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Amir Taheri writes on the conflicting lessons of 9/11.
… McCain believes that America is at war; Obama doesn’t. McCain believes the United States can win on the battlefield; Obama doesn’t.
For Obama, the problem is one of effective law enforcement. His model is the way Clinton handled the first attack on World Trade Center in 1993. Obama says: “We are able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.” This means the United States reacting after being attacked.
McCain, however, doesn’t fear the politically incorrect term “pre-emption” – hitting the enemy before he hits you.
WHEN all is said and done, this election may well have only one big issue: the existential threat that Islamist terrorism poses to America’s safety. Since McCain and Obama offer radically different policies for facing that threat, American voters do have a real choice.
Gerard Baker tries to explain to Obama-worshipping Euros how it is The One might lose.
… Travelling in Britain this week, I’ve been asked repeatedly by close followers of US politics if it can really be true that Barack Obama might not win. Thoughtful people cannot get their head around the idea that Mr Obama, exciting new pilot of change, supported by Joseph Biden, experienced navigator of the swamplands of Washington politics, could possibly be defeated.
They look upon John McCain and Sarah Palin and see something out of hag-ridden history: the wizened old warrior, obsessed with finding enemies in every corner of the globe, marching in lockstep with the crackpot, mooseburger-chomping mother from the wilds of Alaska, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, smiting caribou and conventional science as she goes.
Two patronising explanations are adduced to explain why Americans are going wrong. The first is racism. I’ve dealt with this before and it has acquired no more merit. White supremacists haven’t been big on Democratic candidates, whatever their colour, for a long time, and Mr Obama’s race is as likely to generate enthusiasm among blacks and young voters as it is hostility among racists.
In a similarly condescending account, those foolish saps are being conned into voting for Mr McCain because they like his running-mate. Her hockey-mom charm and storybook career appeals to their worst instincts. The race is boiling down to a beauty contest in which a former beauty queen is stealing the show. Believe this if it helps you come to terms with the possibility of a Democratic defeat. But there really are better explanations. …
And Charles Krauthammer recounts the Obama trajectory as it seems to be crashing to earth.
…Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain‘s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.
The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.
It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever. …
James Pethokoukis who writes on money and politics for US News is uniquely situated to comment on the bubble that was Barack.
… Has the “revolutionary optimism” of Obamamania faded? Let’s turn to a second event. I was recently chatting with a top Obama adviser who was explaining in detail the campaign’s ambitious 50-state strategy, how legions of Obamamaniacs were turning up in the reddest counties of the red states. If that was all true, I asked him, how come the polls were so close? If Obama was surging in places where John Kerry and Al Gore got clobbered, shouldn’t the Democratic nominee be ahead by a country mile? The only answer I got was something about how the structure of the American electorate is historically biased against Democrats.
Huh? I felt like a Wall Street analyst during the tech boom sitting through a glitzy PowerPoint presentation—filled with buzzwords like “stickiness” and “eyeballs” and, of course, “sticky eyeballs”—who finally had the temerity to ask: “So if things are so great, why aren’t you making any money?” It’s like the old joke, “Sure, we lose money on each sale, but we make up for it on volume!” (The adviser finally admitted that Obama hadn’t closed the deal on national security.)
Is Obama doomed to go from hero to zero, bubble to complete bust? I don’t think so. Politicians, unlike stocks, don’t go to zero—though Howard Dean did come awfully close in the 2004 Democratic primaries. …
Byron York tries to understand why Obama supporters go crazy contemplating Sarah.
What is it about Sarah Palin that seems to have driven so many smart, thoughtful Obama supporters around the bend?
Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman” and denounced “the Republican Party’s cynical calculation that because [Palin] has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies … she speaks for the women of America.”
Carol Fowler, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said that Palin’s “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”
Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, wrote that Palin’s values “more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers” and asked: “What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.” …
Perhaps the strangest episode in the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin was his willingness to believe the bogus AP reports of her supposed claim our Iraq efforts were a “mission from God” in Blues Bros speak. Jim Lindgren of Volokh has the story.
One thing I learned tonight is that neither Charlie Gibson nor anyone on his staff reads the Volokh Conspiracy (or Hot Air for that matter).
Outrageously, in his interview Gibson claimed that Sarah Palin had called the Iraq War “a task . . . from God.”
No she didn’t. She prayed that it was a task from God. As I said a few days ago:
I find it hard to believe that Anderson Cooper [and now, Charlie Gibson] does not understand the difference between praying for something you hope is true and stating that it is true.
Is praying for peace throughout the world the same as saying that there is peace throughout the world?
If I had prayed for the press to be fair to Sarah Palin that would not be the same as stating that the press is being fair to Sarah Palin.
Here was the exchange between Palin and Gibson tonight:: …
More on this from Hot Air.
Jay Nordlinger posts on Gibson attitudes at the Corner.
ABC News is so stupid they are flagging the “holy war” parts of the interview for promotional purposes. Dartblog with the story
We have snippets of CBS News interview with Hillary’s Mark Penn.
… CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?
Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”
What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them. …
Wisconsin is this week’s bellwether state in The Economist.
… Wisconsin is best known for its dairy products and its love of American football. The Packers, a team from the small city of Green Bay, claim some of the sport’s most obsessive fans, known as “cheeseheads”, a term also used to denote Wisconsans generally. But among politicos, Wisconsin is the swing state that has failed to swing.
Earlier in the last century, the state was at the heart of America’s Progressive movement, enacting liberal social reforms such as compensation for injured workers before the rest of the country did. But Wisconsin pioneered conservative welfare reform in the 1990s, and its voters now plainly prefer divided government on the state level: Wisconsin currently has a Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, and a Republican-controlled state Assembly. And they have split almost exactly evenly when it comes to the presidency. Al Gore took the state by only 5,700 votes in 2000, and John Kerry won it by 11,400 in 2004—0.2% and 0.4% of the vote, respectively. The margins were a lot closer than those in nearby Michigan, which gets a lot more attention. …
Adam Smith blog post on the disruptions of bio-fuel.