He's Barack Obama!

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The potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader

...[Obama] is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Sorry, Dad, I'm voting for Obama (Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast, 10 October 2008)

Yeah, that about sums it up.

November 4th will not mark the first occasion that I've voted for a Democrat--I've done so many times in my adult life, for candidates at the local and state level--but it'll be the first time I've ever voted for the Democratic Party's candidate for President.

The Appalachian Problem

The southwestern region, rising from the Roanoke Valley up to the Appalachian Plateau, is a place of small farms, coal mines, and chronic economic hard times. It was settled in the eighteenth century by Scots-Irish Calvinists who fled Anglican-dominated Ulster and, eventually, came to that portion of Virginia which the planter aristocracy didn’t want. Their descendants live in small hill towns that are nearer, in mileage and in spirit, to the old factory town of Ironton, Ohio, than to the glass office towers of northern Virginia. Three weeks after the Virginia primary, the mostly white, working-class voters of southern Ohio, a significant portion of them of Scots-Irish descent, helped deliver that state to Hillary Clinton. In the next weeks, their kin did the same in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky. It became clear that if Obama hoped to win in November he would probably have to overcome his Appalachia problem.

The Appalachian Problem: Obama goes to rural Virginia (Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, October 6 2008 issue)

I think there's something in there about him being a Harvard grad, too

On 9/14/08 8:17 AM, XXX wrote:

According to The Book of Revelations:

The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal....the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

Hey, XXX – I hope this note finds you well. We are all okay, but always wish there were a few more hours in the weekend and a few less in the workweek...

I have seen the above repeated in a lot of places lately... Makes it easier for me to believe that old saying about the Bible being one book that everybody has in the house but nobody reads.

Revelation doesn’t describe or even use the term “anti-Christ” (though it is used elsewhere in the Bible); the figures of evil in Revelation are beasts that, when you read about them (see below) don’t really even sound like human beings to me, much less like a 40-year-old Muslim male. (Also: The Muslim faith was not founded until many hundreds of years after the last book of the Christian Bible was written...)

I’m not a big fan of Obama, to be honest. I was a Republican for most of my adult life before switching my registration to Independent a few years back, and I think there are plenty of valid reasons to prefer McCain, Barr, or not voting, over voting for Obama.

Arguing that he is some kind of Secret Muslim Anti-Christ is just silly, though.

- bc

New International Version, Revelation chapter 13:

¹ And the dragon[a] stood on the shore of the sea.

The Beast out of the Sea

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.


²The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.


³One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast.

⁴Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?"

⁵The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months.

⁶He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.

⁷He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation.

⁸All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.[b]

⁹He who has an ear, let him hear.

¹⁰If anyone is to go into captivity,
into captivity he will go.
If anyone is to be killed[c] with the sword,
with the sword he will be killed. This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints.

The Beast out of the Earth

¹¹Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon.

¹²He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.

¹³And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.

¹⁴Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.

¹⁵He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.

¹⁶He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead,

¹⁷so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.

¹⁸This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

The perfect attack dog

To keep track of how the Presidential candidates are reaching out to their supporters (and also as a little experiment to gauge whether the various campaigns are keeping their privacy pledges--so far, all of them are), I've signed up at each major candidate's campaign site under a trackable pseudonym; at Obama's site, I'm "Joe Gauche"; for McCain, "Joe Droit," and at Bob Barr's place, "Joe Liberté".

Mr. Gauche got the text message announcing Obama's pick of Joe Biden early this morning, followed by an e-mail.

Real Clear Politics has been collating the published responses in the major media, and so far I think the New York Post, of all places, has the analysis nailed: Blowhard Could Be Just What Obama Needs.

Biden is, um, articulate to a fault... and he'll make the perfect attack dog, if his performance in the primary debates is any indication. (His one-sentence takedown of Rudy Giuliani -- "He only ever says three things: a noun, a verb, and 9/11" -- was pitch-perfect.)

If the campaign staff can keep Biden anything close to on-message, he'll be very effective.

Pull the string, and the story unravels

At Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog, David Weigel runs those crazy Larry Johnson-fueled net.rumors about Michelle Obama to earth:

Until he comes out with a video tape that shows at least one of the many rumored "Michelle speeches," I think that's the last we need to hear from Larry Johnson.

Maureen Dowd, having none of it, thank you

Then came the Big Dog, crazy like a fox, for the coup de graceless. Campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., he said that his scrappy wife can win working-class voters, as compared with Obama’s Viognier-and-Volvo set.

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity. And don’t you love this paean to rules coming from a man so tethered and humbled by rules that he invented an entirely new sexual etiquette to suit his needs in the Oval Office?

"This Bud's For You" (Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 4 May 2008)

Obama the Hawaiian

"To envision a world where racial identity is more fluid, where men and women are more mobile, and where segregation is a thing of the past is not to envision a post-racial world. Obama knows this, as anyone who has lived in Hawaii must."

Allegra Goodman, Honolulu Diarist, The New Republic

"Obama is a secret Muslim who also belongs to a Christian church that practices black liberation theology..."

Dear [Mom's friend],

Mom had mentioned to me that you had received some e-mail(s) about Barack Obama. There are a lot of lies and half-truths in circulation about him now - and when you receive an e-mail that makes a bunch of outrageous claims and you want to fact-check them, the best website for that sort of thing is http://snopes.com.

I don't know which e-mail(s) you received, but here is Snopes's breakdown of the Obama e-mails in wide circulation:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/obama.asp

In short, virtually anything you're likely to hear about any political candidate in an unsourced e-mail is highly likely to be complete bullshit.

Great seeing you - and thanks so much for the wonderful chicken salad...


All best,

Barry

You think he's wearin' a vest?

Watching Obama's Iowa victory speech:

...But what I'm looking at here is different than the '88 election. Jesse had done surprisingly well, considering. But pulling off the Iowa shit that Obama did last night? A state with a 2.3% Black population and a 94% white majority? Oh, no. This was some “next-level” stuff I was watching. It took an eternity for Obama to get to the mic to speak, and in that eternity, I felt the muscles in my neck tense up...

...I found I couldn't really absorb or analyze the speech as I'd have liked. I was too busy checking out cameras in the crowd held aloft, and wondering about security. “Jesus, he gets so many people at his events! How the fuck is he gonna secure the venues? Ohhhhh man...”

...The phone rang, jarringly.

“Hello?”, I ask.

“You watching this?”, my friend “D” asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

“You think he's wearin' a vest?

A long beat from me. “Well...I'm sure he's got Secret Service protection.”

“Is he wearin' a vest to protect himself against those motherfuckers?“

“Well, if he didn't before tonight, he will be by tomorrow”, I replied.

This is a long, thoughtful post, well worth reading. It's a vivid glimpse into what a friend of mine calls "educated paranoia":

We have developed an unfortunate Pavlovian response to the repeated sight of our best and brightest being blown away like so many dandelion bits in the wind.

We have our moments of pride, and then...then, those uncontrollable palpitations. Worrying about when the ax will fall. Or the grenade. Or the bullet's sharp crack, the diving security and guests, and the inevitable cut to a shocked newsroom.

Group News Blog: Pride and Palpitations