Like most political junkies here in the USA, I was glued to the TV last night to learn the result from Wisconsin. I watched Fox News and so had the unusual experience of seeing and hearing Obama’s speech from Texas. It was the first time that I have really studied his mannerisms and the content of what he was saying. I was not impressed!
First let me say that in Wisconsin he trounced the Clintons with a 17% margin. This was a wider margin than anyone predicted and was achieved despite the Clintons belatedly campaigning in Wisconsin and pouring in resources. The new Clinton team, fresh from Hillary’s much-publicized shake-up of her campaign staff, appears to have been unable to turn the two bosses into likeable people. Mrs. Clinton was in Ohio by the time the Wisconsin result was out and she made no reference to it in her speech. Although I consider Obama to be a politically dangerous man, I find it impossible not to enjoy his giant victories over the anointed pair. I share Dick Morris’s pleasure in their political humiliation and only wish I could be a fly on the wall in her campaign HQ when she holds an inquest. I still stick to my forecast that she will get the nomination through behind-the-scenes string-pulling and skullduggery, but she must be raging at the way that her cruise to a coronation has been turned into an embarrassing extended brawl. There are still plenty of Democrat big-wigs ready to go on TV and boast that she can be anointed despite the popular vote. This is a tribute to the way the Clintons have captured the Democrat Party machine and installed like-minded people. However, there are a number of Party sympathizers who are now publicly worrying that the Clintons will slash and burn their way to ‘victory’ at the expense of the last vestiges of the Party’s image of integrity.
I cannot see either candidate getting a commanding and decisive ownership of delegates before the Convention, though I expect Obama to have a clear lead. I also cannot see Mrs. Clinton conceding to him for the sake of the Party’s unity and ultimate electoral fortunes. To me, the Clintons are like a Mafia family embarking on the construction of a family empire. Bill and Hillary are business partners dedicated to the accumulation of total power and the opportunity to hugely enrich themselves from that power. I suspect that in the event of their having success in this enterprise, they have it in mind to pass on the power to Chelsea in the distant future. Fanciful? I think not! The Clintons have come so near to success that they now consider occupation of the White House their right. As many conservative commentators have pointed out, the Clintons’ whole lives have been focused on gaining the White House in order to establish a dynasty.
I know of no evidence that suggests that Obama and his wife are trying to create a dynasty or to get into a position where they can plunder the wealth of the people of the USA. I assume that Obama is a financially honest politician – at least as honest as most politicians, which I suppose may not be saying a lot. However, last night I was struck for the first time with the conviction that he is not a sincere campaigner. His mannerisms, pauses, his facial expressions all seemed to me to be studied. He is surely a man who lives to be on the platform holding an adoring audience in the palm of his hand. I was reminded of the story ‘Elmer Gantry’. I am not suggesting that he is a Gantry-style womanizer and embezzler, but that he loves himself and is fascinated with his own power to conjure up empty images with words. As I previously wrote in another article about John McCain, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’. In McCain’s case I was referring to the underlying anxiety of many Americans regarding the Islamic threat. In Obama’s case, the ‘hour’ is the craving of many Americans for an easy way out of current and impending problems. His twin themes of Hope and Change, and his claim that he will bring a new coming-together in the USA are quite fraudulent and I assume that he does not believe his own words. He has already been in the Senate for two years and has never broken Party ranks to call for compromises with Republicans. He is no Joe Lieberman, instead he aligned himself with the Democrat hard Left and in doing so was able to kick-start his current campaign. It was his hard Left credentials that allowed him to outflank both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards early on in the contest and win much of the Party’s activist base.
Obama’s extremist political record has not been challenged by the MSM, so he has been able to pose to a wider and politically ignorant audience as a healer, uniter and Messiah. Unfortunately for the Clinton’s they have not been able to go after Obama for his record of extreme Leftism, for they have been trying to keep this activist base on board their own campaign. Race has posed an extra problem for the Clintons, for they have long claimed to be almost Black themselves. It never occurred to them prior to the election cycle that a real Black man might also feel entitled to the White House, would capitalize on his color and would go further Left. I think the Clintons, with their eyes confidently focused on November, wanted to avoid appearing too Left. Obama, believing that his empty rhetoric can fool all of the people all of the time, has had no such inhibitions. Should he get the Democrat nomination, he will find that his Leftist past will haunt him by November.
Those who read my previous article will deduce that I never had any regard for the Beetles and the other Pop and Rock strummers. If anyone had asked me in the 1960’s (or any time since) that such strumming would capture so many fans and pave the way to wealth measured in billions, I would have dismissed the idea as one brought about by sniffing illegal substances. Over the years, I watched in disbelief as the Mick Jaggers, the Elton Johns, the Lennons and all the others captured the adulation of not only pimply-faced pre-teens but ultimately educated adults. As someone once said, never over estimate the public’s intelligence (or at least a significant part of it). I had the same feelings when some friends leveraged their homes to buy inflated tech stocks. I never doubted that the housing bubble would burst and it beggars my belief that so many clever people thought it could go on and on. I now get the same feeling about Obama. His huge popularity is surely a bubble that must burst for it has no substance. Those who bother to dissect his actual policies must surely see that they are old-style socialist remedies that have long been discredited. The gigantic crowds now cramming his rallies and swooning at his words are surely mesmerized like the Pop and Rock music fans who still turn out to see the skeletal Jagger or like the sheep who are attracted to a bubble because everyone else they know will be there. I could be wrong, for I have been wrong about the music thing for 40 or more years. The difference is that politics, like stocks and housing, are not part of the fantasy world of Media. Unlike the constant dumbing down of culture by the Media Class, economic and national security issues have a day of reckoning. Whether Obama’s day of reckoning will come by August or in the days before November is not clear, but surely John McCain will have an opport unity to introduce political reality in the Presidential contest. As I said about him before, Cometh the hour, cometh the man.