Election Thoughts

Here are several stories of election analysis that I wanted to pass along to you. First, the Wall Street Journal reports on how the world is just as split over Obama and Clinton as the Democrat party is. Obama carries Africans and Europeans, as well as Middle Easterners; Clinton carries Mexicans and Chinese.

This is the most useless article I've ever heard.

Who cares what people around the world think? They're not allowed to vote! Of course, plenty of illegal aliens vote anyway, and plenty of rich foreigners exert way too much influence through their campaign contributions, but when it comes to an actual vote, they don't count. This is an American election, after all...

In an article with far more substance, Thomas Sowell writes about the audacity of Obama's rhetoric. Excerpts:

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.

This is the danger in Wright's message: not for whites, but for blacks, who absorb it and believe it whole-heartedly. After listening to Wright's hate-speech for 20 years, Obama seems to have absorbed plenty of it himself.

American Thinker posts an article by Bookworm that delves into Obama's messianic schtick. Excerpts:

To those who worship at his shrine, though, there is nothing ordinary about him. To them, he is the embodiment of all virtues.

The real fawning comes in the way people describe their emotional reactions to this former unknown from Illinois. Take the example of Chris Matthews, an MSNBC talking head whom one might naively credit with a little bit of professional objectivity. After hearing one of Obama's speeches, Matthews giddily said "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

And then there's the fainting: At speech after speech, it seems, ladies swoon merely from being in his presence. There hasn't been this orgy of public fainting since Frank Sinatra or, perhaps, the Beatles.

One might dismiss all of this as the ravings of a celebrity culture, trained to become hysterical in the presence of fame, were it not for the vaguely religious note that keeps appearing when political commentators start writing about him. Andrew Sullivan, a devout Obama supporter, after admitting that Obama has little going for him in terms of such practical matters as experience or knowledge, nevertheless describes the meaning of his candidacy in shamanistic tones.

This kind of soft, worshipful rhetoric is typical for those endorsing Obama. Deprived of a candidate who has actual done anything or even stood for anything, they fall back on emotion-laden platitudes that place Obama on a level above that of ordinary mortals. Already a year ago David Ehrenstein was assuring all of us that Obama can be seen as the "magic negro," capable of functioning as a benign black figure who will make whites feel good about themselves.

Given how rich white liberals have flocked to Obama's banner, it's clear that Ehrenstein was on to something there. It's too bad that Obama's benignity was shot to pieces with the revelation that his "spiritual mentor," long-term pastor and political advisor, Jeremiah Wright, was a racist crackpot, whom Obama revered, ignored or tolerated, depending on which version of the truth Obama feels like spreading around on any given day.

As [indicated by campaign pictures], Obama is no longer an ordinary mortal. Instead, he has been elevated to a symbolic level, where his name is unnecessary (we all know it, don't we?), his goal is unmentioned (I think he's above petty politics), and his qualifications are irrelevant (good thing, too, since he doesn't have any). Instead, all that's left is his almost superhuman visage, which is allied with one magical word: "change." The political poster has been transformed from advertisement to iconography.

For many months now, I've been inclined to slough all of this messiah-shtick stuff off, attributing it to those liberal fans who operate from a strong emotional base that manages to side step reason. Reason, of course, would point out that his politics are indistinguishable from other ultra liberal Democrats and his experience minimal. As Geraldine Ferraro was tacky enough to point out -- how un-Democratic of her -- the only pragmatic advantage he has over other like-minded candidates is his skin color.

Obama's recent race speech, however, indicates that Obama is beginning to believe his own publicity.

Not only have his followers been suckered into his savior-like appeal, but so has he. And that suits him just fine. As Heavy-Handed Politics quotes Sowell, Obama will use these useful idiots as long as possible, all the way to the White House [emphasis mine]:

Did Senator Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question. The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it? Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination a year ago. Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead... Someone once said that a con man’s job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe. Accordingly, Obama’s Philadelphia speech—a theatrical masterpiece—will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now ‘move on,’ even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush’s 2000 election victory. Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama’s speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the ‘useful idiots’ useful.

But all is not rosy in Obama-land. As the Democrats continue to slug it out, McCain continues to benefit. According to a recent Gallup poll, if Clinton goes up against McCain in the general election, 19% of Democrats say they would vote for McCain instead. Similarly, if Obama goes up against McCain in the general election, 28% of Democrats say they would vote for McCain.

While it's impossible to tell how many would actually go through with the defection, these stats have got to be extremely disturbing for Democrat leaders, who have been boasting about a victory since 2006. We'll see how it actually pans out, but this is a sign of deep divisions within the party which, if allowed to fester, could really hurt the party in November.

Of course, McCain is having serious difficulties of his own, gaining little traction with evangelicals, one of the biggest core constituencies of the Republican party. Joel Rosenberg reports on a poll of likely Christian voters that McCain is losing badly to both Clinton and Obama. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a man with almost 10 million weekly listeners, has said publicly that he could never vote for McCain:

The Republican party, Dobson recently warned, “seems poised to select a nominee who did not support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, who voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings, who opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, who has little regard for freedom of speech, who organized the ‘Gang of 14’ to preserve filibusters, and who has a legendary temper and who often uses foul and obscene language.

Rosenberg suggests that a couple ways McCain could regain the trust of this key group would be to emphasize the bigger common enemy of Islamic terrorism and to pull out the stops in support of Israel; McCain's recent trip there could be a first step in that process.

Again, only time will tell us how all of these factors will balance each other out. But, it is clear -- as I have said before -- that conservatives really don't have any good options. As Dobson said: "Should John McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime.”

I agree.

There's my two cents.