« Previous — Next »
British Times Newspaper: Is America Ready For This Dangerous Leftwinger?
25 February 2008The Europeans watch America and Americans with great amusement and often wonderment. (My parents are Brits as well as all my cousins, uncles, aunts etc…).
The European view tends to be a bit weary, having a 1,000 plus years of history as opposed to our 225 gives them a historical viewpoint that views events less energetically then we do. The whole empire thing, been there, done that. These people live in houses older than our country, well a lot of them do.
Also the view over the pond filters out the noise and chaff. So when the normally staid Times calls Obama a “dangerous leftwinger”, it is a must read.
Foreigners don’t have to like America - and they’ve certainly exercised that freedom in the past few years. But most Americans can distinguish between the transience of policy failure and the permanence of the national ideal.
the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate’s campaign. There’s always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama’s rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.
Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. Mrs Obama is surely not alone in thinking not very much about what America has been or done in the past quarter century or more. In fact, it is a trope of the left wing of the Democratic party that America has been a pretty wretched sort of place.
There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.
…..
He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.
While he speaks of the need for Americans to move beyond partisanship (“We are not blue states or red states, but the United States” is a campaign meme), when you cut through the verbiage there is nothing to suggest he believes anything that is seriously at odds with the far Left of his party. If you think about it for a second, it’s not really an accident that he has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson.
Though he talks with great eloquence about the future, he sounds for all the world like one of the long line of Democrats from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis, who became history by espousing policies and striking a rhetorical pose that was well out of the mainstream of American politics.
Obama does not wear a flag pin, well neither do I, but I am not running for Commander in Chief, if I was, I would. His wife has only recently felt proud of this country that has given her and Barack so much. Here is a son of a single mother running for President, reads like Abe’s log cabin story. After background reading on these two, I get the feeling there is an underlying bitterness at work here. Barack’s church displays that on their website, loudly. Other quotes by his wife are worrisome in that they betray a sense of little tolerance for people who do not buy in to their program.
Peggy Noonan wonders if they are simply “snobs”. Could be
The Journal said:
Listen closely to that Tuesday night Wisconsin speech. Unhinge yourself from the mesmerizing voice. What one hears is a message that is largely negative, illustrated with anecdotes of unremitting bleakness. Heavy with class warfare, it is a speech that could have been delivered by a Democrat in 1968, or even 1928.
In late December, Gallup released a poll in which 84% of respondents said they were satisfied with their own lives. At some point in the next 10 months, people will have to square Sen. Obama’s Grapes of Wrath message with the reality of their lives.
It is in the Ohio primary that Barack speeches have turned hardest to the left and the message of populism. Close to Barack’s home turf and his old job as community organizer one has to wonder if perhaps we are finally peaking past the smile and the slogans.
Is this his ideological home?
No comments yet