MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT November 02, 2008 .Jim Miller
soundpolitics.com
This year, the choice is as clear as it has been in at least a century. Citizens who love this country, and who understand the choices, will vo
te for John McCain over Barack Obama, with no hesitation.
There are positive reasons to favor McCain; he has a good record on spending and taxes, and he understands our dangerous world. He has been right about most of the great issues of our time, welfare reform, the fall of the Soviet Union, and, most recently, the surge in Iraq.
But the choice is made far easier this year by his opponent, Barack Obama. Obama does not have the character that we need in a leader, in particular does not have the integrity needed in a president. We know that because whenever a newspaper checks what he has said about his past, they find discrepancies; again and again, what he said happened, didn't. Some of these differences could be explained by the inevitable lapses in memory that almost all of us have. But not all. And when we look at what he has said about his past, we find that his stories all make sense — as leftist political fables. But real life does not always fit into those neat patterns. We know that he does not have the character needed in a president even though much of his past life has been hidden from us; again and again we learn that relatives and friends of his have been asked not to speak about him until the campaign is over.
We also can draw an obvious inference from his missing records. We have not seen Obama's test scores, his college transcripts, his Columbia thesis, his state senate records, and much else. If a man hides this much of his past, it is fair to conclude that we would think less of him if we could see those records.
Obama is the least qualified man ever nominated by a major American party. As even his supporters admit tacitly, he has no significant accomplishments as a public figure. He has done nothing as a United States senator, and he did little as an Illinois state senator. He has no significant executive experience; he has never been an officer in our military, never been an executive in a business, never held an elected executive office, never been a member of a Cabinet. The closest thing he has to executive experience is being chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — which failed completely.
Obama is not well-informed on most subjects important to a president. There is no reason to believe that he understands military strategy, on even the most basic level. He understands so little of physics that he thinks that the problem of storing nuclear wastes is unsolved. He knows so little about trade issues that he opposes the free trade agreement with Colombia. He knows so little about agricultural policy that he thought arugula could be a significant product in Iowa. I could add example after example to that brief list, but it is easier to list the subjects that he does know something about: community organizing, law, and, probably, basketball. And that's it.
His senate office is full of pictures of Barack Obama — and almost empty of books.
Obama has been consistently wrong on major policy decisions. He opposed the Reagan military buildup that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. He opposed welfare reform. He favors affirmative action, in spite of the mounting evidence that it hurts those it is supposed to help. He voted for the bloated farm bill. In his short career in the Senate, he has voted for many wasteful earmarks. He even sponsored one that went directly to his wife's employer. He has opposed most controls on illegal immigration.
He is wrong on his proposals for the future. At a time when our federal budget needs restraint, Obama has promised both immense tax cuts, and enormous increases in spending. (He claims that he can pay for both with unspecified savings, but no one who understands our budgets takes him seriously on that promise.)
There are two common themes in his domestic proposals, themes that will be familiar to anyone who has observed big city machines. He wants to make citizens clients of the government, dependent on the government in as many ways as possible. And he wants to provide jobs for the politically connected, from the precinct worker to the big contributor. Machines have used these two to keep political control of their cities for decades.
Nearly all machines were, and are, corrupt. Obama spent almost all his political career in Chicago — and backed many of the corrupt Daley candidates. (One exception: Obama backed Alex Giannoulias, instead of the organization candidate, for state treasurer. But Giannoulias has ties to an even worse organization.) For years, one of Obama's closest associates in Chicago was Tony Rezko, who was convicted of corruption — and is now most likely implicating other Obama associates. Either Obama did not know Rezko was corrupt, in which case Obama's judgment is suspect, or Obama did know Rezko was corrupt, in which case Obama's integrity is suspect.
We have already seen, in this campaign, examples of corruption. Obama's campaign set up their on-line donation system in a way that facilitates fraud, everything from theft to donations from foreigners. They intended to make fraud easy — and succeeded.
Most of all, Obama is wrong on foreign policy, because he has the wrong view of the world. Melanie Phillips describes Obama as a "Marxisant radical", and after I found this extended definition of the word, I had to agree with her, though I might qualify it slightly, to adapt it to the United States:
The French have a great adjective: marxisant. If you look it up in Larousse you are told that it means "that which tends toward Marxism," but so bald a definition doesn't capture the connotative flavor of the word. To be marxisant is to be vaguely but ostentatiously leftist, as a form of class display. It means to affect a faux-radical style, and to spout a half-baked Gramscian jargon that identifies you as politically cool and adversarial. It's a way to be hip and trendy while hanging out at the Sorbonne.
In France if you are marxisant you wear a black turtleneck, you shave only every few days, you discuss Sartre at great length in bistros, and you kiss the feet of every decrepit soixante-huitard whom you encounter. As for Marx and Lenin, well‐you haven't actually read them, but you know they are profoundly important, and you'll quote them on occasion. Being marxisant isn't an intellectual position. It's a social posture, designed to indicate that you are a member of an upscale elite.
For example, a member of the upscale elite who sneers at people in rural areas, clinging to their religion and guns.
In short, Obama's leftist views are mostly a fashionable pose. That doesn't mean that he holds them lightly. People have died for their fashions, so strong is our desire to pose in just the right way. Mostly a pose, but not entirely. Though Obama's racial grievance collecting may have been a pose at first, I am inclined to think that he now believes much of his own spiel, as salesmen are prone to do.
Unfortunately for us, these Marxisant poses lead, in almost every case, to the wrong decisions in foreign policy. Those who hold them sneer at bourgeois democracy, sympathize with third world extremists, as long as they belong to an oppressed group, and think that there was some good in communism, in spite of those millions murdered. In short, Marxisants sympathize with all our enemies.
And our enemies know that. Almost all of them, from the Iranian regime to Kim Jong Il from Castro to Chavez, have endorsed Obama. They aren't backing him because they wish us well.
Why do our enemies prefer Obama? Because they think they can make gains at our expense if he is president. They recall what happened when the leftists took control of Congress in 1974 and what happened after Jimmy Carter was elected president. And they are hoping for more of the same.
The greatest risk is in the Middle East. This satirical Ralph Peters column will give you some idea of the risks of an Obama presidency — if you don't know them already.
Looking back on the four years of his first administration, President Obama can be proud: He made the US welcome among the family of nations again; he reduced our reliance on military force; and he gave us peace by reaching sensible accommodations with our enemies.
The lies told about him in the 2008 election were exposed as sheer bigotry. Far from being "soft on radical Islam," President Obama was the first world leader to welcome Jewish refugees after Iran's nuclear destruction of Israel's major cities (his only caveat — a fair one — was the refusal to accept Zionist military officers and their families, in light of Israel's excessive retaliation).
Peters is being satirical, but he is right to say that electing Obama increases the chance of nuclear war in the Middle East — which would be bad for children and other living things.
Nuclear war is the biggest worry, by far, but if Obama is elected, we should fear more conventional conflicts as well, with deaths mostly in the thousands, and hundreds of thousands, instead of the millions. This may not bother Obama. You may recall that, in 2007, he admitted that genocide might be a consequence of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq (which he was favoring at the time), but did not see that as a sufficient reason to change his policy.
Oddly enough, Senator Biden has admitted that Obama would be tested by our enemies — and that we wouldn't be happy with Obama's response. That bit of truth telling, along with a few gaffes, made the Obama campaign decide that Biden did not need to be heard, and rarely needed to be seen.
The choice is clear. I could say that it is a hero versus a zero. But that would be giving Obama too much credit. He's way below zero.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(soixante-huitard means "68-er", that is one of the violent radicals who almost brought down the French state in 1968.
The closest American equivalent to Marxisant is Tom Wolfe's "radical chic".
For more, you may want to look at three detailed posts from the Baseball Crank, on Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and John McCain.)
Posted by Jim Miller at November 02, 2008 07:27 PM | Email This |
