So the Democrats, spooked by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Vice President, complain she lacks experience? As Governor of Alaska, and previously mayor of her city, she'll bring far more executive experience (as second on the GOP ticket) than Barack Obama brings to the top of his ticket. BHO, as George Will neatly put it, "has never run so much as a Dairy Queen."
Bright stage, dark overtones
Editor: Those grandiose touches on the stadium stage from which Obama will speak Thursday evoked a chilling memory from recent history for our contributor Delta Mike. He writes: Don’t think “Greek Temple”, think Albert Speer’s “Theatre of Light”, constructed in Nuremburg for the Nazi Party rallies, which took place at just about this time of year! Does this look familiar?
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Don’t think “togas”, think brown shirts, black shirts, mass hysteria, and compulsory conformity.
Obama Über Alles?
The myth of white racism
Editor: Is Obama in the position of Jackie Robinson, needing only tolerance from bigoted whites in order for his genius to prevail? Such was the implication, intended or not, of a Dan Haley column in the Denver Post 8/26, with which I sharply disagreed. Below, my colleague Ken Davenport deflates a far more blatant version of the same fallacy, this one from Jacob Weisberg. Of related interest is John Dendahl's post earlier this week (scroll down on our home page) flagging an important National Review piece about the darkly race-colored glasses with which the "real" Barack Obama views America and the world, according to his own autobiography.
Ken Davenport writes:
The Wall Street Journal highlights in its editorial today a quote I've read often over the past few days. It's from a piece by Jacob Weisberg that appears in the current Newsweek -- that supposed "mainstream" newsmagazine. Weisberg says this about the possibility that Obama might lose the election against John McCain:
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Only some "crazy irrationality over race" could prevent Mr. Obama from winning the White House. If he does win, America will have reached post-prejudice Nirvana. "If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth," Mr. Weisberg continued. "To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn't just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation's historical decline." Wow. Vote for Barack, or America is as irredeemable as many foreigners believe.
Wow is right. According to this narrative, a common one among Obama supporters, the sole reason that Obama might lose is because he's black -- and the fact that he's black should be a primary reason to vote for him in the first place. It makes little logical sense, of course -- to say on the one hand that he's the victim of prejudice and then to say that prejudice is a perfectly good -- even necessary -- justification to elect him. But so goes the emotion-powered politics of the left.
We know, of course, that racism is being practiced in this campaign -- but it isn't white racism. Its black racism, aided and abetted by a core of guilt-ridden whites like Jacob Weisberg. Blacks voted for Barack Obama 90:10 over Hillary Clinton in the primaries not because they had analyzed the Obama platform and policies and preferred them over those of Hillary Clinton, but because of the color of his skin. Period.
Obama is, in fact, largely where he is today because he is black, not in spite of it -- though as Geraldine Ferraro found out, you can't say that out loud even in today's America. So sensitive are we to even the suggestion of race that we simply can't be honest about it. And neither can Jacob Weisberg -- who suggests that America is so backward still that if Obama loses, it will be a sign of our nation's "historical decline". Oh, please.
I believe that white racism in this country is largely a myth. Yes, I admit that it still exists in the deep south to some extent, but not to the degree that the left says it does. As the Journal points out:
Virginia elected a black Governor two decades ago, and Illinois has had two black Senators. America has had two black Secretaries of State, and major corporations are run by black CEOs. No other Western democracy has done as well at opening up political, business and other arenas to minorities.
The truth is that white racism is part of an Obama narrative that is designed both to mobilize whites into casting "guilt votes" to prove our "progressiveness" as a culture, and to inculcate Obama from criticisms of all kinds and on all issues. Part of the lasting bitterness of the Hillary Clinton supporters is that every time Clinton tried to hammer Obama on policy, his supporters subtly trotted out the race card to blunt her attacks. Now that McCain is attacking Obama on taxes, energy policy and national security, you can bet that they will again be trotting out the "racism" charge against McCain in an effort to intimidate him.
It won't work, because McCain -- like an increasing number of Americans -- understands that the stakes are simply too high in this election to avoid a serious evaluation of Barack Obama on the merits. McCain knows he hasn't a racist bone in his body, and he will not be falsely bullied into changing his campaign to one of softballs and cream puffs, though the left will try and force him into just such a move. He will persist in hammering Obama on the issues and on his (lack of) experience, and will be justly rewarded for it -- because Americans instinctively know that this country is not "racist to the core". A racist nation would hardly nominate a black man for the nomination of the Democrat Party, would it?
Perhaps Jacob Weisberg should take off his own shroud of guilt and consider this: Is it not possible that if Obama loses in November it will be because he is simply not qualified to be President of the United States?
Barack's great deception
In 1995, Barack Obama published an autobiography that has sold like hotcakes and helped make him and his wife quite wealthy people. Titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama's book got rave reviews, just like the national address he delivered in defense of his 20 years following the spiritual leadership of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I wrote at FamilySecurityMatters.com about the Wright speech when it was delivered back in March. Now a writer with the pseudonym Michael Gledhill has written a devastating comparison of the Barack Hussein Obama appearing in Dreams and the one now appearing regularly on your TV screen and about to be officially the Democratic Party's candidate for president. It is titled "Who Is Barack Obama?" and can be found in the September 1 print issue of National Review and at this link.
Numerous analysts of Obama's writing and speechifying have noted the same strength and weakness: well-formed rhetoric pleasing to the eye or ear but lacking substance. Dreams is full of substance -- but little or none that a patriot would recognize as suitable background for a U.S. senator, let alone for someone aspiring to lead our country as its president.
Just like his wife Michelle, the Barack Obama of Dreams was a bitterly race-conscious person with a high dislike for the United States. Or in the concluding words of Michael Gledhill, "Dreams from My Father reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight – a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization."
I am reminded of the supreme irony of the demeaning remarks Obama recently leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas. In contrast to Thomas's, Obama's youth (as well, by the way, as that of his America-hating pastor Wright) was Easy Street. As an intellectual and patriot, neither Obama nor Wright could carry Thomas's briefcase.
Change we can shudder at
In watching a biography of Obama on Fox News, I was struck by the mindset the man has. He has no economic training, no desire to be part of the “establishment”. More likely, he wants to be the Hugo Chavez of America. Though he pays lip service to “bringing people together”, what I can read between the lines is hatred of “the rich” and of “white people”, the two groups somehow melded, in the same way many see all black people as poor. His having an epiphany at a Jeremiah Wright church service is the case in point. Rev. Wright’s views are well known.
The logic (perhaps subconscious) of Obama's call for a “Civilian National Security Force” becomes clear: it will become an officially sanctioned armed mob of the have-nots to prey on the haves. The same thing happened in South Africa when the blacks took over there. They called it “affirmative shopping”.
To Obama, with little economic understanding, the economy is a fixed pie, and it’s time for black people to seize a bigger slice. In Obama’s eyes, this is “justice”, defined as “equality”: equality NOT equal opportunity! All one has to do is look at Venezuela to see where Obama might take the United States.
The tragedy of course is that it will push the country toward chaos and poverty. The economy is NOT a fixed pie but an elastic one. The capital flight and contraction in the economy will bring massive unemployment and an unprecedented economic downturn, shortages and lines for basic necessities.
True to the Venezuelan model, Obama could then blame “greedy businessmen” for the situation, holding kangaroo courts, making examples, etc., blaming everything and everyone except himself and his policies.