I have been intrigued by the Obama candidacy. Although I am going to vote for the Republican nominee, I have felt that despite the similarities in policy and voting record between Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama, the Senator from Illinois was the more interesting of the Democrat candidates.
The vision and the articulate presentation of his message has led me to watch Senator Obama since his entry into the arena at the 2004 Democrat Convention. I have felt that the Republicans would be out of the White House in 2009 and it was useful to see what the Democrats had on offer.
Well the times they are changing. Senator McCain, although still not accepted by the conservative base, is uniquely qualified to run and to win in this race. He is positioned (if properly funded) to bring independents and moderate democrats into the Republican tent and to regain the White House with seat gains in House and Senate. The Democrat nomination race has been (and is) damaging to the Democrat candidates and may create a backlash that impacts House and Senate races.
Senator Obama has been treated with loving care by the media, but his image is cracking a bit around the edges as he suffers from over exposure. Last week in a private presentation to fund raisers and major supporters in San Francisco, Senator Obama managed to offend practically everybody in a single condescending paragraph of his speech - recorded and repeated by media present in the room - in this day and age of citizen journalists and bloggers, an increasingly familiar scenario. If you add the view of Obama as out of touch with Americans to Michelle's view of just plain mean America and Pastor Wright's Black Liberation Theology - a disturbing picture begins to emerge of the leading Democrat candidate.
No shortage of articles to choose from today as conservatives of every stripe pile on. Newt Gingrich says the following about Senator Obama:
"If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be weird ideas.
They can't really believe in the right to bear arms.
They can't really believe in traditional marriage.
They can't really believe in their faith in God.
They can't really want to enforce the law on immigration.
Therefore, they must be "bitter" and "frustrated."
This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife's view that "America is a mean country". Not since Governor Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign."
I have chosen George Will's article to represent the balance of the conservative press this morning.
Barack Obama's Bitter Liberalism
By George Will
Tuesday, April 15, 2008WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."
Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than -- in Michelle Obama's words -- "just downright mean."
The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.
Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.
When Democrats convened in San Francisco in 1984, en route to losing 49 states, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- a former FDR Democrat then serving in the Cabinet of another such, Ronald Reagan -- said "San Francisco Democrats" are people who "blame America first." Today, they blame Americans for America being "downright mean."
Obama's apology for his embittering sociology of "bitterness" -- "I didn't say it as well as I could have" -- occurred in Muncie, Ind. Perfect.
In 1929 and 1937 Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-sized manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind.
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