Barack Obama # 2 of 2

Barack Obama # 2 of 2
cinops be gone Thursday, May 8, 2008

Thank you Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist for the Orange County Register, Orange County, California for your article in the Sunday paper, May 4, 2008.

“Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human: As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s – that’s a show of disrespect to me.” And we can’t have that, can we?

In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to the Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline Web site remarked on the senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course, he is the change we’ve been waiting for. “Do you personally feel that the reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on “The Today Show.”
“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”
Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” – whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million buck a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.
By the way, the best response to Michelle’s “this conversation doesn’t help my kids” would be: “But entrusting their religious upbringing to Jeremiah Wright does?” Ah, but, happily, Meredith Vieira isn’t that kind of interviewer. Mrs. O is becoming a challenge for satirists. May radio pal Hugh Hewitt played a clip on his show of the putative first lady identifying the real problem facing America:
“Like many young people coming out of college, with their MA’s and BA’s and PhD’s and MPh’s coming out so mired in debt that they have to forego their dreams, so mired in debt, you can’t afford to be a teacher or a nurse or social worker, or a pastor of a church, or to run a small nonprofit organization, or to do research for a small community group, or to be a community organizer because the salaries that you’ll earn in those jobs won’t cover the cost of the degree that it took to get the job.” I’m not sure why Michelle would stick “pastor of a church” in that list of downscale occupations: Her pastor drives a Mercedes and lives in a gated community. But, insofar as I understand Mrs. O, she feels that many Harvard and Princeton graduates have to give a minimum-wage “community organizer” (whatever that is) and are forced to become corporate lawyers, investment bankers and multinational CEOs just to pay off their college loans. I’m sure the waitresses and checkout clerks nodded sympathetically.
Michelle Obama is a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance – like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder. But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls “corporate America.” Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the senator will be saying, “I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait ….”
Whatever one thinks of Sens. Clinton and McCain, they’re as familiar as any public figure can be. Obama, on the other hand, is running explicitly on a transcendent “magic.”… George H. Kubeck