Saturday, July 19, 2008
More on the not funny Obama
Tom Smith
In the FT.
I'm just hoping BO is a faux lefty who will run to the center when he realizes that's where the most power is. So, just a classier version of Bill Clinton. That's my hope. If he turns out to take the things he is saying seriously, then it won't be funny at all.
Taking oneself too seriously is something the young and inexperienced are especially good at. Obama has not been around long enough to have it handed to him in anything he really cared about. He is a very peculiar candidate for the White House. I think maybe the closest parallel is JFK but instead of Irish Catholic it's (sort of) African American. One hopes Obama will not get a Cuban Missile Crisis sort of test.
THIS is helpful. Obama will get funny.
https://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2008/07/more-on-the-not.html
Comments
Obonga is an affirmative-action product who does not take the same tests as others nor therefore make the same changes; he also carries the recommendation of being a natural narcissist and fabulist. There is no center for such a person excepting himself.
The natural state for such a person is centralization and uniformity; liberty does not compute. His orbit of friends and associates will remain the same, and that tells us who he is. He is 47 years old, not 22.
He is currently being handled by David Axlerod, a true red-diaper baby. Axlerod has been surprisingly not stupid. He scripts the teleprompter, keeps Obonga away from questions, and sent a crack special forces team to surround his wife...I mean to advise his wife. So they understand something about propriety, and Obonga's limitations. Very impressive, but that will only make the politics more presentable, not centrist.
I would say he reflects enough of the country now to be elected. It is that which upsets rather than the man himself. But was there ever really any doubt where we were going?
There is no doubt who Karl Krauss, who died in 1936, was thinking about when he wrote this--'A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is.' Our difference presently is that Adolf told us where he was going and kept no counsel. Obonga will surround himself with like-minded counsel (300 foreign policy advisers?) and obscure where he is going. But he's going.
Posted by: james wilson | Jul 20, 2008 8:40:07 AM
I am certain thatthe ObaMessiah will run to the center. I am terrified that he will not govern from there.
Posted by: krome | Jul 21, 2008 1:58:56 PM
Whatever else one may have thought of him, Kennedy had his Naval service, and real-life experiences to go with it. Actually getting into combat distances him so far from the utterly un-accomplished Obama as to make it a two-different-planets story.
I have a hard time bringing Obama into any comparison with Kennedy.
As corrupt as the Kennedy background was, it pales in comparison to Obama's Cook County Democratic Machine manufacture.
And, Kennedy's cotiere were idealists. Obama's are savage power-takers, like Emmanuel and Daley.
Posted by: WPZ | Jul 22, 2008 10:34:07 AM
He's not a faux lefty, he is a radical one. His "move to the middle" is faux.
Posted by: Sam | Jul 22, 2008 11:39:29 AM
Jesse had one thing right. By cutting them out instead of off, he asserts that BO is prepubescent; BO is not ready for prime time.
Posted by: Jaybee | Jul 22, 2008 12:59:47 PM
I support the hope and it seems that events are endorsing it. FISA, public financing, RKBA, and now the Mother of All Pivots... the Iraq war. Barry is flipping to my side (the Bush side) on all these and there are more to come since the hard left positions that get one the Dem nomination quite rightly doom the bearer in the general, thank God. But if you are for the prosecution of the war why would you vote for a late-converter over a fullscale, long term proponent? McCain was arguably more for a vigorous prosecution than Bush. Is that too logical for the electoral process? Pace Goldberg today, that seems all too likely.
Posted by: megapotamus | Jul 22, 2008 1:03:54 PM
It's a hope, Tom, but not much more than that. One of the bills he's pushed in the Senate is for "comparable worth," an idea too far out even for Clinton. And the fact that when he decided he needed to attend a church to help with his community organizing, he chose one run by a proponent of black liberation theology, which is basically Marxism and racial grievance in a thin shell of Christianity. I could go on, but in short he's pretty clearly very far left as American national politics goes. If he goes centrist it'll be because he's forced to, and even then he'll be able to get away with lots of leftist stuff.
Posted by: PapayaSF | Jul 22, 2008 3:11:12 PM
Obama is dead serious in his hatred of white people, his determination to lose the Iraq war, his view that the United States should not have nukes if Iran can't have them, etcetera. Like al Qaeda, the guy is telling us, over and over, exactly what he thinks. Some people refuse to believe it, and will even vote for this rabid America hater. But no one ever hears the most damning stuff, since the press simply refuses to report on Obama's extensive ties to radical Islamists like Raila Odinga.
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-yorker-nails-maximum-likelihood.html
Posted by: Alec Rawls | Jul 23, 2008 1:01:52 AM
"just a classier version of Bill Clinton": surely any version of Bill Clinton is bound to be classier?
Posted by: dearieme | Jul 20, 2008 6:06:12 AM