Now It's Obama's Turn

My old Greek friend used to say that you can’t tell the worth of a dog when it’s out hunting. You can only tell when it’s being hunted.

That’s been the story of the McCain campaign. It came to near death a year ago, and they were measuring him for his political shroud. But John McCain never gave up. Now he’s the Republican Party’s nominee for president.

Two years ago, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) set out on Barry’s Excellent Adventure. Against all the odds he beat the favorite in the early primaries and managed to eke out a win against a surging Hillary Clinton. That was Barack Obama out hunting.

But now it’s clear that the Obama campaign is in trouble. Against all the odds, what with the war, the economy, the housing mess, the gas price explosion, John McCain is just behind in the polls, and we haven’t seen the full convention bounce yet.

Today, on the day after the Republican National Convention it is Barack Obama who is being hunted.

Obama supporters should be glad of this.

Up to now, Sen. Obama has been a candidate with a good organization and a great style on the stump. He has introduced the age-old themes of Hope and Change in a new vernacular to a new generation. So far so good. But we don’t elect organizations to office, and we want to know a bit more about what’s on offer than the gauzy vision of Hope and Change. We’d like to know if Obama can lead.

Now that the Obama campaign is in trouble, we are about to find out. How good a leader is Sen. Obama when the going gets rough? Can he revise his tactics? Can he retire broken formations without the tactical retreat turning into a rout? Can he deploy new units into the gaps and advance?

Stay tuned. We are about to find out.

If Obama demonstrates an ability to learn from mistakes and come back stronger than ever he will deserve to be elected president.

If not? Well John McCain and Sarah Palin just spent three days in St. Paul, MN demonstrating that they are ready to rule if Obama isn’t.

The Mom vs. The One

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gave a polished speech last night in accepting the 2008 nomination for Vice President from the Republican Party. This morning conservatives are thrilled and lefties are a-feared.

Obviously Sarah Palin is a great natural political talent with real potential.

But right now I am trying to draw a line down the great cultural divide in this country. It is the divide between women like Sarah Palin and the lefty feminist women that despise her. It is the divide between Christian believers and the lefty secularists that despise them. It is the divide between loyal husbands and fathers that go to work every day to support their families and the Cultural Creatives that sneer at them.

What this adds up to, I believe, is the divide between the culture that celebrates ordinary life, and the culture that wants to escape it.

The life of Sarah Palin is an ordinary life. She went to school, she went to college, she got married and had kids. She supported her husband’s commercial fishing business. Then she got involved in the PTA and got into politics. One thing led to another, and now she is the Vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

The life of Barack Obama is the life of the Chosen One. He was plucked out of a rather messy childhood and chosen. He was sent to elite universities, and became, like the Dalai Lama, or a Janissary, a creature of that special education and training. He has not, at any time in his life, lived or celebrated an ordinary life. He vaulted through temporary occupations: community organizer, part-time university lecturer, non-profit board member. And then he got helped into politics by the Daley machine.

This difference, between The Mom and The One, is a symbol of the great divide in America. The beginning of the modern era saw a huge and influential affirmation of the value of ordinary life. The best life was not Aristotle’s life of the mind, or the warrior (and politician’s) life of honor. It was to work at ordinary life and value it. But in our era, the liberal elite celebrates a life that rises above and utterly transcends the ordinary life in the cult of creativity. Instead of creating a family and children, you create a philosophy, a creative and original work of art, a new vision of society.

Which is best? Which is truth, and which is lie? That is what the culture war is all about. That is what we are fighting about.

Newt ImPales MSM on Experience Issue

Yesterday at the Republican National Conventions it looks like good old Newt had his talking points on the Palin experience issue ready to go.

Confronted by CNN’s Ron Allen worrying that Gov. Palin’s resume is not something we’re familiar with in presidential candidates, Newt unloaded with both barrels.

I don’t know why you guys walk around saying this baloney. She has a stronger resume than Obama.


She’s been a real mayor; he hasn’t. She’s been a real governor; he hasn’t.


She’s been in charge of the Alaska National Guard; he hasn’t.


She is a whistleblower who has defeated an incumbent mayor; he has never once shown that kind of courage. She’s a whistleblower who turned in the chairman of her own party and got him fined $12,000. I’ve never seen Obama do one thing like that.



She took on the incumbent governor of her own party and beat him, and then she beat a former Democratic governor in the general election.


I don’t know of a thing that Obama has done except talk and write.

Hum. I’ts sad that Howard Cosell is no longer with us to celebrate this “telling it like it is.”

Another Camel's Nose Under the Conservative Tent

Some people reckon that the conservative movement is composed of three parts: the social conservatives, the economic conservatives, and the national-security conservatives. Others, like Ken Blackwell, have dvided it into six parts.

1. Social conservatives
2. Christian conservatives
3. Second Amendment conservatives
4. Economic conservatives
5. Philosophical conservatives
6. National Security conservatives

But my question is: Where do the Palin conservatives belong in our movement?

It’s a big question, and I think it is the determining question for the next phase of conservative expansion. We conservatives see a new camel’s nose appearing under the tent and we want the Palin conservatives in our coalition. I mean by “Palin conservative” people from unremarkable origins, people who maybe were in a hurry to get married. People who have Downs Syndrome babies, and pregnant teenage daughters. People who had a DUI in their twenties. People who want to get on with life, don’t have big expectations or big resentments. People who more or less take the world as they find it, but want to go to work, obey the law, play by the rules, and give back to the community.

Ross Douthout and Reihan Salam have addressed this issue in Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. How can Republicans get their head out of the clouds and get their feet on the ground to welcome people like the Palins into the conservative movement?

I don’t like to call the Palin people “blue-collar” or “working-class” conservatives, because that’s demeaning. They aren’t, anyway. They are middle class and think of themselves that way. People who go to Bible church are no longer rank-and-file working class, because the whole point of Bible church is to leave the tribal world of identity politics and enter the great middle class where service and moving out replaces battling for a bare existence and defending the community against injustice and exploitation.

I think all this is very important. I think that, after a Democratic interregnum, Republicans will come back stronger than ever. But first we need to do some thinking. Well, maybe first of all we need to do some listening. What is the Palin candidacy telling us? What do the Palin people want for themselves and America? What can the rest of the conservative movement do to welcome them into the tent?

One thing is for sure. The current liberal sneer-in over the Palin pick is going to boomerang big time. The New York Times today, Tuesday September 2, 2008, had three front-page stories on the Palin daughter’s pregnancy. What is it about these liberals? Have they no decency? As attorney Robert Welch said at the Army McCarthy hearings:

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

But, of course, our liberal friends don’t think that they have “done enough” on Palin’s daughter, or on Palin herself, or on McCain, or on any conservative or any Republican. Indeed, they have hardly begun!

UPDATE: In a blazing denunciation of the Drive-by Media (driving by the Palin family for the last three days and spraying media gunfire on them) Rush Limbaugh just used the notion of “heartland” conservative to describe the Palin conservatives.

UPDATE TWO: Or maybe “fly-over” conservative.

UPDATE THREE: How about “bedrock” conservative?

Sarah Palin, the Real Thing from Alaska

At first blush Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) seems like an unlikely choice as running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

But then you get to watch her speak after McCain’s introduction today in Dayton, OH.

You immediately realize that she is a practiced and confident public speaker. And next you get the feeling that she likes being up on the stage. Unlike some other politicians we all know.

Then you run the YouTube session of her playing a talking head on Larry Kudlow’s cable show, and you realize that she ain’t no neophyte.

In fact, here’s a nickel that says she’s better when she’s off the prompter than the Great Orator himself.

Then there’s Fred Barnes’ report on Palin from last year, when he told the story of her remarkable rise in Alaska politics, marked by remarkable courage and willingness to take on the corrupt Republican establishment. For guys worried about her cojones:

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin’s rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah," says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign.

I don’t care what you say. It takes a ferocious political talent to do that.

No wonder that hard-core Republicans like me are fizzing with excitement. This babe maybe could take prisoners. After all, her nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”

Obama Wows His Supporters, At Least

Obama supporters seem as pleased as punch this morning after his acceptance speech at Invesco Field last night. It was indeed a historic moment as an African American accepted the presidential nomination of a major political party for the first time, 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.

But as a conservative, I was encouraged. All along, I have been wondering if Obama had a rabbit to pull out of the hat, whether he had a passing gear that he hadn’t yet shown us.

The answer came through last night. He doesn’t. He presented himself as a solid New Deal/Great Society/Multiculti Democrat. No real break with the past. No real change, chaps.

And he may have made a tactical mistake by criticising John McCain so frequently. It seems as though The One spots that McCain has been releasing over the last few weeks have gone home, and Obama is miffed with the criticism. So that means that the wiley tactician is controlling the game.

One more thing. Obama reprised the “On Your Own” theme that Hillary Clinton raised last year, and which I criticized here.

What are you talking about, Senator? Let’s look at the projected numbers on government spending for FY 2009, the first year you would be in office.

• Pensions: $891.1 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $958.2 billion
  
  
• Education: $873.7 billion
  
  
• Defense: $806.1 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $467.7 billion
  

On your own? We, the American people who pay taxes, are shelling out for a little shy of one trillion dollars a year each on Pensions, Health Care, Education, and half a trillion a year on Welfare.

If after all that money, every year, Americans are still “on their own” then maybe it is time to deep-six the whole notion of the welfare state that you and your pals support and find another way of caring and sharing in our American nation.

Dems Just Don't Like Free Speech

First it was the outrage over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. How dare they attack Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). Then it was conservative talk radio. What was needed, Democrats agreed, was to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Earlier this week, the Obama campaign vowed to make a criminal complaint against a group, the American Issues Project, that aired a commercial criticising Obama’s association with radical bomber Bill Ayers.

Today, the Obama campaign instructed its supporters to inundate with phone calls and emails a Chicago radio station’s interview of Dr. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has been researching the relationship between Barack Obama and radical Bill Ayres in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. At National Review they have this to say:

Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a “smear” and smacks of “guilt by association.”

That’s what liberals always say when they want to shut down somebody’s free speech.

The trouble is that liberals have convinced themselves that Swift-boat type attacks are beyond the pale, vicious smears that should be suppressed. Well, everyone feels like that when their ox is being gored. What liberals don’t get is that they are as good as anyone in the smear business. Maybe better.

But as I’ve said before: Go ahead liberals. Make my day. The more liberals try to shut down the opposition, the more they are going to fire up conservatives.