Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Friday, August 08, 2008 3:14:19 PM
The pre-Democrat convention polls aren't where Obama and his supporters would like them to be. This is actually worse than 2000 and 2004, where two other liberal Democratic candidates were faring better at this time, despite the fact that it was Gore and Kerry, neither of whom achieved greatness as campaigners. Now, even Democratic strategists and analysts are getting nervous, and with good reason, since McCain has been polling within the margin of error with Obama.
Writing in the Huffington Post, Lincoln Mitchell animates the evolving electoral anxiety, but, predictably, he focuses on the left's hobgoblin, race, rather than the growing realization by many voters that Obama simply isn't the heavy weight they once thought he was. Like his liberal brethren, Mitchell has less than perfect political pitch when it comes to race, creating an edifice of bigotry as the pretext for Obama's failure to achieve electoral traction.
He begins with a wholly fallacious assertion:
One of the recent complexities is that among white Americans there is a virtual consensus that racism against African Americans is a thing of the past.
The more accurate characterization is that most Americans (i.e., not just white Americans) believe that the nation has made steady and meaningful advances, both legislatively and culturally, to combat racism. They also recognize that Americans of African descent are in unprecedented positions of power, in corporate America, in politics, and in academia. But the reason the Mitchells of the world keep rekindling the times when racism was rampant is that if we're obliged to judge Obama merely on the integrity of his ideas, on his credibility as a presidential candidate, he falls conspicuously short.
That's why the best Republican strategy is to let voters get to know Obama as intimately as possible, because the more they know about his ideas and his vision for America, the less comfortable they are with him.
For instance, just as Western Europe is removing the obstacles to capital formation by reducing corporate income tax rates and dismantling their vast regulatory apparatus, Obama is recommending higher taxes; he's similarly out of step with most Americans who correctly applaud the success of the counter-insurgency initiative in Iraq, rather than equivocate as the Harvard professor he once was; he maligns guns as the source of violent crime, naively subscribing to the anachronistic notion that the real victim is the criminal because he had an alcoholic father or was the child of a single parent; add to that his most recent misstep, preaching the virtues of driving with fully inflated tires (next week he'll move on to ways to combat tooth decay and how to avoid trans fatty acids).
To make matters more painful and tiresome, all of this is delivered with an arrogant professorial sternness and haughty confidence that makes us wonder about having him around day in and day out for the next four, or perhaps eight years. Political bias aside, the one truism about presidential elections is that we elect people we like, people we're comfortable with. That assessment is result of listening and watching these two men, of gauging their authenticity, their ability to command respect by convincing us they're up to the job.
In that regard, Obama's recent response to a seven year old girl who asked why he wants to be president, betrays a less than ringing endorsement of America. Rather than stating that he wants to build on America's greatness, he echoed his wife Michelle's oblique disparagement of this nation. That may play well in Berkeley, but it won't in middle America.