Gerard Baker at the UK Times Online:
In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season, Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack’s campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.
…
It was instructive for two reasons. First, it reinforced the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate’s campaign. There’s always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama’s rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.
Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. Mrs Obama is surely not alone in thinking not very much about what America has been or done in the past quarter century or more. In fact, it is a trope of the left wing of the Democratic party that America has been a pretty wretched sort of place.
There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.
Sounds like pretty scary stuff to me — yet seemingly equally apt as a description of the views of and aspirations for the U.S. that Hillary Clinton has expressed. Whether it’s Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama, it appears that the Democratic party will be putting forth a socialist candidate for the office of President of the United States this time around.
I try to reassure myself that freedom-loving Americans of once hardy, pioneering stock would never actually elect a candidate of this sort, who runs on a platform of seeming shame about who we are, and a vision-less vision of making us more humble and obedient like everybody else. But the mere possibility is certainly enough to give me a chill…
At Little Green Footballs, c/o Instapundit:
Barack Obama won’t wear an American flag on his lapel, but on the wall of his Houston campaign office: a Cuban flag with a picture of Communist mass murderer Che Guevara.
(Follow the link for pictures and video.)
Yow. Sure seems like the Obama campaign staff ought make an effort to keep that kind of stuff away from the cameras…
Candidates on the contemporary American left don’t run for office in this country as outright “socialists”, knowing full well that the moniker would render them unelectable in the United States, but incidents like this one (which may say more about certain of Obama’s supporters than Obama himself) do seem to shed light on the shared ideological affinities…
Interesting item that went by this week while I was too busy to blog about it:
An excellent, uncharacteristically long post over at Instapundit about the subprime mortgage crisis and, somewhat peripherally, Senator McCain’s recent comments on the matter. One especially interesting reader comment:
According to many in congress and social commentators, one of the main causes of the subprime mess was mortgage brokers doing loans for people that we knew could not repay the loan.
As a mortgage broker if I had a customer sitting in front of me who qualified for a loan (according to lender guidelines in place at the time), I was supposed to tell them that I was not going to do a loan for them because I don’t think they will make their payments? Can you imagine the uproar if lenders and brokers did that to customers? Especially if the customer happened to be a minority. It comes down to a case of brokers being damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Worth reading the whole thing for a variety of comparably interesting perspectives on what’s happening. And be sure not to miss this excellent 2006 SNL sketch guest-starring Steve Martin. I had never seen it before myself, but the radically “new” idea being pitched pretty well sums up what my approach to credit has been all my life: if you don’t have the money now, don’t buy it! I don’t know to what experiences I might owe my natural aversion to spending beyond my means, but it has certainly served me well. Buying a house, of course — especially in California — is one purchase for which the need to borrow money is nearly unavoidable, barring truly extraordinary business or investment talents. But even given that, one does have a choice about whether and under what conditions to proceed. A couple of years ago, the assortment of house prices and lending instrument terms being offered in the SF Bay Area entered the realm of the truly absurd. I’m certainly glad I exercised restraint and didn’t buy then.
As for McCain, I’m generally inclined to like the guy better than any of the presently available alternatives, but I didn’t much appreciate his comments about “greedy people on Wall Street”, which Glenn Reynolds followed up on here, here, and here. As James Taranto put it in the WSJ:
He seems to view the making of money — that is to say, the production of goods and services that people want, and the act of supplying them through voluntary exchange in a free market — as a less than honorable pursuit.
Certainly, I feel obliged to point out, this is not the point of view I would choose if I were assembling my idea of an ideal candidate from scratch. But I’m a practical man, and politics is rightly enough the art of the possible, not the ideal. I’m still sad about Fred Thompson having withdrawn his candidacy, as are others, but even as my first choice he wasn’t someone with whom I agreed on all issues. If anything, I appreciated his straightforward honesty about his convictions, whether I agreed with him on a particular philosophical point or not. Much preferable to crowd-pleasing evasion and fungible, poll-driven responses-du-jour in my book.
In any case, Fred’s bowed out of the race, and all the write-in votes the country has to offer seem unlikely to change that. So for now at least, I’m with McCain. I’m no big fan of McCain-Feingold, or of his recent, left-echoing “econo-baiting”, but he’s got it right on the one issue that overrides all others for me: seeing things through to a tenable conclusion in Iraq, and showing the Jihadists who mean with demonstrated determination to bring harm to the United States and the West at large that we will not back down.
Update 2/3: If he doesn’t win re-election to the Czech presidency on February 8th, can we draft Václav Klaus?
For the longest time it seemed far too early to pick a horse to back in this race. Then, before you know it, it’s too late for some.
I’ve become a big fan of Fred Thompson‘s no-nonsense style, Federalist platform, recognition of the real threat posed by Jihadist terrorism, and determination to see the Iraq war through to a viable conclusion, so I was very disappointed this week to read the news that he’s withdrawn from the 2008 presidential race. Glenn Reynolds had a roundup of reactions, and Pajamas Media has a campaign retrospective from Fred’s first hire, Patrick Cox.
I feel pretty much as Eric Scheie does — disappointed and uncertain who I’ll back next. Despite misgivings about his nanny-stater tendencies as exemplified by McCain-Feingold, McCain has been a pretty strong second in my book. His RNC speech was a defining moment of the 2004 election for me, and he’d have had my vote for President in a heartbeat if only he had won his party’s nomination. But, time will tell… Right now I’m still gloomy over the loss of Fred…
Update: Rick Moran writes:
Fred Thompson was not the most exciting candidate and certainly not the best campaigner. It was his philosophy and ideas that captured me and earned my loyalty and support. It is very difficult to simply transfer your allegiance to someone who might represent only a pale echo of your candidate’s qualities.
