>> My latest oped, on the Flight of the Obamacons, is over at the Washington Times. An excerpt:

Mr. Kmiec and his small band of Obamacons are the new Lotophagi, the “Lotus Eaters” of Homer’s Odyssey. When landing on the territory of the cult-like Lotophagi, Ulysses’s crew was given a flower to eat “which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus Eaters without thinking further of their return.”

Mr. Kmiec and others like him can munch on the flowery prose of Mr. Obama for as long as they want, drifting along on the wafted air of Hope and Change, fooling themselves into forgetting the principles that they once professed to believe. Don’t mourn the Obamacons in their current state, fellow conservatives: We can safely leave them to their happy way which will only bring them heartbreak when they wake up to a world with Supreme Court Justice John Edwards and a whole mouth of grass-stained teeth.

The reactions to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club were almost universal. Even commentators like Andrew Sullivan, who spent weeks arguing that Rev. Wright’s statements were either taken out of context or irrelevant to the discussion at hand, were forced to concede their indefensibility.

And showing the kind of courageous leadership he has already become known for, Barack Obama knows how to respond when an opinion is poll-tested at overwhelming levels: he adopts it unconditionally, as if he has held it all along. As Rev. Wright, insightful political observer that he is, said yesterday: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

Remember those fine words Sen. Obama shared in Philadelphia? How he could not denounce his spiritual mentor, the inspiration for The Audacity of Hope, without denouncing the entirety of the black church? Just a few weeks later, those words mean nothing. Or, the Obama campaign seems to be urging, perhaps in our cynicism we just misunderstood them. Sen. Obama does not flip flop. He has held the same position all along. It’s just Rev. Wright who’s changed into something “unrecognizable” to the Senator, after twenty years of friendship.

One wonders when, exactly, this alteration of character took place. Was it on one of those Sundays when Sen. Obama sat and listened as Rev. Wright launched into a tirade against the United States of America, when he tithed as they passed the plate and shook hands with important citizens after the service? Was it when Rev. Wright, as he later told the New York Times, acknowledged that the Senator would have to distance himself from their church in order to win the presidency? Or was it only when Rev. Wright appeared in front of the gathered cameras and stuck to his rhetorical guns, refusing to disavow his past positions? Those hot lights certainly bring clarity for the new Adonis who turns winter into spring, and the idea that churches are chosen according to the political benefit to a rising politician, not that incidental matter of beliefs, is looking awfully bad in hindsight.

Wright did not hide from the questions: he answered them frankly and honestly. He conceded the anti-Americanism of his statements, and more. When asked about the Senator’s Philadelphia speech, he responded: “[Barack Obama] didn’t distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American…We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”

The theology of Barack Obama is an intriguing one. Forgive my clumsy brevity of description, but: if we understand the theology of George W. Bush as one of a very New Testament-heavy understanding of God’s power of redemption – for the individual, for government, and for nations; and the theology of Bill Clinton was one of hands-off deism – where God forgives virtually any personal sin as long as your aims are noble; and the theology of Ronald Reagan as an Old Testament understanding of God’s hand moving invisibly behind the great clashes of good and evil empires…we must find Obama’s personal view to share the most in common with the theology of Jimmy Carter, circa 1976.

It is a kinship that Rev. Wright certainly believes exists between himself, the former president and others – at least on the subject of Israel.

“Louis [Farrakhan] said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter’s being vilified for and Bishop Tutu’s being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that’s what I think about him…Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color.”

Barack Obama is the evangelist of the betterment of man. His religion is one of an almost overriding humanism, to the exclusion of the divine: hope is his signet, change his golden cross. He brings salvation to the masses via the empowerment of government, government under his leadership. His followers are not the Southern pro-American Carter voters, and they may carry iPhones instead of the hoes of the agrarian south, but the message is striking for its similarities. Where Carter constantly used Protestant religious terminology to describe the healing that needed to take place in the wake of Watergate, Obama’s solution for the Iraq war and the other sins (as he sees them) of the George W. Bush administration is to say: trust in me – untested, inexperienced, poll-driven me – as you trust in yourself.

Yet there are small differences as well, and those are key to understanding the Senator. The language Obama uses may still be that of prayer, but it is prayer not directed toward a creator, but to his audience itself. Faith turns inward, and becomes an infinite loop. So Carter’s “We can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems” becomes “Yes we can.” And so the old sung tones of “Wait upon the Lord” morphs into “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” From Obama’s perspective, as opposed to Carter’s, it is only the bitter, the nervous, the threatened, or the uneducated who cling to religion.

We know how this ended the first time: the infamous malaise speech of 1979. As the eloquent Steve Hayward put it in his biography of President Carter, the man ran for office promising “a government as good as the people” ultimately ended his term in office by saying that the people were no good. If they took such bets in Vegas, one could get a fine margin on picking the month of his term where President Obama would announce the same realization.

It is a shocking sight for some. How could something this radical have stayed hidden for so long? And so all sorts of theories abound in the blogosphere that the Rev. Wright story has to be a creation of a political strategist, a planted story to allow for a Sister Souljah moment, a false-flag operation gone wrong, not the self-inflicted wound of a Chicago politician who needed friends like these to rise from the state senate to the presidential stakes in just a few years. It doesn’t really matter now, to be honest – if it was such a story, it has already spun out of the Obama campaign’s control, and their billion dollar brand is now in the lurch.

But we should not be shocked by this. We should not recoil from Rev. Wright for explaining his views. We should applaud him for his honesty and consistency. When the media came calling, he did not retract decades of radical speeches and remarks merely to satisfy the fashion of the times: he merely explained why he believed what he believed. He is not ashamed. He is a showman, not a scholar – and so his references for the belief that the United States government caused the HIV virus as a blight on the African American community are odd books and a view that “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

Indeed. Under a leader with the poll-driven doctrine of Barack Obama, who knows what it will be capable of doing – if, that is, America decides to find out.

originally posted at Right Side Politics

>> I think this VDH post does the best job of summarizing everything that’s wrong with Barack Obama’s latest gaffe: saying these kind of things to the San Francisco Democrats is just part of the same thread that started when he complained about the cost of arugula at Whole Foods in Iowa, a state that has no Whole Foods stores - and when Mrs. Obama got in touch with the middle class by complaining how it cost $10,000 for dance and music lessons these days (that’s an Eliot Spitzer inflation rate, for crying out loud).  How are they going to use the old “Out of Touch” attack on John McCain when Obama is imitating John F. Kerry?

>> This is the new politics: right off the bat, a great big fat lie. See, you don’t understand - once he found there was a market for HopeChange, you can’t expect Barack Obama to pass it up. That’d just be bad business, dontchaknow.

Barring a shocking turn of events, Barack Obama will effectively seal the nomination of the Democratic Party on March 4th. While Hillary Clinton may still pull off victories in Ohio and Texas, she would have to win by large margins to have a realistic path to victory – which seems unlikely given the increasingly desperate nature of her on-trail performance and a growing impression that her moment of opportunity has passed, if it ever existed.

Republicans are now confronted with a Democratic candidate who, as Fred Barnes has pointed out, is a candidate of a consensus party for the first time in more than a generation. With a delicate coalition that must come together around the controversial John McCain in order to win, the odds are strongly against the GOP in November.

But should they be?

As we all know by now, Obama comes equipped with many innate gifts that make him the most appealing and pop culturally significant Democratic candidate since John F. Kennedy. As recently as six months ago, I believed it was impossible for anyone other than McCain to have any hope of beating the young Illinois Senator. Yet the primary results led me to reevaluate my opinion, and I now believe that Obama presents not just an inherently flawed candidacy, but a kamikaze leftist candidate, whose out-of-step views will not last the duration of a general election without full exposure, and whose mawkish storytelling can’t carry him to the White House without some serious good fortune.

Read on, then, for the top ten reasons Republicans should not be afraid of Obama in a general election:

1. No McGovern has ever won

The Democratic Party has a long history of choosing candidates whose liberal views and ability to inspire their upper class white and lower class worker voting base make them ideally suited for caucuses and primaries, and terribly suited for general elections. They’ve proven that they can win when they choose triangulating centrist Southern candidates like Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992, but candidates like McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis all went down in the general. While Obama is certainly a more inspiring figure than Dukakis, it’s worth remembering that the Massachusetts Governor emerged from the DNC Convention with a 17 point lead in 1988 in large part because George H.W. Bush was a known quantity, while Dukakis was a bright unknown immigrant talking about change. One wonders whether Obama will be smart enough to avoid any tank incidents, since the modern equivalent would get six million views on YouTube in short order. In the end, the historical path just isn’t there - a fact which makes a win not impossible, but less likely.

2. Latinos

Barack Obama has yet to prove that he can perform well or even consistently compete for Latino voters, who have been a key swing bloc in past elections. McCain is the best candidate out of the Republican field in terms of performance among voting Latinos – he has a long history of winning them in Arizona, and a good deal of cachet among the community – and Obama will have to overcome significant racial divides to compete among them, which is one of the reasons he has a distinct disadvantage in point 3.

3. New map is better for McCain

A McCain-Obama contest effectively throws out the Bush 2000/2004 maps. The battlegrounds shift, and in nearly every case, they shift in a way that plays to Republican advantages. Obama has raised money with an ease unlike any candidate in American political history – even George Washington had to buy scads of alcohol to cater his first campaign – but he will have to spend a large amount of those resources in traditional Democrat states to shore up his base after a divisive primary. On the other hand, McCain will run strong in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and he is already running even with Obama in western states like New Mexico thanks in large part to Latinos and another key bloc, which leads us to a fourth point.

4. Veterans

The so-called “older belligerent men” vote that granted McCain his come-from-behind victory is in large part a result of emphatic, overwhelming support from veterans and military families. This is no Kerry-Bush race where veterans could be split – McCain’s loyalty runs so deep, he wins both anti-war and pro-war vets. Yes, turnout for African-Americans will be at its highest point ever with an Obama candidacy – but on the other side, strong veteran communities plus Latino voters will enable McCain to realistically compete in states like California, which a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t had a shot at since 1988. It’s notable that Obama couldn’t pass Clinton there, despite his fundraising prowess in the state – but in the end, it’s less important that McCain actually wins in the Golden State than it is that he keeps Obama’s resources tied up there, allowing for gains in other contests.

5. Single Issues Matter This Time

On several hot-button issues, Barack Obama has views that are considerably to the left of both Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000 – and unlike those two candidates, his views have yet to be exposed on the national stage. Take this recent column from Stu Rothenberg on Obama’s gun problems, emphasis added:

Even more telling, possibly, was a recent interview Obama gave to television anchor Leon Harris and journalist John Harris. In it, Obama tried to have things both ways.

When he was asked by Leon Harris how he reconciles his support for the D.C. gun ban, which was declared unconstitutional by a federal court last year and which bars all handguns not registered before 1976, with his statement that he has “no intention of taking away folks’ guns,” Obama launched into a confusing explanation of “conflicting traditions in this country.”

He ended his monologue by saying, “We can have a reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respects the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.” But the D.C. gun ban is based on the premise that the Second Amendment doesn’t give individuals the right to own a gun.

This isn’t just leftism – it’s incoherent leftism. The idea that “reasonable, thoughtful gun control” is somehow not “taking away folks’ guns” might fly now, but just won’t play after every gun-toting middle and lower class white male in the Midwest has heard about it. Gore essentially ran as a pro-gun candidate in 2000, and even Kerry tried to soft-pedal the gun issue, but Obama simply can’t – any more than he can soft-pedal his views on partial birth abortion and other associated issues. Leading pro-lifer Gary Bauer recently sent an email to supporters pointing out that Obama gains roughly 10 percentage points over Hillary Clinton among pro-lifers in states like Wisconsin, Iowa, and Virginia. Some may view this as a problem, but in reality, it’s a huge opportunity for Republicans to completely define a candidate who struggles to define even his own positions on the matter. As we saw with Rudy Giuliani this cycle, when ignorance ends on a candidate’s views on life, the percentages swing.

6. Weakness among typical Democrat voting blocs

Obama’s success among groups like the young professionals, wealthy whites, and poor blacks have been unsurprising – but he’s been less consistent with a key demographic that he needs to win in November: union voters. While I don’t think there’s any question Obama will ultimately win them over, doing so is going to take more sustained outreach, and more attacks along the lines of his anti-NAFTA assault last week. And even after endorsements from the Teamsters and others, there’s a strong undercurrent of union voters who are unenthusiastic about a candidate they view as a weak advocate on their issues, and fundamentally out of step with their experience. You need only look at this recent rant by Tom Buffenburger of the machinists’ union to see the problem:

“Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”

Reaching out to union voters is going to force Obama to take more divisive anti-free market positions, ones that McCain can absolutely exploit.

7. The New Southern Strategy

While Gov. Ed Rendell’s controversial comments about racial politics don’t reflect the situation in most states (if anything, this cycle has revealed it’s more a problem in New England than in the South – not even the Kennedys could deliver Massachusetts for Obama!), they do reveal another problem for Obama. He’s won throughout the primary season by having enormous turnout from African-American voters in places like South Carolina, where they made up half the voting electorate at the polls. It’s not going to be like this in the general. In fact, Obama has only won the votes of white Democrats in a total of two state primaries: Illinois, his home state, and New Mexico. There is not one Southern state where Obama did not have the advantage in a Democratic primary, and not one Southern state where Obama has the advantage going into the a general election. He must expand his base in the South in order to hope to win, and efforts to do that will be stymied without moving right on several issues – issues like guns, marriage, and immigration, all areas he can’t afford to move on. And how many incidents of rank racial politics of the sort Sean Wilentz (no conservative he) details here have the potential to backfire in a general?

8. The Experience Gap

This race has the widest experience gap since Wendell Willkie took on FDR in 1940, never having held elective office. While many members of the mainstream media are eager to make Obama-JFK comparisons, younger voters may forget that the war hero Kennedy had spend 13 years in Congress and the Senate by the time he ran for President. Obama’s inexperience and naivete have already revealed themselves in small moments when it comes to foreign affairs, and this is obviously McCain’s strength. As I noted earlier, McCain’s maverick tendencies are so ingrained that he wins independents and moderates who oppose the war, as well as those who support it and believe it was poorly waged.

If this election is about pop culture and style, Obama wins; if it’s about who is best suited to be Commander in Chief, McCain wins. In one of politics little ironies, the Democrats now have to hope that the surge in Iraq is so successful over the coming months that Iraq is essentially a non-issue: if foreign policy is a priority, either way, it plays to McCain’s advantages.

9. The Barack Obama is My Shiny New Bicycle

The “Building a Religion” cult of personality that has grown up around Obama has certainly propelled much of his success and fundraising. But anecdotal evidence suggests it’s now reached a point where it’s genuinely off-putting to some voters – certainly if it’s reached the point where Hillary Clinton herself is mocking it. Think John Edwards’ “Christopher Reeve will walk again, but only if you vote for Kerry-Edwards!” comment in 2004, but maximize it as the note hit by an entire campaign’s following. As anyone in Hollywood can tell you, all it takes is a few TMZ segments, and one day you go from being Hannah Montana to being Britney Spears. This is the kind of “Obama’s made voting chic” strategy that draws in susceptible young voters, but has massive potential to backfire in a general election where true believers are outnumbered and where a political novice is pitted not against a sluggish partisan candidate like Hillary, but an experienced campaigner who’s proven he wins Independent voters consistently.

10. Even if he wins, it’s not over

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that none of the previous eight factors break Obama’s way. Say the Republicans don’t come together, and he wins a narrow election over McCain, winning states like Missouri, holding onto California, and carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania. Now the hard part begins for the political left: how do you govern successfully as a liberal in the White House? How do you actually make this thing work? It’s not going to be easy to pull off Great Society Redux and post-partisanship at the same time, particularly if Hillary is Majority Leader as some expect. The problem for Democrats is that Obama is so unique, so fresh and new, and those he surrounds himself with … aren’t. They don’t have the farm team to support him in office – just the tired old partisan lions of big government and scandal, known quantities all.

If Obama is elected, his presidency may ultimately resemble Jimmy Carter’s: a candidate who convinced voters that he was nice and good, and then discovered that these good intentions just weren’t enough to actually run the country for four years.

The basic rule of branding still holds here: once you get the candidate out of the box, regardless of how good the branding is, it still has to work.

crossposted at redstate

For years, I’ve had conversations with friends in politics that all conclude with something like this: “We’re never going to fix the Republican brand until we get our leadership to start recognizing that what a brand is, and that candidates need to sell themselves not by looking at other candidates, but by looking at Nike.”

Yesterday, Barack Obama’s audacious brand continues to triumph. Marketed with dazzling skill to the high end consumer and the conformist college-age Millennial, it enables Obama to make a much broader appeal as a unifying force, in spite of his narrow policy views. He’s the iPhone of politics, sleek, sexy, and pop culture, and even as only 2.5 percent of the market, last year, everyone – even the nonpolitical – know the brand instantly. As Patrick Ruffini noted in his own analysis of Obama: The Brand – “The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people. The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity. That’s not a criticism. It is a compliment.”

Last night, though, we also started to see a few chinks in this HopeChangeObama brand. See, while the benefits of marketing a candidate like anything in a box are enormous, it’s a dangerous game to play.

Consumer brands are more recognizable, they are more unifying, and they have a broader appeal. But when the American people are increasingly voting based on a desire for authenticity, it still matters what’s actually inside the box you’re selling. If you promise people tea and cake, and it turns out to be death, well, they’re not exactly going to be saying omg ponies! And if your brand is a new entry into the marketplace, and you don’t have a lot of built-up goodwill and gravitas, well, you can be rebranded by your opponents before you know it.

The signs that the Big Rock Candy Mountain candidate gave off last night were not the signs of a brand that has staying power. The Clinton campaign has essentially goaded him into giving longer, more typically political speeches – laundry lists of programs and bureaucratic expansions that make him sound like a typical politician, not a candidate of HopeChange. It leads to scenes like this, the sort of promises that can win you a Democratic primary in Wisconsin hands down, but will come back to bite you in a general election:

“We can restore a sense of economic fairness in this country. I believe in capitalism, but when you’ve got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary Americans make in a year, that’s not right. I want a $10 billion package to prevent foreclosures, and a mortgage deduction for those who don’t itemize.”

“Yyyesss!”

“We shouldn’t raise the minimum wage every 10 years, we should raise it every year, to keep up with inflation. If you work in this country, you should not be poor.”

“Amen!”

As Thomas put it: “Those folks on the other side attack the ‘failed policies of the last eight years.’ As a cure, they offer the failed policies of the last century.” The Obamanation doesn’t seem to recognize this yet, but the promises made now just aren’t going to play the same way in a general election.

Robert Samuelson’s column on the “Obama Delusion” in the Post is getting a lot of linkage today, and it deserves it; while naturally inclined to like Obama, he still sees a broad distance between brand and reality (emphasis mine):

Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscuration. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it’s his standard and also his campaign’s central theme. He has run on the vague promise of “change,” but on issue after issue — immigration, the economy, global warming — he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion.

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media — preoccupied with the political “horse race” — have treated his invocation of “change” as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.

If you think that’s the sort of thing that McCain – Mr. Straight Talk, an old brand, a slow brand, but one built on decades of action to back it up – isn’t going to be able to peel back in a drawn out general, well, you’re fooling yourself. But even if he has to do it without the help of the MSM, without further investigation of what Obama really offers beneath all that packaging, it can be done. As Jennifer Rubin notes:

Obama showed a little leg last night and to the relief of the McCain camp showed himself to be a rather ordinary liberal. It sounds trite to recite the litany, but the list of his policy proposals was trite: tax the rich, roll back trade agreements, spend more money, do something (I couldn’t tell what) about lobbyists, and give everyone in America an affordable college education (you might get some Republican takers if you started taxing educational institutions with billion dollar endowments), all while providing universal healthcare. On foreign policy you will find no Joe Biden realism, let alone any Scoop Jackson muscular defense strategy. (He did seem rather enthusiastic about using funds we will save from retreating from Iraq to build roads and provide broadband service in Houston, though.)

This is good news for McCain on two fronts. First, it helps solve, if not totally obliterate, his problem with rallying the base. If conservatives cannot get revved up to oppose a platform that looks like something Ted Kennedy cooked up (come to think of it…) then nothing will rally them. Second, this will enhance McCain’s ability to snag independents. (When you throw in Obama’s positions on everything from partial birth abortion to gun control the task becomes that much easier.)

McCain will, of course, need to fight through the throngs of media boosters and shout over the “Yes, we can” chants. But if the only thing innovative about Obama is stylistic, then McCain may not be such a long shot after all. (He can only hope Obama gives a rambling, self-indulgent mess of a speech after every victory between now and June.)

There’s a meme that’s emerged over the past few months that Obama is – despite resting in age between the runoff of the Baby Boom and the first Gen Xers – the first true candidate of the Millennial generation. The label fits, in large part: Millennials are a responsible bunch, but they still have a mess of conflicts – they say they hate materialism yet spend scads of money, they’re socially conscious but don’t have long memories, and they’re the most secular and the most evangelical generation on record at the same time. Their personal lives are extremely conservative: they drink and use drugs at much lower rates than any generation since the 1950s, and they share those straitlaced conservative attitudes toward sex (the abstinence figures and pregnancy rates are just astounding, and a plurality of them are pro-life), but they’re solidly on the left on the environment and the size of government. They’re optimists, trusting of most authority, and passionate about civic duty.

Yet there’s something else here, too, something that the left should realize is a bigger concern than the political horserace of the moment – this voting bloc is massive, young, and fickle. They’ll turn on a dime after seeing some paparazzi photos and a segment on TMZ. One day you’re Hannah Montana, the next you’re Britney Spears. Just imagine how they would’ve reacted to Dukakis in the tank, with 6 million hits on YouTube, and you get the idea.

Be warned, lefties. Empty promises may sway the Millennials for this election, but putting all your audacious hopes of Great Society Redux in one basket with Obama must have the intended result: once you get the candidate out of the box, regardless of how good the branding is, it still has to work. The past two Democrat administrations have been trainwrecks, and now you’re trusting a guy with no executive experience and a team of political has-beens to achieve glorious HopeChange with a bar set in the stratosphere.

When it comes to the future of conservatism, perhaps the best result for this election and for our future would be the Old Man beating the Kid. The lesson for the left: Even when you packaged it with flowers and puppies and a bright pink bow, you still couldn’t sell McGovernism to the American people. But even if Obama wins, he has to deliver – and it now appears like, after all that sturm und drung, all he’s bringing to the table is a bunch of old failed ideas. The Millennials are too young to remember the welfare state – but they’ll remember what happens next.

crossposted from redstate