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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: What We Learn Won't Help Obama As the Obama rocket flames out and plummets back to earth, it is useful to recall how extraordinary it has been. Before the Iowa caucuses, almost everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the nomination easily. She had the support of blue collar workers and most party insiders, and an enormous war chest. If ever there were a prohibitive favorite, it was she. And Sen. Clinton did dispose quickly of three candidates with more impressive resumes than hers (Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico). But until "Bittergate" erupted last weekend, she was losing the nomination to a tyro senator whose most important resume tic was that back in school he'd been president of the Harvard Law Review. It took many missteps by the Clinton campaign to make this possible. But for Barack to have been on the verge of besting Hillary is nothing short of phenomenal. What fueled the Obama rocket was that he was able to bring together two rarely united factions within the Democratic party: blacks and latte liberals. Blacks have run for the Democratic nomination for president before: Shirley Chisholm in 1972; Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Al Sharpton in 2004. But these were "pay attention to us" campaigns, not serious efforts to win the nomination. Latte liberals Gary Hart in 1984 and 1988, and Bill Bradley in 2000 ran "reform" campaigns against establishment candidates, but made little headway, in large part because they had little appeal to black voters. Barack Obama, a latte liberal who is black, had the potential to go much farther within the Democratic party than either a Gary Hart or a Jesse Jackson. But what really made the Obama campaign take off was that we knew little about him other than that he was a good looking guy who could give a terrific speech. In the early days he didn't campaign as either a black grievance candidate, or a latte liberal. He spoke vaguely about "hope" and "change." He was a blank slate onto whom we could project whatever kind of change we were hoping for. Unfortunately for our illusions and his prospects, Barack Obama has been filling in that slate in ways that sharply diminish his general election appeal. The most savage blow was the revelation that for nearly 20 years Sen. Obama attended a church where the pastor preached race hate, and that Sen. Obama made the Rev. Jeremiah Wright his spiritual adviser. That's not conduct we expect from someone who pledges to bring us together. Then came the remarks he made at that fund-raiser in San Francisco April 6: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Cluelessness and condescension aren't likely to bring us together either. What was particularly damaging about this remark is that Barack Obama made it himself, said Democratic pollster Pat Caddell. It wasn't a "gaffe" by an economic adviser (Austan Goolsbee), or a foreign policy adviser (Samantha Power) or his spiritual adviser (Jeremiah Wright) that could be explained away as not reflecting his own sentiments. "He was saying to these upscale San Francisco Democrats, 'I am really one of you, and I am not one of them,'" wrote John Judis in the New Republic. The silver lining in the "Bittergate" flap for Sen. Obama is it diverts attention from the testimony in the corruption trial of Sen. Obama's most important early financial supporter, Antoin "Tony" Rezko. It was disclosed Monday Sen. Obama attended a party Mr. Rezko threw for Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire who is said to have made much of his money selling guns to, and laundering oil for food money for the regime of Saddam Hussein. Sen. Obama has claimed never to have met Mr. Auchi. We are going to learn more about Barack Obama in the weeks and months to come, and what we learn will not be helpful to his candidacy. I've written about the Obama campaign in the past tense. This is premature, as far as the nomination is concerned, because the Democrats have morphed from the party of the working man to a party of snobs who look down on working men and women. But in the general election, the question is not whether Sen. Obama will lose, but by how much.
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#1. To: RickyJ (#0)
Ignores how important Independents and crossover Republicans were to Obama's caucus and primary victories.
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
This bears repeating: That sums up the entire Obama campaign right there.
America is not at war. The military is at war. America is at the mall and the Congress is out to lunch.
You mean to tell me the Oil For Food deal was a SCAM? That people made money off innocent Iraqi's? I'm shocked. I bet his staff is to blame for this again. As a country, the USA has deeply injured the world and it's a national obligation to right that wrong as much as possible. For us to try to safeguard our 2nd Amendment rights at the expense of lives of innocents worldwide doesn't fly in my book. -- Pinguinite http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=78060&Disp=44#C44
Do you believe in 'Magick'
As a country, the USA has deeply injured the world and it's a national obligation to right that wrong as much as possible. For us to try to safeguard our 2nd Amendment rights at the expense of lives of innocents worldwide doesn't fly in my book. -- Pinguinite http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=78060&Disp=44#C44
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