President-Elect Obama can’t get over his love of the baby-blues, as witness his new “Office of the President-Elect” plaque at the podium. Can he resist the urge to remake the Presidential Seal after all? Would anybody inside the establishment make a peep of protest?
Even Jimmy Carter restrained his urges to make-over the office of the Presidency to the confines of the cosmetic and ephemeral: nobody can make the President get out of the limo, or turn the thermometer down, or don a cardigan. Those who think Obama will somehow prove “Burkean”, just because he knows how to bandy the word around, are in for a rude awakening.
At the very least: does Obama think he’s STILL campaigning? Will he ever lighten up his intense, oh-so-grave quest for “teachable moments” and make peace with the fact that, yes, he won already? Or that it wasn’t even a squeaker? American elected an African-American President, yes: but then, that shouldn’t be such a surprising possibility, in light of two African-American Secretaries of State, two Supreme Court Justices, a UN Ambassador, a few governors and a plenitude of Congresspeople. Obama wasn’t even the only African-American option on the ballot– there’s Congresswoman McKinney to think of, too.

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Predictably, MSM and Obamaphile sentiment has accelerated its promotion of the idea that only racism could force a tightening in the polls. By shoving the election in the direction of a kind of “moral referendum” on America’s alleged ongoing and intransigent racism, they hope to compel the public to vote out of guilt– in essence, to internalize feelings of racist shame and thus feel obliged to “atone” for such unwarranted feelings by voting for Obama. That people could feel genuinely dubious about Sen. Obama’s fitness for office remains perplexingly invisible to the majority of the punditocracy. Perhaps it is to be regretted, after all, that Sigmund Freud’s readership has fallen by the wayside in recent decades. Those psychoanalytically savvy New Yorkers of yore may have been a ready comic butt for anyone with ears to hear some of their introspective absurdities, but at least they might have been hip to the dynamics of wishful thinking. Whatever the limitations of Freud’s notion of ‘reality’, at least he was hard-nosed about sniffing into people’s underlying motives. But amazingly, the current class of scribes and mandarins seems genuinely clueless to the fact that there’s something a little odd about nominating a man only midway through his first Senate term for the land’s highest office. Nor has he held a chair in any non-elective position of great responsibility: he’s no Cabinet officer, no former ambassador, not even the president of a university. No, he’s but a memoirist with sterling academic credentials and the previous tenancy of an Illinois state senate seat that is, demographically and ideologically speaking, the moral equivalent of a gerrymandered district held by one of the members of the Congressinal Black Caucus. Nothing out of the ordinary, right?That, certainly, is how the Obamaphiles of the upper- and upper-middle-class Establishment would like to see it.

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The shadowy arch villain in “The Godfather Part III” (a film almost as miserably underrated as Sarah Palin) opines before his demise, “He who builds on the people builds on mud.” This grandfatherly nugget from the lips of an arch-Mafioso should serve to dispel the vulgar illusion that gangsters are all about populism. But this bracing aphorism might serve as a sort of warning for the American electorate in 2008. Sen. Barack Obama built a left-leaning coalition that pushed his nomination through, largely by exerting weighted importance in the caucuses and through the madly unhinged (dis)proportional representation math that helped him “carry” the delegates in states that Sen. Clinton actually won.
Now in the general election, amidst the turmoil of a still-unraveling set of financial crises of uncertain real extent and damage, Obama is riding a wave of economic unease just as Bill Clinton did in 1992. The “economy, stupid” issue of ’92 proved laughably ephemeral, while the damage done to America’s reputation abroad by the leadership of an inexperienced governor proved rather more serious and lasting. Once again, an elder statesman of the GOP is pitted against a brash, ambitious young Democrat who’s playing the card of economic populism.
What will be the consequences? Without the economic freefall, this election would almost certainly be close to tied, possibly with John McCain out in front. The alleged chagrin of “moderates” to Gov. Palin is largely, I feel, trumped up and ephemeral. Her unveiling before the media should certainly have unfolded differently– whatever the status of her learning curve in out-of-Alaska domestic and international issues, she is certainly feisty, poised, and folksy all at once, and she could easily bat policy speeches out of the ballpark just as she did her magnificent initial addresses. The anti-Palin backlash is largely a subsidiary product of the Obama Media-Industrial Complex’s appeal to the snobby elitism of WaPo-reading upper-middle class professionals who innately believe that “one of them” should be governing the country.

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 The shadowy arch villain in "The Godfather Part III" (a film almost as miserably underrated as Sarah Palin) opines before his demise, "He who builds on the people builds on mud."  This grandfatherly nugget from the lips of an arch-Mafioso should serve to dispel the vulgar illusion that gangsters are all about populism.

 But this bracing aphorism might serve as a sort of warning for the American electorate in 2008.  Sen. Barack Obama built a left-leaning coalition that pushed his nomination through, largely by exerting weighted importance in the caucuses and through the madly unhinged (dis)proportional representation math that helped him "carry" the delegates in states that Sen. Clinton actually won.

 Now in the general election, amidst the turmoil of a still-unraveling set of financial crises of uncertain real extent and damage, Obama is riding a wave of economic unease just as Bill Clinton did in 1992.  The "economy, stupid" issue of '92 proved laughably ephemeral, while the damage done to America's reputation abroad by the leadership of an inexperienced governor proved rather more serious and lasting.  Once again, an elder statesman of the GOP is pitted against a brash, ambitious young Democrat who's playing the card of economic populism.  What will be the consequences?

Read More →