Obama: Read the Commenters

Never mind about the vapid messianic tone of the Obama campaign.  Never mind about his snobby wife’s disdain for America.  When you get down to specifics this is a pretty left-wing guy, writes The Times’ Gerard Baker

He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

Pretty normal comment, you’d think.  But Baker provoked a number of Obama-heads to respond.

Here’s one:

It is NOT unpatriotic to question your government or your country. It is the most patriotic thing you can do. Barack Obama is bringing my country hope, and it’s the most important thing a president can do for his country.

And this:

Coming from someone who is supposedly liberal and a campaign worker for Mr. Obama, I have not had anything to be proud about this country for until he came along.

A disabled voter:

I am a disabled mother... My fiancé is blind and he is disabled... And I haven’t been proud of my country since Bush took office!

Well, we know where she’s coming from.  And no, Obama isn’t a left-winger, retorts this writer:

Gerard Baker: He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist.
Barack Obama: I believe in the Free Market. I believe in Capitalism. I believe in Free Trade. I am not worried about us being able to compete anywhere on earth with American workers.

Of course, Obama is still fighting for Democratic votes right now.  We’ll get a better idea of his general election agenda in the months ahead. 

But let’s face it.  An Obama adminstration is going to feature another expansion of the welfare state and more national resources under the control of the political sector.

Like I keep saying.  We won’t abandon the follies of the welfare state until it hits the buffers.

"Another Reagan" Wouldn't Run

Today’s Republicans all live in hope of “another Reagan.”  Not a chance, says lawyer Ann Coulter.  It could never happen.  And you can think the campaign-finance laws for that.

I ask: How many Reagans have we lost to campaign-finance reform?

Coulter goes through the progress of Reagan from the first time that businessman Holmes Tuttle approached him with an offer to help finance him in a run for office.

At every step along the way, from the first $1,000 a plate fundraiser (now illegal at the inflated cost of about $7,000 a plate) to the nationwide broadcast of his speech “Rendezvous with History,” his run for the governership of California and his run for president, Reagan and his backers would have been stymied by the limits and the bookkeeping of modern campaign finance law.

It is appropriate, is it not, that the Republican presumptive nominee for president is an author of a campaign finance law.  What a coincidence.  It reminds me of the McGovern reforms of the nominating rules of the Democratic Party after the debacle of 1968.  Funny how McGovern turned out to the first beneficiary of those rules.

Coulter reckons that only four kinds of people can now run for office:

1. High-school fatties like Bill Clinton
2. Billionaires or near billionaires like Mitt Romney
3. Celebrities like Arnold
4. MSM-anointed candidates like McCain and Obama

Er, well yes.  But wasn’t Reagan something of a celebrity in his day?  B-movie actor and TV host?

Back to the drawing boards.

Really Proud of America

Liberals have always had a real problem feeling proud of America.  In fact you could say that the defining mark of an American liberal is that he or she is proudly ashamed of America.

So Michelle Obama’s statement that now, for the first time in her life, she could feel “really proud” of America is unremarkable.  All liberals think and feel similar thoughts until America does what they want for them.

But another Michelle, the notorious conservative “woman of color” Michelle Malkin, wants to know what planet Michelle Obama is living on.  Obama is seven years older than Malkin.

We were both adults when the Berlin Wall fell, Michelle. That was earth-shattering change.
We’ve lived through two decades’ worth of peaceful, if contentious, election cycles under the rule of law, which have brought about “change” and upheaval, both good and bad.

Then there are all the breakthroughs in medicine, communications, and technology of the last generation.

If American ingenuity, a robust constitutional republic, and the fall of communism don’t do it for you, hon, then how about American heroism and sacrifice?

Who couldn’t feel proud of the American response to the Indonesian earthquake, and the private response to Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.

There’s a problem here: a great American problem.  And it’s not America that’s the problem.  It’s American liberals and their snooty disdain for the nation that showered them with benefits and subsidies and made them into privileged Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am elitists utterly lacking in gratitude.

Now that’s an area where we really need “change.”

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.