admit that Barack Obama is a human featherball — a slick, smiling, substance-free empty suit who excites gullible dimwits by repeating the words "change," "unity," and "hope" over and over — then who am I, a mere conservative blogger, to disagree?

Or the rest of us sandlot players.

But then there is the magisterial big hitter hitting the same pitch.Charles Krauthammer. The most remarkable skill in the world is to get people to pay for something that’s available free, he suggests.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

We old veterans would never be taken in by a chancer like that, now, would we?

Even steady base-hitter Mona Charen has noticed the Obama effect. Old wine, new bottle, she reckons, because when you strip the gassy rhetoric away, there’s just same-old same-old.

Much of his rhetoric is lighter than air — almost content-free. It’s the past versus the future, hope over fear, one nation not two, yes we can, turn the page, and so forth. But when you get past the music and really focus on the lyrics, Obama emerges as an utterly conventional, down-the-line liberal Democrat. He claims to be all about the future, but his policy ideas are about as modern as disco and the leisure suit.

Even Jonah Goldberg has surfaced from his book tour to claim that all this talk of unity and coming together was exactly what he has been writing about in Liberal Fascism.

How long will the spell last? Krauthammer reckons it has a ways to go.

My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

Hmm. Mr. Optimist.

Valentines for McCain

It’s Valentine’s Day, so every Republican pundit is sending flowers to John McCain.

Michael Reagan writes that his father would have supported McCain. Ronald Reagan, he recalls, had a real dust-up against Jerry Ford in 1976.

When it was over and Ford had won, what did Ronald Reagan do? He simply went all-out to help Ford win his re-election, as did I and as did my sister Maureen. My dad simply followed his rule of backing the Republican candidate no matter who he was.

Larry Kudlow is for McCain. Why? He’s going to be the next president.

For starters, McCain will have a unified Republican Party — conservatives and all — working hard for him. He’s also going to win over the Reagan Democrats, the Bush Democrats and the Perot independents. These folks demand a strong military, want government off their backs, and are sick and tired of growing federal deficits and out-of-control spending. McCain’s their man.

Listen to Larry Elder. Sure, many Republicans are upset because McCain voted the wrong way on the tax cuts, on ANWR, and immigration.

But aren’t these I-can’t-pull-the-lever-for-McCain Republicans the same people who purport to care about A) the war in Iraq, B) the economy, and C) the Supreme Court?

Even old William Rusher puts in a word for John McCain.

He will be a formidable adversary for the Democrats. As I have warned before, 2008 has all the earmarks of being a Democratic year. The Republicans have held most of the major offices of government for eight years, and lots of people will think it’s simply the Democrats’ "turn." But Hillary, instead of McCain? Obama, instead of McCain? It makes one wonder.

Earmarks? So that’s it, then. John McCain’s our man.

Obama in the Driver's Seat?

After Senator Barack Obama convincingly won the Potomac Primary yesterday, is it time to start selling tickets to the Fall of the House of Clinton, as some wags call it?

Or have the reports of their death been grossly exaggerated?

RealClearPolitics’ resident political scientist and number-cruncher Jay Cost says: wait a minute, chaps. Take it easy with the claims of Obama momentum and inevitability.

Clinton’s losses in the contests are as explicable as any of her losses before or on Super Tuesday. Obama has systematically won states that play to his particular strengths since the Iowa caucus. So has Clinton. Her problem has been that she has not had any good states in the last week.

Of course, he says, there may indeed be momentum kicking in for Obama. It’s just that, given the data, the momentum effect is presently “undetectable.”

Cost analyzes the demographics of the upcoming states and reckons that the advantages for each candidate come out as a wash.

All in all, this implies a rough parity from here until the end of the primary season. Approximately speaking, neither candidate seems to have an advantage in the remaining contests. So, my suggestion to readers is not to get caught up in the "Obama is inevitable" storyline. Minimally, we should all remember how well the "Clinton is inevitable" storyline worked out five months ago!

But for those of us who are not Democrats the spectacle of the Democratic Party tying itself up in knots over race and gender is long overdue poetic justice. (See Maureen Dowd)

As it says in the Bible: Those who live by identity politics will die by identity politics.

At least, it would have said that if modern identity politics had been invented back then.

The Problem Isn't Just McCain

In the aftermath of Senator John McCain’s presumptive victory last week in the race for the Republicans presidential nomination the fur is starting to fly.

It’s a bit disappointing to see folks like writer Mark Helprin, along with Jack Kemp and others, dragged out to spank the reluctant orthodox conservatives into line. It makes you think that the McCainiacs actually want to expel the conservative wing from the Republican Party and reconstitute it as a moderate party.

Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, does have something useful to say. He reminds disappointed conservatives that McCain’s agenda is not so far different from the agenda of the “compassionate conservative” President Bush. Both McCain and Bush are pro-immigrant amnesty. Both are pro-big-government. And when it comes to the judges, well, it was President Bush that nominated Harriet Miers.

If you take the drift of Goldberg’s argument, he is saying that Reagan conservatism ran out of gas about ten years ago. Since then it has been running on the fumes.

On that view McCain is not such a dreadful compromise, especially if you are willing to concede that the official conservative in the race, Mitt Romney, signally failed to catch fire and win the support of the broad Republican Party.

It also points out that conservatives have a lot of work to do before we can hope to return to the American people with a winning message. After all, if a true conservative can’t win the nomination of the conservative party it’s not likely that he could win the support of a majority of the American people.