Obama must lose for the right reason
Fascinating, isn't it, the way Barack Obama continues to backtrack from his downplaying of the threat Iran poses to the United States, and his willingness to meet personally with its nutty president? The naivette of Sen. Obama is startling in a man who finds himself so close to the White House. Only last night CNN was displaying electoral college maps which seemed to demonstrate his near inevitability.
In fact, he's a phenominally intelligent and charismatic man- without the first qualification to be President of the United States. He has held only one national office, and during the time he's been in the Senate he's spent such little time in Washington that it's reasonable to ask whether that even counts.
As his naive (and oft-modified) foreign policy statements would indicate, Sen. Obama has no foreign policy experience at all. To the extent he has one, he seems to espouse the Jimmy Carter make-nice-nice-to-the-bad-guys approach to what his supporters laughably call "diplomacy."
Diplomacy is not conducted with your hat in your hand. Or your umbrella, either.
I haven't read it yet, but I understand that Michelle Malkin has a wonderful post today on the free ride the MSM has been giving Obama over his repeated gaffes- gaffes which they would have hounded a Republican over relentlessly (just consider what happened when Jamie Rubin misrepresented that McCain statement about Iran earlier in the week- and consider how silent the MSM has been about the whole affair since that unedited version of the interview turned up and proved that McCain had not said what Rubin said he had said!),
Barack Obama's candidacy for the White House ought to be seen as a joke. It is not. I must confess, however, that there is one outcome to this election which I fear even more than an Obama victory: an Obama defeat clearly and unmistakably tracable to his race.
The imminent nomination of an African-American by a major political party for the White House is a historic moment (one I always thought, to be honest, would happen first at a Republican convention). It represents a tremendous step forward for this nation in the area of race relations. For Obama to lose because he's an African-American would undo all that, and possibly create an outcry that would reveal a deeper racial divide than has existed in this country at least since the 'Sixties. I'd like to think we'd come farther than that.
I'd like to think my fellow white Americans had come farther than that.
The thing is, of course, that racism will probably also be used as an excuse if Obama is defeated for the right reason: because he isn't qualified, and John McCain is. Either way, I'd feel better if the African-American running this year were, say, Colin Powell- somebody with the background to actually do the job if he's elected to it.
In fact, he's a phenominally intelligent and charismatic man- without the first qualification to be President of the United States. He has held only one national office, and during the time he's been in the Senate he's spent such little time in Washington that it's reasonable to ask whether that even counts.
As his naive (and oft-modified) foreign policy statements would indicate, Sen. Obama has no foreign policy experience at all. To the extent he has one, he seems to espouse the Jimmy Carter make-nice-nice-to-the-bad-guys approach to what his supporters laughably call "diplomacy."
Diplomacy is not conducted with your hat in your hand. Or your umbrella, either.
I haven't read it yet, but I understand that Michelle Malkin has a wonderful post today on the free ride the MSM has been giving Obama over his repeated gaffes- gaffes which they would have hounded a Republican over relentlessly (just consider what happened when Jamie Rubin misrepresented that McCain statement about Iran earlier in the week- and consider how silent the MSM has been about the whole affair since that unedited version of the interview turned up and proved that McCain had not said what Rubin said he had said!),
Barack Obama's candidacy for the White House ought to be seen as a joke. It is not. I must confess, however, that there is one outcome to this election which I fear even more than an Obama victory: an Obama defeat clearly and unmistakably tracable to his race.
The imminent nomination of an African-American by a major political party for the White House is a historic moment (one I always thought, to be honest, would happen first at a Republican convention). It represents a tremendous step forward for this nation in the area of race relations. For Obama to lose because he's an African-American would undo all that, and possibly create an outcry that would reveal a deeper racial divide than has existed in this country at least since the 'Sixties. I'd like to think we'd come farther than that.
I'd like to think my fellow white Americans had come farther than that.
The thing is, of course, that racism will probably also be used as an excuse if Obama is defeated for the right reason: because he isn't qualified, and John McCain is. Either way, I'd feel better if the African-American running this year were, say, Colin Powell- somebody with the background to actually do the job if he's elected to it.
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