For those who didn’t figure it out, my previous endorsement of Senator Obama was simply my celebrating the holiday (April 1). The truth is that this man scares me. Not simply because he stands for just about everything I’m not for, but because he’s starting to believe his own hype. I keep waiting for the press or Hillary or someone to pop his balloon of promises. He is a lightweight and whenever he has to explain the details of his ideas, he stumbles. Originally, I figured he just wasn’t ready for prime time, but now I fear he believes this messianic tone his campaign has taken on.
I think his mask is beginning to slip. Note this comment from an April 6 fundraiser in San Francisco (you can read and watch it all here and a hat tip to Powerline):
[T]he truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of 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. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Did you catch that? All of you living somewhere other than California or the Northeast that don’t want to vote for Obama are just bitter. You have a psychological defect that leads you to cling to these concepts like the Second Amendment or your faith or the sovereignty of your country. I’ve long felt that most liberal elitists feel this way about most of America, but it takes either a real nitwit or a serious egotist to blurt it out at a campaign event. That’s a seriously contemptuous attitude toward the Americans that pay the taxes, populate the military, and drive the economy.
Then, I happened to come across a speech Michelle Obama gave at UCLA some weeks ago (hat tip again to Powerline). You’d think this would scare people a bit, but only Hugh Hewitt has been bringing it up. You can read a transcript of the entire speech here. Here’s the spooky part:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed.
Um, remind you of anything? I can think of at least four other political leaders who said similar things during their careers in the last hundred years. None of them were Americans and none of them would be considered to have had successful eras of leadership. Mindless obedience to a benevolent government happens to be a place where communism and fascism overlap. I would venture to say that it’s significantly out of place in this republic.
I really, really don’t like the Clintons, but at least they are predictable. They will do and say anything to gain power and grow that power. They don’t seem to have deep moral beliefs that drive them upstream even when the majority is against them. The Obamas, however, seem to be on a crusade to save our souls. They are still human, though, and not saviors. He seems more concerned about growing government to fix problems when less government would work better (health care, education, tax rates) than using government to fix external problems that need focused attention (radical Islamic terrorism, illegal immigration, a nuclear Iran). I fear he’ll make some things worse by meddling and other things worse by ignoring. I’m just not buying what he’s selling.
I will admit that I’m not the biggest fan of John McCain. But, when you consider the importance of fighting the war against radical Islam, the importance of naming constructionist judges to all courts, and the importance of keeping a sane tax policy, I can’t trust either of the Democrat candidates. McCain doesn’t carry the standard I’d like to follow, but he’s the one who is liable to hurt this country the least.
Beware you Obama supporters. The press isn’t doing you any favors by playing down his weaknesses. Either he’ll get hammered during the general election or, worse for all of us, he’ll stumble at critical moments during his presidency.
