When verbal blunders turn into policy

Barack Obama, the not-ready-for-prime-time presumptive nominee of the Democratic party for President of the United States, could not have picked a worse moment to stick his foot in his mouth about meeting Middle Eastern terrorists and friends of terrorists without prior conditions than this spring when gas prices have topped four dollars a gallon, and are still climbing.

Charles Krauthammer thinks that Obama started off by misspeaking- and then, in his haste to demonize the "cowboy diplomacy" of George W. Bush, painted himself so quickly and so completely into a corner that he had no choice but to make his verbal blunder policy. Sometimes mere candidates can get away with this, especially when (as in Obama's case) the media is firmly in their corner and not only downplaying their blundering but creating almost a daily series of pseudo-gaffes and faux scandals centering on their presumptive November opponents, as they continue to do with John McCain. But even this double-barrelled approach to saving Obama's bacon can't entirely hide the fact that presidents don't always get the luxury of a partisan media hiding their blunders and lying (as James Rubin did earlier in the week about a statement by McCain on the negotiation issue)about their opponents. Blunders that become policy tend to be rather worrisome when the person committing them- and getting stuck with the resulting distortions in policy- occupy the Oval Office.

All the more evidence that, despite what Obama and his acolytes have been saying for lo these many months, experience does matter. It matters because simple competence at that level of government requires the wisdom that only experience can provide. And the bottom line is that Barack Obama simply lacks it to a degree that makes the prospect of an Obama administration even more frightening than his economic and social extremism alone would make it.

And extremism it is Obama's forte, for all his talk of healing the land and uniting its people. Obama is on record, for example, as opposing gay "marriage." Yet Rick Lowrey thinks- and argues quite plausibly- that despite the Illinois senator's gentle rhetoric about turning the angry blue and red splotches on the electoral map into a nice, friendly purple, his "new" politics of double-talk and slippery rhetoric may well conceal a greater friendliness toward that oxymoron than he is willing to admit. Certainly Obama's response to the decision by California's Supreme Court to legalize gay "marriage" can only be described as praising it with faint damns. His seeming openness to treating the entire matter as a civil rights issue raises real questions both about the plausibility of his professed position and how he sees the matter in his heart of hearts.

This race is essentially one between a seasoned- though flawed- senior statesman, on one hand, and an inexperienced extremist on the other. It will be fascinating to see whether, and for how long, the liberal media can prevent that from becoming apparent to the American people.

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