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Before Rev. Wright’s performances last weekend, there were many reasons to probe the character of Barack Obama. Stuart Taylor, an early fan, mentioned them in the National Journal
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
Many who have been disposed to admire Obama, including me, see these matters as raising troublesome questions about his judgment and character. Many of us have come to wonder whether the purportedly post-ideological Obama is so close to his party’s business-bashing, pacifistic left wing as to skew his judgment on matters ranging from the capital-gains tax to Iraq. Perhaps our suspicions are mistaken. But Obama has hardly laid them to rest.
So said British statesman Edmund Burke in his famous 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol. Similarly, James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that voters should choose the candidates “who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
Wise counsel, albeit forlorn in today’s campaign world in which most people—especially primary voters—back the candidates who are most shameless in sacrificing their judgment to the voters’ opinions.
Burke and Madison might well have approved the judgment-focused questions that pro-Obama journalists have so furiously excoriated moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, for asking at the April 16 debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales accused the two of “shoddy, despicable performances.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg said that they had committed “something akin to a federal crime.” The New York Times’s David Carr called it a “disgusting spectacle.”
Such commentators were especially livid that for much of the first half of the two-hour debate the moderators bored in on Obama’s gaffe about “bitter” laid-off small-towners who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”; questioned his closeness to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright through many years of Wright’s anti-American, white-bashing rants; and brought up his more glancing connection to William Ayers, a University of Illinois professor who was a Weather Underground leader and (by his own admission) bomber almost 40 years ago.
Jennifer Rubin reads between the lines of a NY Times article.
The New York Times today does Barack Obama no favors on the ongoing Reverend Wright fiasco. First, it seems to confirm that a sense of personal pique rather than any “new information” on Wright caused Obama to finally denounce his former pastor. Recounting how Obama read the National Press Club remarks on his blackberry, the Times explains:
As Mr. Obama told close friends after watching the replay, he felt dumbfounded, even betrayed, particularly by Mr. Wright’s implication that Mr. Obama was being hypocritical. He could not tolerate that.
You see, any suggestion that Obama had tolerated, solicited and embraced Wright for political aims and then dumped him when whites got wind of Wright’s hateful radicalism was intolerable. But wasn’t it also true? There are plenty of facts suggesting that this is exactly what occurred. The Times provides additional evidence. …
John Fund says the polls are catching up to Obama’s pastor disaster.
A new Fox News poll may provide some evidence that the Rev. Wright affair is damaging the campaign of Barack Obama.
The poll shows that Mr. Obama’s favorable ratings have declined among Democrats to a point where Hillary Clinton now has higher net positive ratings. …
A target of Weathermen bombs has his say in the NY Daily News.
In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of Feb. 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car.
I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong have won; Kill the pigs. …
Gabor Steingart, who writes for Der Spiegel always has interesting insights on the election.
The issue of race has emerged as the key Democratic divide in this year’s primary season. Despite his waning support amongst white voters, though, the superdelegates appear to have no other choice but to vote for Barack Obama. A vote against him could have serious consequences.
There is a phenomenon in opinion research called the Bradley effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. When Bradley, who was black, ran to become governor of California in 1982, he was the frontrunner in all opinion polls until the very end of the campaign. But he lost on election day.
Since then, the term has been used to denote a serious shift in voter preferences caused by racial prejudice against a candidate — prejudice that voters would never admit openly, but then express in all secrecy in the voting booth.
A more intense version of the Bradley effect has taken shape within the Democratic Party in 2008. “There is no white America,” Barack Obama has said. “There is no black America. There is no Latino America. There is no Asian America. There is just the United States of America.” Many prominent politicians of all skin colors, from New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson to Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to Jesse Jackson, seem to agree with him. But the public euphoria is increasingly bumping up against the resistance of ordinary Democratic voters.
Within the Democratic Party, which likes to call itself the “party of the people,” cheering on and voting for a candidate appear to be two very different things. Voters who say in public that they are inspired are sometimes quick to change their minds and settle scores in the election booth. In fact, perhaps the Bradley effect should be renamed the Obama effect. …
Sam Thernstrom, who should know, doesn’t think much of Bush’s new climate policy.
… Speaking with only nine months left in office, knowing full well that the critical decisions on both domestic and international climate policy will be made in 2009 and 2010 by someone named either McCain or Obama, President Bush seemed to believe he could still influence the climate debate by offering 18 minutes of general observations about his aspirations for climate policy. What did he say? The president opened with this observation.
Climate change involves complicated science and generates vigorous debate. Many are concerned about the effect of climate change on our environment. Many are concerned about the effect of climate change policies on our economy. I share these concerns, and I believe they can be sensibly reconciled.
After seven years of being tagged — fairly or not, we hardly know — a skeptic on the science behind warming, the president now tells us that he “shares the concerns” of those who believe warming is having an effect on the environment. This platitude should please no one. If the president believes that the science behind warming justifies action, he could have made real news explaining that belief and the evidence that supports it. With Senator McCain’s nomination secured, we now know for certain that the next president will not question the science behind warming. This was Bush’s chance either to anticipate — and therefore potentially influence — his successor’s position on climate science, or to oppose it. His vague expression of shared “concern” did neither.
Far more problematic is the concluding sentence of the president’s opening paragraph, in which he assured us that he believes the tension between concerns over the environment and the economy can be “sensibly reconciled.” This is, of course, the core question of climate policy. …
On March 6th, Pickings noted a book soon to be released on the 12 worst decisions by the Supreme Court. Amity Shlaes reviews “The Dirty Dozen” by Bob Levy and Chip Mellor.
… “The Dirty Dozen” tells us how misguided Supreme Court decisions have helped us to arrive at that consensus and others. Robert A. Levy and William Mellor, both constitutional lawyers, examine 12 notorious court opinions affecting everything from wartime internments and medical-school admissions to tax policy and the rights of the homebuyers. The starting point for their survey is 1933, their reasonable assumption being that modern American law began with the New Deal. They went about compiling their list by asking other lawyers and scholars to name the cases they considered to be the most damaging to our constitutional rights.
Some of the dirty dozen are predictable. One is Korematsu v. United States, which produced the 1944 opinion sanctioning the wartime internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Another infamous case is Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 ruling that supported the University of Michigan law school’s affirmative-action policies and, as result, endorsed the raising of obstacles to university admission for those who happen not to fall into favored groups.
It is useful, if unsettling, to be reminded of such examples of Supreme Court overreaching. “The Dirty Dozen” adds the most value with its discussion of the court’s astounding subordination of property rights over the past three quarters of a century. By now many of us have heard of Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 eminent-domain case. Mr. Mellor’s own think tank, the Institute of Justice, represented Susette Kelo, the woman from New London, Conn., who was forced out of her gabled Victorian house by the city so that condos and an office building might be built there. …
Of course, we know government is clueless. USA Today proves that by reporting a hiring binge in all levels of government. We can only hope they don’t do anything.
Federal, state and local governments are hiring new workers at the fastest pace in six years, helping offset job losses in the private sector.
Governments added 76,800 jobs in the first three months of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
That’s the biggest jump in first-quarter hiring since a boom in 2002 that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By contrast, private companies collectively shed 286,000 workers in the first three months of 2008. That job loss has led many economists to declare the country is in a recession. …
Have we been lost for 40 years in an energy wilderness? Dilbert says the Israelis will lead us out.