The Postliberal

Hands Off Cowboy Poetry!

2011-03-10T14:27:00.004-05:00

Leave it to Harry Reid to remind Americans why our artists and scholars can't survive without public support. If you're an academic like me and just assumed that the NEA and NEH funded only works of especial merit by "underrepresented voices," why it's time to revise your paradigm, pardner. Here's an example of the traditional Silent Majority folk lyric they call Cowboy Poetry.

The Grant Searchers

What makes a land to squander,

to squander all she owns?

She pines and pants

for federal grants,

but why, O Lord, o why?

N...E...A...

U...S...A....A....A

by The Unfunded

Obama's Religion: Pseudist

2010-08-20T19:11:00.005-04:00

Yesterday the White House issued another resounding affirmation of President Obama’s Christian faith. Supposedly the statement came in response to a Pew Research poll claiming that some 18% of Americans now believe Obama is a Muslim, an increase from 11% a year ago. Pew’s release announced “Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim.” Commentators on the Fox News panel seemed to agree that the poll did reveal a peculiar shift in the beliefs of Americans, and that the White House statement showed the President and his staff taking the trend seriously and trying to correct impressions that might harm Obama’s brand.

Don't be suckered, citizens. As far as the White House and MSM are concerned, any poll that indicates Americans believe a “myth”, especially one about Barack Obama, is good news, because it provides material for them to change the subject from Obama’s failures to someone else’s, above all the American public’s. The entire liberal ideology is based on the premise that the public cannot think for itself and needs experts to do it for them. And the entire interminable Obama propaganda campaign has been built on the single go-to premise that dissenters are merely mental defectives and hillbillies whose views no college-educated person could even tolerate hearing, much less consider adopting. A poll suggesting that 18% of Americans think Obama is Muslim, with no demonstrable evidence and against reporting to the contrary by the professional journalists of MSNBC and the New York Times, allows the White House to insinuate that a growing number of Americans are in effect “at risk” of idiocy or psychosis, portending the equivalent of a mental health crisis requiring ‘round-the-clock attention from a task force of therapists and pundits.

They only wish. The public doesn’t need MSNBC to know where the crisis is.

As for public opinion, what the Pew Research headline reports is a factoid. The poll records nothing about what Americans say; it records the poll respondents’ choices from the given options when asked about Obama’s religion. All the saying was done by the researchers, because they provided the answers from which respondents could choose. The statistics tabulate the words respondents allowed Pew to put in their mouths. That's what polls are.

If 18% of respondents chose “Muslim” and 43% chose “Don’t Know”, does this mean, as some commentators seem to assume, that 61% hold a belief that is incorrect if not delusional? Wrong answer, dummies! Here’s another interpretation: substantial numbers think Barack Obama isn’t telling them the truth. They may not believe that they know the secret he’s keeping, and they may not care what it is anyway. They’ve registered clearly enough what he says, and what the media says for him; but they just don’t believe he’s telling the truth. That’s no reason to grade their answers as incorrect. At this point it’s those who take Obama’s word uncritically who should be assigned extra homework.

A better measurement of public views about Obama might ask a question like, How often do you think President Obama tells the public the truth? A) Always B) Often C) Rarely D) Never (E) None of the Above. My bet is that (C), (D), and (E) would get the bulk of responses. A poll question about Obama’s religion needs the option “Pseudism”. That’s the one principle Obama never wavers from. Unfortunately the Pew “researchers” didn’t think to offer that option. They should have. I’m neither surprised nor disturbed that people who didn’t find it may have chosen an available alternative.

New Postliberal Haikus

2010-04-09T21:21:00.007-04:00

And Now This Word from Brussels

Peoples of Europe!

Bureaucracy's cause is yours!

Comply or be nudged.

***

Research Consensus

The science is clear:

"Tests Show New York Times IQs

At Dangerous Lows"

***

Preexisting Condition

Found in health care bill:

Obama plan won't cover

Race Card Allergy

***

This blog has moved

2010-04-03T10:25:00.001-04:00

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OBAMA FRIEND FOUND DEAD

2010-04-01T15:54:00.010-04:00

Sole Known Columbia Acquaintance Apparent Victim of Kool-Aid

Stricken at Tea Party; Extremist Plot Feared

WH: "Shocked and saddened"; suspends further comment as President awaits briefing on former classmate's name.

(Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Jayson Blair contributed research to this article.)

Palin: Kiss Democrats Goodbye

2010-03-26T20:37:00.006-04:00

Liberals have accused Sarah Palin of "inciting violence" on her Facebook site by marking a map of Democratic-held House districts with little gunsights. These pompous hypocrites are the people who for years have not only condoned and participated in unlimited abuse of presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, including facetious simulations of deadly violence, but who also laugh at anybody who so much as disapproves of the incitements to violence that are all over hip hop songs. They also have abetted or connived at provocateurs who have created phony incitements, like the Duke lacrosse incident that wasn't an incident.

What can you do with these manipulative, self-righteous frauds? They have a fantasy that they are adults and the rest of us are children, and they can wash our mouths out with soap any time they think we need a lesson. Even if we were children, that would be child abuse. Let anyone try putting soap in my mouth. I'll bite them. So will Sarah Palin, I'll bet.

But, you know, Sarah Palin could find subtler ways to get her point across. Maybe even kill (oops!) two birds with one stone. Instead of urging voters to "target" Democrats, why not urge voters to kiss the Democrats goodbye? Put a little lipstick kiss on each Democratic district on the map. A kiss from Sarah Palin is a lot better than what those misrepresentatives will get from their constituents this November.

Mission Accomplished

2010-03-22T10:15:00.006-04:00

Last night the Democratic Party succeeded in doing a very bad thing. Much has been written about why the Health Care Reform Act will damage our health care and our economy, and there will be more. Rather less has been written about how passage of the bill has damaged the national stability that rested upon the widely if not universally held faith that the laws and powers of the state ultimately flowed from the sovereign will of the people as expressed in elections (I stress "expressed"; "we won the election" could be a valid answer to defeated opponents, but never to voters unhappy with their representatives). This essay and some continuations will address the damage the MoveOn Movement and Democratic Party have done to themselves.

As public dissatisfaction with the Obama/Reid/Pelosi threesome has grown I have often heard that the Democrats may have "misread the mandate" of the 2008 elections, that they deceived themselves into thinking Americans wanted policies that they really didn't, and in November they'll pay for their mistake. I never thought this hypothesis had much plausibility, and any it ever had disappeared after Scott Brown's election to the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. The sad and disgusting truth is that the class of political fixers (which includes many Republican "insiders" like Karl Rove, most op-ed product reps, and virtually all political scientists) thinks that one of government's permanent and essential functions is that of deceiving the governed in order to maintain their consent and quiescence. The Democratic leadership never even thought they had a mandate from the people, or that they needed one. They just thought they needed to develop a better formula or "program" for opinion engineering than the other side's, and that in 2008 they had achieved such optimal results that they might never have to worry about an opposition for a long time.

As far as the believers in Maximum Administration are concerned, the express train to the future has merely experienced a inconvenient delay, because somehow a wagon train of reenactors was permitted to cross the track the train is on: in other words, because somehow the "Right" temporarily figured out a better way to deceive the public. Are highly educated lawyers and journalists supposed to listen to the public? I doubt it ever crossed a single liberal's mind. The political fixers don't believe there's any public to listen to. It's the public that listens. What else could they do? Anybody who took Psych 101 would know that the public is just a herd of animals that needs feed, shots and exercise like the other animals. The fixers and spokespuppets produce polls telling the voters what they themselves think! How many times since 2007 have they said "The public doesn't care about (this question you're asking); they're concerned about making ends meet, etc." And if the voters should perversely listen to anyone but the liberals, then that only means the liberals are due to update their opinion engineering software. They have experts working on it, the best, and in the meantime, they and their media bobbleheads will just keep shouting louder and more abusively in hopes of drowning out the voices that they insist must be "Right Wing" bobbleheads. And that's what Obama/Pelosi/Reid and their talking-points-talkers have been doing.

But the fixers were wrong. Liberalism succeeded in this country because people were basically satisfied with it, not because of its message. As long as the country was properous, safe, and secure, most Americans were content to have the government incrementally redistribute some of the prosperity in ways that did not appear to violate the general sense of how the good was achieved. Who could blame them? And that was liberalism's mandate from the people, one that Republican statesmen prudently respected, just as Democratic statesmen prudently avoided the appearance of infringing upon spheres of personal responsibility that Americans regarded as both a pleasure of citizenship and a source of prosperity and security.

Obama was elected in 2008 because at that time he appeared the more reassuring candidate. It was not particularly hard to reassure an American public that had almost never seen a president or presidential candidate who dared disturb the mood of public complacency intrinsic to the American Dream. American politicians know that enjoyment of the American Dream requires quiet, uninterrupted sleep. The Bush-Cheney administration had made, and given the liberal media excuses to make, too much noise. No Democrat had been been within earshot since 2000, and all the Democratic presidents and presidential candidates within memory--all since LBJ--had been much quieter than Bush-Cheney. A switch in parties was not even really a switch, but an automatic adjustment, like changing sides in bed. The two parties were like chocolate and vanilla, a choice of preferences. To voters who thought the job of a president was to keep the neighborhood quiet while the people were enjoying the American Dream, it was uncharacteristic to think of the presidential nominee of a Major Party as stealthy. Nobody had to convince them not to worry about Barack Obama. How bad could the Democratic nominee be? He seemed all right. He'd make the kind of history that could let everyone go back to sleep and forget about making history.

Well, to change metaphors slightly--"the honeymoon is over" is putting it mildly. The groom might as well have asked the bride one night if she'd be open to a polyamorous relationship with some of his friends from a nudist camp he'd frequented before he knew her--meet Harry, Nancy, and their son Michael Moore. YIKES!! This whole thing is abnormal. Don't get near me! I don't know you! Send my things to my mother's!

This madness of March 2010 is not a little misunderstanding between lovebirds that will be cleared up. It is a political STD. Even the supporters of health care reform realize that Obama is a fraud, because the whole point of nominating him was to let the voters sleep and complete the invasion without a struggle. No wonder members of Congress need such good health care--Obama had to break their arms, legs, backs and balls so that he wouldn't be a lame duck. That's your member of Congress whose teeth are on the floor. Good to know someone's working for you in Washington, huh? And who could sleep through all that racket? Never again will Obama seem "presidential" to anybody, nor will Speaker Pelosi be mistaken for a legislator. This is not, as their fixers will continue to insist, because they are African-American and female and their critics racists and sexists, but because Obama and Pelosi refused to heed the calls of Americans who said the noise they were making was waking up the whole neighborhood.

Obama and Pelosi have even lost their aura of legitimacy as Elected Officials of a Major Party. How can that be? Weren't they elected? Aren't the Democrats a Major Party? Not the way they were before yesterday. The public that thought it was switching flavors got a cone with vermin in it. Yuck! Health code violation! Shut down that joint.

In the past liberals have successfully deflected attacks away from liberalism itself. Liberals didn't shield Communists, they were anti-Communist, or would be if there were any real Communists, just as they'd be real patriots if there were anything to be patriotic about. Liberals weren't anti-business, pro-crime, pro-terror, etc., etc. Liberalism was not the issue. There was nothing to worry about. It was one of the good things about America. Most people didn't worry. They turned over and enjoyed the American Dream.

Well, the American Dream has become less peaceful. "Richest Country on Earth" sounds like it might be somewhere else. And now, for the first time, liberals have made liberalism itself the issue. By undertaking more government intervention in one shot than the public could sleep through, they destroyed the camouflage that has been essential to their past success.

As a result, American political life has entered uncharted waters. To speculate about how many congressional seats the Democrats may lose and Republicans win in November is to imagine the politics of a different time, when the voters decided whether this year they wanted the donkey or the elephant, chocolate or vanilla. The Democratic Party has changed that: for many voters liberalism is now off the menu. Meaning: in passing social welfare legislation against the powerful will of many voters, the Democratic party has for the first time legitimized an effort to repeal an achievement of the liberal agenda. The question of whether this effort can succeed in the near future is much less important than its implications for the long run. As long as the Health Care law is in place, there will be persistent, widespread, and confident efforts to repeal it. It will be subject to constant criticism and evaluation. This criticism will get constantly worse, because the Health Care law will be a legitimate lightning rod for dissatisfaction about any aspect of the national economy. Moreover, it will legitimate, on purely economic grounds, many previously sacrosanct topics, such as immigration legal and illegal, because the cost and functioning of the program is inseparable from the population of the country. And as this repeal movement continues and grows, it will foster a new critical discourse from which no existing entitlement will be entirely exempt.

None of this will require any stoking by Republican politicians. No "Great Communicator" will be needed. There will be no messaging and no issues. Liberalism has announced that its agenda is regime change. It has started a nonviolent war on American soil. It has told the American people that their role in democracy is to be seen and not heard. The American people will not take well to this. Liberalism has made itself a target for the American people. Liberals will win no further victories and suffer many painful losses. That will become clear through elections, but it won't be politics as usual. And in this theater of war, liberalism cannot pull out. It's a sitting duck.

The Democratic Party has placed itself in the position of being on the defensive and exposed to substantive attack permanently. The Guantanomo that opponents will use as a "recruiting tool" against liberalism is one the Democrats cannot even close: Washington itself. The full effects of this will not become immediately apparent, not even this November. The rate of losses may vary, but they will increase over time, and many will be permanent as in the past they were not. Republican and Democrat are no longer like chocolate and vanilla, they're like chocolate and cardboard. Democratic "strategists" will certainly "spin" the gradual death of the Democratic Party as illusory, temporary, and perverse. But they will never convince the voters. The Democrats are now the people who broke in while we were trying to get some sleep. And they're still in the house! Whoever isn't awake yet will be awake soon. And it will be a long time before it feels safe enough to get back in bed.

Points of Lite

2010-01-28T17:12:00.004-05:00

There once was a man from Nantucket
who was told if he ran he could f*** it;
but a critical mass
gave a kick in the a**
to the Democrats' seat from Nantucket.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Crayons have colors
Like states used to.

There once was a man from Nantucket
who was told if he ran he could f*** it;
but the party of nope
was democracy's hope
and now "He's the Man" from Nantucket.

No Prize

2009-10-10T20:06:00.009-04:00

What should embarrass Barack Obama most about winning the Nobel Peace Prize? That it necessarily invites people to compare him to other winners whose sacrifices and achievements make his life seem flimsy? That it extends and magnifies his unbroken streak of unearned distinctions? That it proves more egregiously than ever the brazenly dishonest agenda of the Nobel Prizes?

Barack Obama, who already seemed ridiculous bearing the title "President," has inspired even more laughter since breaking another historical barrier and winning a Nobel Prize for doing absolutely nothing, zilch, bupkus. But as the surprise wears off I find less and less in it to laugh about.

Obama himself is something of an innocent bystander to this travesty. After all, he didn't choose himself. Was that Oslo committee simply swept off its girlish feet by the American president's charisma? Were they so snowed by his windy cliches, or rebounding so hard from their last presidential relationship, that they momentarily imagined that Obama's promises were accomplishments? Actually, there was nothing naive about the Nobel committee's choice of Obama. They didn't award the new U.S. President the Nobel Peace Prize because he's irresistible. They did it to influence him, by paying him in advance for his performance in the international play they have planned. Many commentators have mentioned the possibility that the award might influence the president. But so far only a few have used the correct word for it. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an open bribe in symbolic currency.

As an American I am deeply insulted that the Nobel Peace Prize committee should even think that the President of the United States could be bribed with the offer of an honorary title. Do they think this is North Korea? Don't they know that the President is elected by the people and sworn to serve them and uphold the U.S. Constitution? Don't they know that the President's authority in conducting foreign affairs is shared with the elected houses of Congress? The president doesn't own the United States. He isn't even the CEO. The role of the U.S. in international affairs ultimately depends upon the wishes of the American people. So it is an insult to the United States and its people for the Nobel Peace Prize committee to imagine that they could influence the policies of this country by bribing the guy that we have entrusted with the nation's business. The nerve of them.

Of course it was no compliment to Barack Obama either, imagining that a statesman lucky enough to have won the trust of the world's most experienced democratic citizenry would allow his head to be turned by a pompous-sounding title conferred by a pretentious little committee. They must think Mr. Obama's quite a sucker for prestige, as little respectful of the American people as they are, and easily corruptible. I'd hate to think our president could have done something to give them that idea.

No doubt plenty of people and entities would like to exercise improper influence on an American president, and some have succeeded to one degree or another. But a president who accepts a bribe openly places his integrity under permanent suspicion. President Obama stated yesterday that he would accept the Nobel Peace Prize, but he should be encouraged to change his mind. Indeed there is a provision of the U.S. Constitution that subjects the President's acceptance of titles and gifts to the approval of Congress. If President Obama is not honest or smart enough to drop this bribe like a hot potato, members of Congress, including his friends, should slap his wrist before he burns himself even worse than he has already. I hope our representatives in Congress are keeping abreast of their responsibilities. For my part, I shall be writing to Senators Voinovich and Brown to point out that a foreign entity has offered the President a coveted title as a bribe to influence his conduct of the nation's business, and that the Congress has the power to prevent him from accepting it.

Our president should tell the Nobel Prize Committee publicly that their prize is an insult to him and the people he represents, because it is an insult, and everyone knows it, including and most of all the Nobel committee itself. Of course there is little chance the president will do that, or that the Democrats in Congress, so deep in lies and corruption themselves, would suddenly decide to declare the nudity of their own emperor and prohibit him from accepting the poisoned gift from Oslo. But for the rest of us, it's important that we tell the truth, now, the next day, and often: the President of the U.S. has been offered a bribe, publicly, for all to see, and when he accepts it in December, he will have accepted a bribe. Let him spend the rest of his life explaining that it never influenced his conduct of the Presidency.

Letterman's Late Apologies: Two Down, 59,948,238 To Go

2009-06-17T17:20:00.004-04:00

As all the world knows, last week the CBS network broadcast sexually abusive remarks about the governor of Alaska and one of her teenage daughters on its popular TV program "The Late Show with David Letterman". Since then the hospitality-challenged host has made a tedious, almost nightly ritual of rendering forced apologies on camera to Gov. Palin and her daughter. Pundits have joined the "debate" about the gravity of the entertainer's offense, the adequacy of his apologies, and the responsibilities of the network. Today's paper carried the news that Gov. Palin had accepted Letterman's apology. I wouldn't doubt that Letterman and his staff of half-witty "writers" are combing the Milton Berle treasury for a joke about classiness to turn on Palin.

It is frankly deplorable that the governor of Alaska should even have been put in the position of deciding when a television personality's abusiveness had been atoned for. After all, this was no accidental gaffe or "script malfunction", a joke that in a more tasteful era Bob Hope would just have passed up. Sarah Palin and her daughter, like Alex Rodriguez, were merely props Letterman used for an insult aimed at others and not yet apologized for. Does the CBS network attract millions of viewers to hear personal abuse thrown at moms and their daughters? Of course it doesn't. The real objects of David Letterman's abuse were not Mrs. Sarah Palin and her daughter, but the Republican nominee for Vice-President in the recent election, and those who voted for her. The message of Letterman's abuse was that the Americans who supported the Republican ticket cast their votes for a candidate so contemptible that she could be called "slutty" on network TV and nobody would have a right to complain. So they'd better not vote for white trash again if they want to feel welcome when they turn on the set. You and I, readers, are the ones that CBS and its employee David Letterman are deliberately abusing. They owe apologies to 60 million Republican voters, and indeed to all American citizens in what media-minds might call the adult or non-immature "demographic". I'm not holding my breath while I wait.

As the governor of Alaska Sarah Palin has a serious job, which is more than anybody could say about the host of "The Late Show with David Letterman". And by all accounts Gov. Palin does her demanding job well, which also cannot be said of CBS's 11:30 attraction, certainly not this week. But the overmatched Letterman should ask himself this: when in his "career" as a standup did David Letterman ever kill the way Sarah Palin did in her address to the Republican National Convention? Face it, Letterman: you aren't either funny enough, or important enough, to be part of Gov. Palin's act.

Backspin

2009-06-03T22:58:00.007-04:00

Want damage control?

Daily White House press briefings

minus Robert Gibbs.

The Postliberal

Hu-Ku News June 2

2009-06-02T19:38:00.004-04:00

Latina Wanted

Experienced, Empathic

Customer Service

***

N. Korea fires

short-range ballistic missiles

above O's pay grade

The Postliberal

Hu-Ku II: More Gems of O Wisdom

2009-05-23T15:28:00.009-04:00

Obama-Cheney:

Thrilla-in-Manila II?

Patterson-Liston.

***

"Ghostwriter needed

by blowsy liberal pundit"

Someone's cry for help

***

Barry's pompous lines

put Hardball's leg a-quiver?

My thought: What a jerk!

***

Our cherished ideals:

the press's sacred duty

to propagate memes.

***

Why "social justice"?

Unequal audience share

elevating souls.

***

The Postliberal

Hu-Ku: Poems of the O Dynasty

2009-05-22T17:16:00.010-04:00

Our cosmos in the Reign of O, reflected in original 5-7-5's from the sharpened reed pen of The Postliberal.

What's waterboarding?

Compulsory exposure

to Barney Frank's mouth.

***

Make friends in Europe:

confess American crimes

defeating Nazis.

***

Rule of law, says He;

but Supreme Court Justices

should listen to NOW.

***

Making history:

first minority POTUS

up from ACORN roots.

***

Our cherished values:

every liberal's sacred right

to ridicule spine.

***

Now liberals oppose

flag desecration: they want

to wave the white one.

***

Ciao, Literati! The Postliberal

Who Knew? Dick Cheney Inspires Poetry

2009-05-21T23:23:00.009-04:00

The Muses still live! A certain Jim Treacher has created the Cheneyku, Haiku in the persona of Dick Cheney. Sound unpromising? These were my favorites:

Look out, terrorists!

Obama's secret weapon:

Approval ratings

***

When you attacked me

I disclosed my position

All up in your face

***

Kudos to the bard!

New Slogan for "Paper of Record"

2009-05-19T22:33:00.021-04:00

All the Thoughts You're Fit to Think

Obama's Oscillationist Style

2009-05-17T22:49:00.005-04:00

He was for releasing CIA interrogation photos before he was against it. He was against having military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees before he was for it. And he was against taxing employer-provided health-care benefits before he was open to it. Ready to try another position? Maybe this is why it's a called a Presidential Honeymoon.

Obama's team of communicators informs us almost daily that we're being led by a "pragmatist". Translation: he's so down-to-earth he's over our heads. But if the Ministry of Onomastics needs a pseudo-philosophical "ism" to dignify Obama's sketchy statesmanship, wouldn't oscillationism capture it better?

Major Federal Grant To Fund The Slogan Project

2009-05-12T11:47:00.007-04:00

The NEA (National Endowment for Awareness) has announced its funded partners for the year, and The Slogan Project proudly heads the list of innovative initiatives supporting a global culture of compliance. See today's Global Community World for an article recognizing this outstanding achievement in excellence (Higher Education) by The Postliberal. Coming soon: a MacGenius Foundation-funded site installation, touring 1,000 specially selected campuses!

Today's Slogan Project slogan has been adopted as the Official Slogan of the NEA and The Slogan Project:

Canned Thoughts for a Canned America

Slogan Awareness Bulletin Tuesday

2009-05-11T23:05:00.002-04:00

Dear Member of the Awareness Community:

Celebrate today's Awareness by sharing today's Awareness Community Slogan with other members of the Awareness Community today!

Your Awareness Slogan for Tuesday May 12 is:

United
For
Obama!

Stay in Step: Supporting Slogan Awareness

2009-05-10T15:49:00.005-04:00

In recognition of the contribution of slogans to our community wellness, The Postliberal will devote ten minutes of creativity a day to working for slogans that bring people together for sustainable outcomes.

Global Community Slogan for May 10, 2009:

Celebrate Female Parents on Female Parents' Pride Day

Ohio Citizen Alert--Big Sister is Watching You

2008-10-30T19:29:00.004-04:00

The Columbus Dispatch and other media have reported that the Director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Helen Jones-Kelley, approved records checks on Samuel Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio. Mr. Wurzelbacher, whose middle name is Joseph, is better known as Joe the Plumber.

These records checks were clearly politically motivated and therefore completely improper. As the Dispatch stated in its lead editorial on Wednesday, "Access to such data is supposed to be restricted to official business of government and law enforcement....Such scrutiny could have a chilling effect on the willingness of people to stand up and be counted prior to elections. It also undermines the confidence of all Ohioans that their state government is serious about protecting sensitive information."

Referring to the Ohio governor, the Wednesday editorial also stated: "Strickland, who...said there were no political motives in the data-checking, apparently is giving [Jones-Kelley] the benefit of the doubt."

I suggest that Ohio citizens who read The Postliberal not give Gov. Strickland the benefit of the doubt. He should be inundated with mail informing him that Jones-Kelley's snooping was transparently political, and that he shouldn't be covering up for her. He should fire her.

Gov. Strickland's homepage can be accessed by clicking here. Follow the "Contact" link to find a form for sending the governor mail. Let him know that voters feel personally affected by Jones-Kelley's abuse of her office to harass a fellow Ohio citizen and infringe upon his rights. We can watch too. Make sure Ted Strickland knows we're watching his administration, and that we care.

Top Ten Titles for Friendly Leader's Infomercial

2008-10-30T09:16:00.003-04:00

After welcoming himself into our homes last night to tell Americans who we are, celebrity self-endorser Barack Hussein Obama seems well positioned to add more statuary to the Grammy he won for reading the audiobook of Dreams from My Father. (And every word he read was his own!) Will that be an Oscar gracing the Green Room mantelpiece? An Emmy? Golden Globe? Whatever. But Obama's cinematic masterpiece will need a title before Barbra can announce "the winner is". Hmmmm....The Postliberal has a few suggestions.

1. "The Night the Earth Stood Still"
2. "A Convenient Lie"
3. "Dependence Day"
4. "No Sudden Moves"
5. "A Joe Named Barack"
6. "Barack Obama's Day Off"
7. "Invasion of the Money Snatchers"
8. "The Plot Against Amerika"
9. "Ocean's 14: The White House"
10. "Triumph of the Nil"

Readers of The Postliberal are invited to submit their own suggestions, before the high wears off.

Obama's October Surprise

2008-10-29T21:56:00.002-04:00

Nominee's infomercial leaves millions convinced Obama's ready to take the wheel. Younger voters ask: thanks for the lollipop, are we there yet, is anything else on, are we there yet, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..............................

And maybe, Mr. Nice Man, where's my mommy?

Can Random House and Obama Be Sued? Ask Arista Records and Milli Vanilli

2008-10-28T20:49:00.004-04:00

If Barack Obama didn't actually write Dreams from My Father himself, could Random House and Obama be sued on behalf of consumers? I'm not a lawyer, so I wouldn't venture to say. However, the case of the early '90s rock act Milli Vanilli might offer some precedent. Here a promoter created a sound with certain performers, but since he didn't like their stage presence, he hired other performers to act as a front. The act became very successful (like Barack Obama they won a Grammy) but a technical malfunction during a "live" performance revealed that the guys on stage were lip-synching. Evidently the country wasn't ready for Milli Vanilli in the White House, since the media made much hue and cry about the deception, and the promoter eventually confessed. In the aftermath at least 26 lawsuits were filed on behalf of consumers (according to the Wikipedia article linked above) and substantial damages were awarded.

In principle the cases of Milli Vanilli and Dreams would appear to be similar, if it could be shown that Obama was not the author of Dreams, which I deem reasonably suspected. In the Milli Vanilli case the promoter's confession made things easy for consumers and their advocates; but one doubts that Barack Obama will put the interests of consumers ahead of the royalties he's collecting. Anyone concerned about whether a President Obama will redistribute wealth need only consider how much wealth author Obama has redistributed from consumers into his own swollen bank accounts.

Authorship of "Dreams": The Bottom Line

2008-10-25T10:25:00.019-04:00

I and others (in particular Jack Cashill) have raised questions about whether Barack Obama is actually the author of Dreams from My Father, as one would think from the book's cover. But why should anyone care? Lots of people don't.

It's safe to say that questions about the authorship of Dreams might never have been raised if Obama had not received the Democratic nomination for the presidency. And if it were shown that Obama didn't write Dreams, or even that there were serious reasons to doubt it, the candidate might lose some trust and some votes. Still, the authorship of Dreams has significance in ways not directly related to the election, and not directly related to how members of the public form opinions about Barack Hussein Obama's personal integrity as politician and author. It's not fundamentally political, much less partisan.

Dreams from My Father is a publication of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House. Paperback copies retail at $14.95 U.S. and $16. 95 Canadian. Copies are sold in other countries too, and I have no doubt that Dreams has been translated into quite a few languages. According to Peter Osnos of the Century Foundation (follow the link and search for "Barack Obama and the Book Business"), who as an executive of Times Books at Random House was the original publisher of Dreams, by 2006 about 500, 000 copies of the book had been sold. Neither Osnos nor anyone else doubts that the explosive sales of Dreams were a direct result of the political prominence of its putative author, Barack Obama: the single most commercially valuable feature of the product is Barack Obama's name on the cover. Given Obama's continued political rise, it would be fair to guess that sales of Dreams have already exceeded a million copies and may eventually be counted in multiples of millions. According to Osnos's estimate, by 2006 the royalties accruing to Obama and his agent, Jane Dystel, had already reached about $1 million.

Dreams from My Father is a multi-million dollar, profit-making sales operation. The revenue it has generated comes from consumers who have paid for the books and derivative products such as the audio version read by Barack Obama. Since the attractiveness of the Dreams product line to consumers is substantially based upon Random House's representation of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as the author of Dreams, if Obama is not actually the author, then Random House and Barack Obama have collected and are continuing to collect millions of dollars from consumers under false pretenses. Such a lucrative commercial fraud, or even the reasonable suspicion of one, would demand the attention of a judge, whatever voters might happen to think about candidate Obama, or about President Obama if he were elected.

There are many reasons to doubt the integrity and truthfulness of candidate Obama--and that's putting it cautiously. The discovery that Obama was not the author of Dreams would add another item to the roster of his lies about himself, and the discovery that the real author was William Ayers would add another item to the roster of lies Obama has told about his relationship with Ayers. His lie about the authorship of Dreams would perhaps be exceptionally important as the most elaborate lie, but it also might seem less important because it would be one of the oldest. If it's a matter of how individual Americans evaluate Obama's personal integrity, or his suitability to the presidency, the weight that the new discovery might add to impressions of Obama's dishonesty could ultimately be as meaningless as the weight his smooth performances on TV add to popular impressions of his honesty.

But behind the authorship of Dreams from My Father there is a matter of fact that, whether it ever becomes public or not, is what it is and not what Jack Cashill's arguments make it. Somebody did write Dreams and that writer either was Barack Obama or someone else whose name has much less commercial value than Obama's. Random House has represented Obama as the author of Dreams, and on that basis the company has collected and continues to collect millions of dollars in sales from consumers. Consumers who doubt that Random House has delivered the advertised product have, in principle, a right to have their complaint heard in court, and Random House and Obama have a right to produce whatever evidence they can to prove that Barack Obama was indeed the author of the product sold under his name. It is not my responsibility, nor is it any other blogger's, to accuse Barack Obama of wrongdoing or to acquit him, to prove that Obama didn't write Dreams, or to prove that he did. We have procedures of due process for investigating and deciding matters like this, and they should be followed.

At the present time Random House and Barack Obama have produced no evidence supporting Obama's authorship of Dreams beyond the mere assertion. On the other hand, there is considerable circumstantial evidence indicating that Obama did not write Dreams. As I have pointed out in a previous post, this evidence includes the Introduction and 2004 Preface to Dreams, which curiously narrate the book's genesis without ever stating that Obama wrote it, and in other respects offer a self-contradictory account that is not plausible enough in itself to support an implied claim of authorship, and only plausible to any degree if, as the Introduction actually says, Dreams was written in some other way (which would necessarily have been by somebody else, although the Introduction artfully leaves that implication unclear). Moreover, Jack Cashill has assembled stylistic evidence indicating that William Ayers had at least a significant hand in writing Dreams, and while by its very nature this evidence cannot be fully conclusive, it is sufficient to justify the suspicions of a reasonable person.

That being the case, I think (and I speak here as a non-lawyer) it would be appropriate for at least one state attorney general to initiate an investigation of the authorship of Dreams with a view to a possible filing against Random House and Obama on behalf of the consumers in the attorney general's state. With the matter removed from the web to a court, we would be able to consider not only Cashill's stylistic analysis, my clever deconstruction of the Preface and Intro to Dreams, and other similar evidence, but also any evidence that Random House and Obama wished to produce in their own defense. I'm the last person to want to deny them the opportunity, or to want any innocent person to be falsely accused.

Of course, documents and testimony entered in evidence for a court would be affirmed as truthful under oath. And witnesses, such as William Ayers, Obama's agent Jane Dystel, his editor Henry Ferris, and Obama himself, might be examined under subpoena. But that's nothing they should worry about if the things that Cashill and others are saying about the authorship of Dreams are merely empty and malicious speculation. We doubters have put our cards on the table. It now looks like Obama who's bluffing.

Obama's Signature: Another Specimen Emerges

2008-10-23T14:38:00.011-04:00

Scholars researching the writings of author Barack Obama now have another specimen to ponder. I noticed it in the September/October issue of Columbia College Today. Columbia grads who get the publication should check out the Class Notes column for the Class of 1983 (p. 70). There they will find the text of a letter that Obama sent to his 25th class reunion earlier this year, where it was read in his absence. For those who can't lay hands on a copy of CCT themselves, I reproduce Sen. Obama's letter here.

"Dear Friends,

"I want to thank you for the opportunity to welcome everyone to the Columbia College Class of '83 Reunion. I'm sorry that I am unable to join you all today, but it sounds like you have a great program planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our graduation and the accomplishments of our class over the last quarter-century.

"It's hard to believe that so many years have passed since we left this instititution to take on the world as new college graduates. I learned a lot at Columbia, found my focus, studied and came out with a determination to do something about the injustices I had seen and read about.

"While it may seem like we graduated yesterday, I don't have to tell you how much has changed. Since our time at Columbia, the world has transformed into a place where graduating from an American college without using the Internet is impossible. Medical advancements have turned many terminal illnesses into treatable disorders. New York City has recovered from an unspeakable tragedy. The challenges, but also the promise, of an increasingly interconnected world has [sic] been laid in front of us in myriad ways.

"Twenty-five years ago, we left Columbia with the wind at our backs. But in spite of our successes, many in our nation have not shared in the prosperity of the last quarter-century, and some are worse off than before. We must continually be reminded of the work that remains to protect our union and repair our world.

"Once again, I want to thank you all for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you today. I wish you all continued success and happiness in the years to come.

"Sincerely,

Barack Obama"

The Class Notes item added that one member of the Class of '83, evidently no victim of injustice, had contributed $100, 000 to Columbia in Obama's honor. That gift was also matched by another classmate who is CEO of an investment management firm. The Class of '83 column then continues with personal news about class members and their families.

What does the new specimen of Obamiana add to our understanding of Obama the writer?

At his current stage of literary development, the acclaimed author of Dreams from My Father strongly displays the influence of that popular voice of platitudinous epistles, Hallmark. Anybody who wanted to market a pre-inspired greeting card for liberal politicians to send their 25th college reunion couldn't surpass the formulaic banality of Sen. Obama's letter to his classmates.

Does the style contribute anything to research on the authorial signature of Dreams from My Father? I wouldn't think so. On the one hand, it offers no indication that it shares common authorship with Dreams, and thus does nothing to disprove or weaken Jack Cashill's thesis that Dreams was ghostwritten by William Ayers. On the other hand, any weight the letter might add to Cashill's argument is dwarfed by the material Cashill has already assembled by comparing passages in Dreams to texts by Ayers. For all we know Obama may have assigned a staffer to write this letter to his classmates, and it wouldn't be considered surprising or seriously unethical for a busy political candidate to sign a letter he hadn't written himself (although some guys at the reunion, the letter's addressees, might feel manipulated if they found out about it). A letter is also not a book, and the same author might write both in different styles for a variety of reasons. And then there's the passage of years. Perhaps at 47 Obama's literary creativity has burned out, and formula is all he's got left. That's not a recommendation for the U.S. presidency, but it wouldn't make him a liar when he claimed to be the author of Dreams from My Father.

But style aside, the utterly banal content of Obama's reunion letter sounds an errant note, at least to my ear. I find it hard to believe that the author of this letter ever wrote a memoir. Here is Barack Obama, a 1983 graduate of Columbia, gesturing toward a formative experience in his life, an experience that in some acknowledged measure he shared with his addressees, for whom it was also formative--yet he cannot mention one concrete personal detail that might render vivid his experience at Columbia and evoke the recollections of others who were there at the same time. Obama mentions no professors or courses that influenced him. He mentions no books that challenged his thought. He offers no reminiscences of all-night conversations about Machiavelli, Marx, and girls from Barnard (or Marymount...). He doesn't mention Alpha Phi Alpha or Omega Psi Phi, which as I recall were the African-American frats. No chess games in the Furnald lounge (and according to Dreams the young Obama was a chess player). No poker games in the John Jay basement. No pals, no subways, no volunteer tutoring on the far side of Morningside Park. Nothing. As a presidential candidate Obama can come on TV and tell the camera about a working class American he supposedly met in Toledo (inhabitants now 18, 000, 000, the second largest population of anecdote-worthy Americans after Youngstown), but he can't bother to recall one person he knew, one place he went, or one thing he did in two years spent at Columbia! If Joe Biden had been invited to address the Columbia reunion as a guest and had to decline, he could have sent virtually the same letter Obama did, and nothing would have seemed amiss.

The person who wrote Obama's letter to the Columbia Class of '83 is not someone who thinks of his own life, or anybody's else's, as material for a memoir--not that I can see. This observation would apply to anyone who might have written the letter. And it would apply to Obama, who signed it, even if he did outsource the wording of the letter to a staffer. If presidential candidate Obama was going to send a letter to his Columbia reunion at all, why not include some personal touch? For a Chicago pol, this would be a chance to lay on a double-grip handshake--and lay it, I might add, on a group possessed of some disposable income and lively interest in liberal politics. But Obama passed up the golden opportunity to make that personal connection with his Columbia classmates. If this man was ever interested in personal memoirs, he must have suffered brain trauma and lost all awareness of it. He's a case for Oliver Sacks.

Well, perhaps I'm being too hard on the busy Sen. Obama; perhaps I'm applying an inappropriate standard. After all, in his Preface to the 2004 reissue of Dreams Obama strenuously insisted that his career as a memoirist was merely a temporary diversion from "the business of my life," and that after a few months of promotional appearances he put it completely behind him. So is it fair to expect him to sound like a memoirist when he writes to the Columbia Class of '83?

I'm willing to cut Sen. Obama some slack on his Columbia letter. He never claimed to be a memoirist, and his Introduction and 2004 Preface to Dreams don't claim he wrote it. The letter he wrote, or at least sent, to his 25th Columbia reunion is nothing but what we'd expect from any on-message liberal politician, or an actor playing one.

The Postliberal is a 1972 graduate of Columbia College.

Obama in Plain Sight: Intro to "Dreams" Implies He Didn't Write It

2008-10-18T21:00:00.021-04:00

Jack Cashill has assembled evidence suggesting that Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father may be the work of a ghostwriter: Obama's Chicago neighbor William Ayers. Obama agrees with Cashill on one important point: in his own Introduction to Dreams, which describes his book's genesis, Obama himself strongly implies that he didn't write it.

According to Obama, he did some writing on another book, not a memoir but "an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality" (xiii; all citations refer to the 2004 paperback edition). This book was never finished, and it doesn't exist. Obama says that his work on the "civil rights litigation" project was aborted by personal memories that forced themselves upon him: "I found my mind pulled..." (xiv). But he doesn't say how these memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams "found its way onto these pages" (xvi).

Most readers of Dreams have probably assumed that Obama's curiously impersonal description is merely figurative, a display of humility, a modest way of saying that he did write the book the reader has in hand. I have no doubt that Obama hoped the words would be understood that way. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Obama's display of humility is so extreme that although he devotes his Introduction to just a single topic--where Dreams came from--he omits the writing altogether. Instead he replaces the writing of Dreams by a quasi-automatic process whereby memories somehow took form in words and found a way onto the page by themselves. This picture is so fantastic that it can't be taken literally, and therefore can't be suspected of falsehood. In describing a genesis of Dreams that is blatantly impossible, Obama is counting on readers to think, "he can't really mean it," and he leaves it to us to come up with our own idea of what he did mean. That's very convenient for Obama, since in saying, as in essence he does, "this book came into existence without anybody writing it," Obama also implies, "and I, the credited author, didn't write it." Unlike "nobody wrote this book," "I didn't write this book" is not a fantastic statement that cannot mean what it literally says. Lots of people didn't write Dreams from My Father. Maybe Barack Obama is one of them. Maybe when he said he didn't write the book--because nobody did--he meant it. And maybe he was telling the truth. That would explain why Obama would want to say something as implausible as "[it] found its way onto these pages": he used an implausibility to muffle an implicit, plausible, and truthful, but dangerous statement: "I didn't write it."

Obama's whole Introduction to Dreams has the odd rhetorical project of persuading the reader that Barack Obama, the author of Dreams from My Father, actually had nothing to do with writing his book and couldn't have written it. Describing how the project began, Obama explains that the idea for his first book was not his in the first place: the "opportunity to write it arose" when newspapers reported that he had been elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and "a few publishers" (i.e., nobody in particular, the idea for his book was nobody's), who must have thought Obama was a writer or could become one, took the initiative to call him (xiii). Obama then accepted the role of writer which publishers had offered him, and he "agreed to take off a year after graduation and put [his] thoughts to paper." As Obama describes it, he did not exactly agree to write a book, but rather to do some writer-like things, that is, to clear his agenda for time to write, and "put thoughts to paper." Would the transition of thoughts to paper involve words? Obama leaves that part to the reader's imagination.

Obama began to play at being a writer with only a vague idea of his subject matter, "imagining [him]self to have something original to say about the current state of race relations." He demurs at claiming he actually had anything original to say, or anything to say at all: Obama only claims to have imagined he had something to say, and eventually he concluded on his own that the theories in his plan "seemed insubstantial and premature," and he gave them up (xiv). So far Obama has stated that he "sat down and began to write," but not that he ever got past "began to." His incipient writing was soon interrupted by forces outside his control, just as Obama's legal career had been sent onto a detour by the calls of publishers who thought he was a writer and convinced him to "take a year off"; except now the impersonal alien forces approached Obama from inside himself: "I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again" (xiv). One might have expected Obama to explain that these voices were a kind of Muse, and that by listening to them he became the writer who wrote Dreams. But he doesn't; on the contrary, he states, "I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book."

Obama does once mention writing in connection with his memories, but the passage does not refer to writing Dreams from My Father. Obama says that in reflecting upon oral stories told him by others, he discovered "I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories" (xvi). Even here Obama only claims that he was trying to write, and the activity he calls rewriting yields no inscription of words in any permanent medium where they might be read. This metaphorical "writing" has no text and produces no books--it's all in the head. So Obama the author is affirming that, yes, he was after all a writer, he'd been one for a long time, only not the kind who writes books.

Obama's writing-without-writing allows him to explain how he became the author of Dreams without writing it and without wanting to write it. After evoking his lifetime process of "trying to rewrite these stories," Obama arrives at Dreams from My Father this way:

At some point, then, [note the temporal vagueness] in spite of a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny, in spite of the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey--

In other words, Dreams from My Father is Obama's "writing," even though he won't say he wrote it, because he wrote it metaphorically: it told stories he'd been "trying to rewrite" all his life. But as for actually writing the book the reader is holding, nobody did that. It just "found its way onto these pages."

So as I said, Obama agrees with Jack Cashill on one critical point: Obama didn't write Dreams from My Father. Where he and Cashill differ is that according to Obama, nobody wrote Dreams, while Cashill thinks somebody wrote it for him. Needless to say, of the two positions, only Cashill's is plausible. It's a certainty that somebody wrote Dreams from My Father. If Barack Obama didn't write it, then somebody else did.

Obama's Introduction to Dreams from My Father is a pretty strange document. But the Preface he affixed to the 2004 reissue is even stranger. Bear in mind that the Preface is printed immediately before the Introduction in the 2004 edition, so that it would not be difficult for anyone to read both of them and compare. Like the Introduction, the Preface also narrates the genesis of Dreams. But Obama seems to have forgotten parts of his own story.

As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family...might speak in some way to the fissures of race, etc. (vii, emphasis added)

The "burst of publicity" that testified to Obama's "modest accomplishments" in the Introduction has here been reduced to "some modest publicity." The "few publishers" who initiated Obama's project when they "called" him have given way to "an advance" (i.e., a cash incentive) that Obama received from "a publisher." But most importantly, Obama's original project (the essay on the limits of civil rights litigation), his project agenda, his work-in-progress, the memories that arose unbidden to overwhelm his theories, his struggle to resist the direction in which those memories were leading him, the final triumph in which his inner journey "found its way onto these pages"--all this has disappeared. According to the 2004 Preface, when Obama received his advance, he already had a "belief" about the story he could tell, and he immediately "went to work."

Obama says he "went to work" on Dreams from My Father, but he still does not say that he wrote it. In the Introduction Obama also said he went to work on his essay about civil rights litigation, and even that he "sat down and began to write." But he never wrote that book, and it doesn't exist. When Obama says in the Preface that he "went to work" on Dreams, it's impossible to know whether this means he started writing the book, started thinking about writing it, or started imagining how to deliver a book to his publisher without writing one. "Went to work" claims only that Obama made some early contribution to the Dreams project as a content-provider, whatever a content-provider might be.

Obama's narrative then skips straight from "went to work" to the completed book's publication. Neat! Utterly uninformative about the work of writing Dreams--or the miracle that created it, whatever it was--Obama pronounces confidently about the side of authorship that involves book reviews, promotional appearances, and sales. "Like most first-time authors," he explains, sounding like a veteran mid-list publishing personality, "I was filled with hope and despair." But when his book enjoyed only modest success, Obama says, "I went on with the business of my life." According to Obama, being an author was not part of the business of Barack Obama's life. It was merely a temporary and superficial intrusion upon a life devoted to other things that Obama took much more seriously. Referring to his short-lived "career as an author" as a "process" he was "glad to have survived," Obama seems to be referring to the negotiations with his publisher and their promotional campaign. He hasn't said anything about writing.

Obama's statement that he "went on with the business of [his] life" strikes another note of discord with the Introduction, where Obama had explained that Dreams somehow emerged from an inner work of "trying to rewrite" that had occupied "much of [his] life" (xvi). In that sense his authorship of his book, although not the actual writing of it, was putatively continuous with Obama's life and not an intrusion upon it. But in the 2004 Preface to Dreams the life of Obama is no longer a private "journey" but public "business" instead. When Obama's ephemeral performance as book-trade personality has run its course, it disappears from his life without residue: not only does Obama not write anything else, he doesn't even reflect: "I had little time for reflection over the next ten years" (viii). This is not the same "Obama" who described himself in the Introduction to Dreams.

Taking a paragraph to illustrate the business of this period, "Obama 2004" kicks off his narrative by mentioning a voter registration project that he ran in the 1992 election cycle. This is a strange touch, because the period supposedly summarized began in 1996, after Dreams was published (hardback 1995, paperback 1996, according to the copyright page). Perhaps "Obama 2004" just wanted to sneak in a plug for his voter registration talking-point, and didn't bother to reflect on the chronology of the life he was narrating.

When the summary arrives at 2004, Obama wins the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, and finds himself in the news again (his first fifteen minutes of fame, we recall, having come when he was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review); and once again, as if through an odd coincidence of mistaken identity, powers outside Obama descend upon the busy public man and impose the role of author: "Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher's interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book's re-publication" (ix).

What follows these words is a passage whose peculiar unbelievability exceeds even Obama's high standard.

For the first time in many years, I've pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. (ix)

After reading in the Introduction to Dreams that the book recorded Obama's "search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American" (xvi), that the book culminated a lifetime effort at attempted "rewriting" of intimate stories, undertaken "in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand," it comes as a surprise that the author should have stored this hard-won granite slab in a virtual attic and never read it again for many years. But "Obama 2004," we recall, has denied that reflection was ever part of the business of his life, or that he even had time for it. So when Obama 2004 is moved to pull out a copy of Dreams, he isn't interested in the personal achievement of his stories. Nor does this man, who in the Introduction admitted he periodically thought of abandoning the whole book in deference to "a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny" (xvi), now feel even a little bit curious to see whether the republication of his personal book might expose something that on second thought he would rather have kept private. No, Obama 2004, the vote-drive organizer, law professor, family man, Illinois state legislator, and candidate for U.S. Senator--the guy who admits he never thought of publishing a book at all unless someone else, aroused by publicity, thought of it first and asked him--Obama pulls out his own book solely to measure the changes in what he calls his "voice" by examining a few sample passages ("a few chapters"). Supposing Obama's "voice" did change; why should a man so busy with an active political life have cared about his changing "voice," and cared about this "voice" above all else? That would make sense for a teacher of rhetoric, a literary scholar, or a professional writer. Or even for a serious recreational writer. But Obama, according to the self-portraits of the Introduction to Dreams and the 2004 Preface, was none of these.

Let me translate Obama's statement that he reopened Dreams "to see how much my voice may have changed over time." This means that Obama--the real, living Obama, "I," the one who pulls out Dreams to read it--he suspects that the "voice" of the author-on-the-page Obama doesn't sound like his voice, the real Obama's voice. For some reason this concerns him, and he wants to see how much the author of Dreams doesn't sound like Obama. Now what is this phenomenon Obama calls his "voice"? First he discusses the prose style of Dreams, and this, he affirms, is not the "voice" of Obama 2004 (who I reiterate is the only actual, living Obama). But according to Obama, "voice" is not prose style alone, because after describing how alien the prose of Dreams seems to him, Obama declines to disavow the "voice" in Dreams after all: "I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine--that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research" (ix). So Obama is saying that by "voice" he means two different things: (a) prose style, and (b) something other than prose style that includes content political opponents might want to highlight. Of these, Obama considers the latter the more important to "voice," since he says that although the prose style really is not his, the voice still is.

Fine; but in that case, affirming ownership of the "voice" (content) would involve reading through the whole book, and not just representative passages, which is what Obama says he did. Examining "a few chapters" would be satisfactory only if Obama was interested in checking the style and nothing else.

Notice, moreover, how at the end of the paragraph Obama acknowledges that passages in Dreams had already become a topic of media comment and opposition research. At the beginning of the same paragraph he said that for many years he never so much as pulled out a copy of Dreams until his run for the U.S. Senate encouraged the book's republication. So Obama is saying he knew opponents were reading his book to mine it for dirt, but Obama himself wasn't interested enough in the book to go back and see what they might find there, until his publisher showed an interest in reissuing it to the marketplace? I compute only three possible explanations for Obama's account of how he finally "pulled out a copy" of Dreams after neglecting it for many years: he's lying, he's clueless, or both.

But perhaps the strangest feature of this paragraph is Obama's commentary on the change he observed in the prose-style aspect of his "voice." Obama does not merely assess the quantity of change, as he says he wished to ("to see how much my voice may have changed"); he assesses the quality of the writing in Dreams; and his assessment is brutal. Where else does an author who has published only one book, and that one only moderately known, append a preface to a republication of his own sole book informing readers that the prose in it is painful to read, and so flabby that fifty pages should be cut? I doubt those sentiments were shared by the critics whose "mildly favorable" reviews Obama had mentioned earlier in the Preface. The testimonials printed on my paperback include "beautifully crafted," "beautifully written," and "a book worth savoring." Why would an author of a book whose writing is so often selected as a special object of praise append a preface saying that the writing in his book stinks? It certainly couldn't be a sales pitch. And if Obama's assessment was sincere, if he really thought the prose in Dreams so bad, why didn't he just revise it, and give readers a better book? Even writers of well-known classics sometimes make considerable revisions for later editions. Dreams from My Father was hardly a classic whose circulation outside its author's control inhibited revision. Not yet, anyway.

There is clearly something about the writing in Dreams that embarrasses Obama. But it is not at all plausible that what embarrasses him is what he says it is, the ineptitude of the writing. Because the writing in Dreams is far from inept, and even if it were inept, the author himself would have no conceivable reason to observe and advertise his own ineptitude, unless he had already published other books and gained a reputation for a better sort of writing. But at the time of the 2004 Preface Obama's only reputation as a writer was as the author of Dreams from My Father, and no reader of the reissued book could have had any expectation of an authorial voice other than the one that was there, if they had any expectations at all.

So if the writing in Dreams embarrassed Obama, but not because it was inept, what was it that embarrassed him?

An inference may be drawn from Obama's description of the curiosity that supposedly drew him back to Dreams: he wanted "to see how much [his] voice may have changed over time." Even before Obama discovered that the writing in Dreams was inept, he already knew (or strongly suspected) that its voice was not his. Now the way Obama puts this implies that the voice in Dreams, including its prose style, was his once; but for Obama who goes back to Dreams, the voice he is looking for, and the one he finds, is not his. Instead of saying, however, "I didn't write this, it found its way onto the page by itself," as in essence he did in the Introduction, in the Preface Obama implies instead that he did write Dreams, but he was a different and very bad writer when he wrote it, so bad that he's now ashamed to be associated with the writing in his book.

Well, Obama 2004 was right about one thing: the "voice" in Dreams isn't his. The distance between reader-Obama 2004 and the writing in Dreams can be gauged from the writing in the 2004 Preface, whose text we have under examination: it has none of the lyricism of Dreams from My Father (or of the Introduction to Dreams). Or by looking at the writing in The Audacity of Hope, a preview excerpt of which is printed at the back of my copy of Dreams from My Father. Very little lyricism there either. Let's give Barack Obama a little credit for perceptiveness: when he said he was curious about how much the prose-style-voice of Dreams differed from that of Obama 2004, his instinct, if that's what it was, was right on target: the author of Dreams and Obama 2004 do sound like different people. The question is, why?

Obama's critique of the prose style of Dreams preempts that question by providing an immediate answer: Obama's prose style was changed by "time." He then provides a few illustrations of the improvements time brought to his taste in writing. To the implausibilities already noted we now may add another, the implausibility of someone becoming a markedly different and, in his estimation, better writer, without any acknowledged effort to improve his writing, or even any acknowledged practice at writing in the interim--by Obama's account between 1995 and 2004 he had no time even for reflection, much less for writing. Nevertheless during this span his writing improved significantly, the work, he suggests, of time (whenever Obama discusses writing, he never does anything, the writing just happens).

But Obama's whole self-critique is implausible, whether he's bashing the writing in Dreams or congratulating himself for becoming better. So if we can't accept "time improved Obama's style" as a plausible answer to the question of why the author of Dreams and Obama 2004 don't sound like the same writer, what would an alternative answer be? One possibility, obvious when the question is properly phrased, is that one or both of the authorial Obamas isn't Barack Hussein Obama at all. This would mean that at least one ghostwriter was involved in the two books credited to author Barack Obama. Since none of Barack Obama's publications acknowledge any writing assistance besides his agents, editors, and consulted advisors, the involvement of one or more ghostwriters would mean that Obama has misrepresented himself as the author of at least one of his two books.

According to this analysis, Barack Obama's Introduction to Dreams from My Father and his 2004 Preface offer an obfuscated, self-contradictory, and unbelievable representation of his authorship that, upon close reading, proves vacant. As Obama tells it, his authorship of Dreams was miraculous, because although he lacked the writing skill to be the author of anything, and he didn't want to be the author of a memoir, and he resisted becoming the author of a memoir, and he tried in vain to become the author of a different kind of book, and he never had an idea of being the author of anything until one or several publishers had the idea first and he agreed to accept the opportunity they offered to be an author, and even then he only considered himself an author as long as his publisher was selling his book, after which he reverted back to a complete non-author, reverted so completely that he wasn't even moved to reread his book when political opponents were using it against him--because, in short, despite all the reasons Obama gives why he couldn't have written a book like Dreams from My Father, and despite the fact that, according to Obama's account, he didn't write Dreams from My Father, nevertheless Dreams from My Father somehow "found its way" onto the page with Barack Obama's name under the title as the author. That's a miracle. It couldn't have happened.

But if Obama's fantastic story contains one believable detail, one grain of truth, it would probably be that Obama did not write Dreams from My Father. Because if he had written it, why would he have concocted an alternative story about its genesis that is so implausible, much less one that implies he didn't write it? Instead of telling an outright lie--"I wrote Dreams from My Father"--Obama would have told the truth, but obfuscated it.

But why wouldn't he have lied? If Obama had a ghostwriter and wanted to hide it, why wouldn't he have covered his tracks better? Perhaps we'll never know; and unless Obama someday proves that he did write Dreams after all--i.e., unless he puts all doubts to rest by replacing the story he has already told in two inconsistent and unbelievable versions with a third that he could have told at the beginning if it was the truth--then the question of Barack Obama's incomplete self-concealment will intrigue psychoanalysts and literary scholars for a long time to come. Here I will offer speculation of a comparatively mundane and practical sort.

The person who wrote Dreams from My Father was not merely a hired professional wordsmith. He or she was a literary talent: no creative genius perhaps, but someone with a definite gift and the ambition to develop and use it. Since Obama was not that kind of person--as he repeatedly insists--then by claiming to be the author (i.e., the writer) of Dreams, he would have assumed a role that brought with it expectations he could not meet and did not wish to. Barack Obama did not have another Dreams from My Father in him--he wasn't even comfortable acknowledging authorship of this one. So he would have tried to avoid a massive, elaborate charade that might consume his life and run a high risk of exposure. Instead he would indirectly tell as much truth as he could, by refraining from saying that he actually wrote Dreams, and also by acknowledging that he wasn't a writer at all, so no further writing should be expected of him. I suspect that when Obama said in the 2004 Preface that he knew his career as an author would be short-lived, but he was "glad to have survived the process with his dignity more or less intact," he was glad indeed he had survived without the loss of dignity that exposure would bring, and glad he could stop pretending to be the author he wasn't. And when Obama described the ten years after Dreams as if he couldn't do enough to forget about his book, maybe that had some truth in it too.

Barack Obama, and the literary author who may have put Obama's Dreams into writing on paper where a publisher could sell it and people could read it, escaped the curious attention of readers for a long time. Nobody much cared who wrote Dreams from My Father until Barack Hussein Obama became a candidate for the U.S. presidency. But those days of untroubled obscurity may soon be ending for the author or authors of Sen. Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father.

Stop the Smears: Obama's Middle Name

2008-10-14T04:20:00.003-04:00

I heard recently that a newspaper formerly fit to print has published an article revealing the source of the vile rumor that Barack Obama is Muslim. The alleged source is one eccentric person who has spread the rumor via the Internet.

This piece of investigative trivialism is a perfect example of the disinformation that the MSM has spun around the Obama campaign. It should be obvious to anyone that the source of the rumor that Obama is Muslim is none other than Obama himself. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. Duh! Is it any wonder that he has to go around insisting "I am a Christian, I am a Christian, I am a Christian," like a broken record? Maybe he could send the message more efficiently by adding another middle name that would symbolize his putative Christian faith. It's been done; the Pope's name wasn't always Benedict. But unless Obama either augments his nomenclature or loses the "Hussein," some people will think that he's Muslim. And not unreasonably.

One of the small but telling symptoms of the MSM's official war on free speech is the prohibition against mention of Barack Obama's middle name. It's like Holocaust denial in Europe (except not yet illegal): mention "Hussein" and you're a bigoted nut, a public menace who must be silenced. Of course there are problems with this. One is that in this country we don't silence people unless very special circumstances justify it. Another is that Hussein is Obama's middle name. How can it be forbidden to refer to someone by his actual name? Most accepted restrictions on speech concern statements that are untrue: you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater if there isn't a fire, and you can't spread harmful lies about people. But this case is different: the MSM is forbidding Americans to tell the truth. It may seem like a small matter. I hope that with the perspective of time it seems even smaller. But I think there's a chance it's a symptom of something bigger.

Personally I am not too concerned about Obama's middle name, and I am not too concerned about whether he is Muslim. I am concerned about whether he is truthful, and given that his middle name is Hussein I don't think he should hide it. Americans like to use the middle names of presidents, and since Obama is hoping to be president, he's hoping to be called by his middle name. (Americans also like to use initials for their presidents, and if Obama and the MSM aren't comfortable with BHO, BO will be their only other option.) I also don't think Obama should welcome or accept the MSM's effort to restrict the speech of Americans when they talk about him. But he does accept it.

Now if Obama and the MSM had concocted a little title for the leader and insisted that everybody use it when referring to him, that would be offensive in a very obvious way. Insisting that references to the leader not use a certain word is much more subtly offensive. But there is a common principle at work, the principle that we can and should be told what to say. So I must confess that I have grown resentful of the way the use of Obama's middle name has been prohibited. What is a name, anyway? It's what you're called. If it's OK for Hussein to use Hussein, then it's OK for everyone else to use it too. From now on, I'm calling him Hussein. Why not? It's easier to say than "Dubya".

MSM Exclusive: Katie and Ayers, One-on-One

2008-10-10T21:30:00.005-04:00

Just kidding.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that nobody has interviewed Bill Ayers and asked him about his relationship with former neighbor Barack Obama? Find out what it was like to have an accidental brush with a talented Chicagoan before anybody imagined he could run for president? Get Ayers' ironic perspective on the way his practically nonexistent relationship with someone he hardly knew has been blown all out of proportion by the capitalist-controlled media? With Ayers' name on everyone's lips, wouldn't journalists want to get the story? It's a natural!

I wouldn't think getting an interview with Bill Ayers would be hard. He's a public figure, and not just because he was a terrorist in the Weather Underground. He was "Educator of the Year" in Chicago. Was praised by Mayor Richard Daley. Ayers has given lots of interviews, including one right after 9/11 if I'm not mistaken. Had his picture taken in his University of Illinois-Chicago Circle office. Posed with his foot on the American flag. The guy's not unknown and he's not shy. Ayers loves to talk. He's a journalist's dream. The story is ripe for the plucking.

So when are we going to see it?

I did notice somewhere on the web that Ayers has declined to give interviews until after the election. I don't know whether this is true or not, since I haven't tried to interview him myself.

If it's not true, then I repeat my plea to the MSM: what's holding up the Ayers interview?

If it is true that Ayers declines to be interviewed, then I have some other questions.

Like, how do we know it's true? Who has sought to interview Bill Ayers? Has Brokaw invited him to appear on "Meet the Press"? Does Matt Lauer call every day to try to get him on "The Today Show"? Did the NY Times contact him for their front-page story about his non-close-relationship with Barack Obama? And if they did, and Ayers declined to be interviewed, why haven't they reported Ayers' refusal?

And this question: why would Bill Ayers decline interviews? He's not what you'd call a private person. Normally when a figure is in the news but they decline interviews, it means they're hiding something. What could Bill Ayers be hiding? It's not illegal to be on a foundation board. And it's not illegal to be a not close friend of Barack Obama. You'd think the worst that could happen would be that the interview would be boring.

Maybe I've watched too many movies, but if Bill Ayers isn't talking, he thinks there's something he isn't talking about. Therefore, his silence is all the more reason that journalists should want to talk to him. Of course they can't make him submit to an interview. But they don't need his permission to surround his house, follow him everywhere, and shout at the camera about his evasions. Why aren't they doing that? (Not even Fox.)

The public needs to demand an interview with Bill Ayers. Even if we don't get it, we can call attention to the fact that we aren't getting it, and what that implies. And we can also call attention to the fact that the MSM, by all appearances, has collaborated with Bill Ayers in keeping whatever secret he's keeping.

Let's everyone spread this question around the web: When will they interview Ayers? And let's inundate every medium we know of with the question: When will you interview Ayers? When? When? When? We demand to know. We won't stop filling your inboxes until you tell us!!!!!

"Qualifications": A Lesson in Liberal Ideology

2008-10-04T17:22:00.007-04:00

During the past month we have repeatedly heard liberal commentators proclaim that Sarah Palin is "unqualified" to serve as vice-president. While followers of one party or the other have always disparaged the rival party's candidates because their policies would have undesirable effects, sometimes supporting their critiques with illustrations from the opponent's past record, the particular term "unqualified" has not often been used of candidates running for election to executive office. Of course I am sure that many liberals thought that Ronald Reagan was unqualified for the presidency (I confess that I did). But the term "unqualified" and the paradigm it implies did not, to my recollection, play an important role in the public and MSM discourse during the campaigns of 1980 and 1984. In the current election the demand from the MSM that Sarah Palin prove that she is "qualified"-- or rather submit to a public inquisition by Katie Couric to produce evidence that she isn't qualified--this is something new in American politics.

Something new in American electoral politics, that is. In the past we've heard plenty about candidates being qualified or unqualified in another political realm: nominees for the judiciary. The inquisitions into Sarah Palin's "qualifications" for office, and into John McCain's "vetting" of her, represent the importation of a paradigm routinely applied in deliberations about the appointment of civil service employees and judges.

In particular, during the past three decades nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court have been subjected to dramatic public interrogations by the U.S. Senate. Hearings like these constitute the implicit background of the current demand that Sarah Palin appear before journalists and respond to any questions they might ask, as if the press had a right and indeed a responsibility to subpoena candidates for electoral office and compel them to produce evidence of qualification under oath. (An item on the web today quotes Charles Gibson as saying that journalists have a responsibility to "expose" Sarah Palin.)

The fact that liberals have transferred this discourse from congressional hearings to public elections reveals a lot about how liberals think. It can help us understand what they see in Sarah Palin that horrifies them, and the qualities that nonliberals see but liberals overlook. It also can help us understand what liberals think about elections and about us, their fellow-citizens and fellow-voters.

The evaluation of potential judges according to a standard of "qualification" has long been institutionalized: organs of the legal profession regularly examine and rate the work of judges. This makes a lot of sense, because of what judges do. The task of a judge is that of applying an existing body of legislation and judicial precedent to the particular cases that will come before his or her bench. A satisfactory judge must have expert command of this knowledge or he cannot do the job. Moreover, the judge's decisions, in order to be effective, must be able to withstand appeal to higher courts that implement the same body of law and precedent according to essentially the same principles of judicial logic. The work of a judge, therefore, by its very nature is implicated in impersonal standards that the judge is supposed to put into practice: the judge represents a bench. This body of knowledge is the same for any judge who might be serving at the same bench, and so it makes perfect sense to demand approximately the same knowledge and legal skills of any prospective judges under consideration for a given bench.

Since judges are evaluated according to their professional expertise, those who evaluate them must be professionals who possess the same expertise. Judges are trained lawyers and members of the bar, and they are evaluated by fellow members of the bar who are experts in the relevant jurisprudence. The most important judicial seats are filled by appointment rather than election, and even when seats are regularly filled by election, voters accept and appreciate the evaluations of professional boards, because only legal professionals can tell them whether a judge or prospective judge knows what he will need to know to do the job.

The job of a U.S. president or vice-president is very unlike that of a judge or civil servant, so it should not be surprising that there are no institutions for formally evaluating candidates for president and proclaiming them as either "qualified" or "unqualified". In each presidential term the officeholder confronts a unique array of problems and opportunities. To a very large degree a president is entrusted with choosing how to distribute the administration's attention to these matters. Moreover the president does not merely deal with situations that come before him, as judges deal with cases; presidents can initiate legislation and diplomacy, issue executive orders, and sometimes authorize military action. Every presidency is different, and that uniqueness is built in to the office itself. For that reason it is impossible, even for former presidents, to say exactly what the "qualifications" for the presidency are.

The office of president is also filled by the election of voters, not through appointment by someone deemed better capable because of their professional expertise. It is true that the framers of the Constitution devised the Electoral College to be the body that would select the president. But it has never actually functioned that way, and the electors were never supposed to be experts.

Ultimately it is the voters who decide whether they wish someone to serve as their president, and if anyone were to pass judgment on the qualifications of a presidential candidate it would be they.

To summarize the previous two points: in our system the presidency is not conceived of as a professional position like a judge's, and presidents are not selected or authorized by professional licensing boards.

The fact that liberals are making such a fuss about the Governor of Alaska's alleged lack of "qualifications" to serve as vice-president shows not merely that liberals have a problem with Gov. Palin, but that they have a problem with the characteristics of the presidency and vice-presidency outlined above. When liberals talk about the "presidency," they are not in fact referring to the office now held by George Bush and held previously by Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, JFK, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. They are referring to an imaginary office that is much more like a professional civil service or judicial position. Some (deluded) liberals may think the presidency is already that, and that President Bush is the one dreaming he holds a job that doesn't exist. Others may want to make the presidency the equivalent of a professional civil service position. But either way, when liberals make proclamations about whether presidential and vice-presidential candidates are "qualified," the presidency they have in mind is not the real one, but the imaginary liberal presidency that is occupied only by qualified professionals who have been authorized by expert practitioners of the same profession.

This conception of the presidency is not merely an accident. It is intrinsic to liberalism, which is an ideology that might accurately be described as the political expression of social science. According to classical social science human affairs follow regular patterns like those of inanimate nature and can therefore be studied "scientifically." From this premise it follows that the only true and valid understanding of human affairs is that of trained experts, and that all practitioners of actual politics should either be experts or should implement "policies" that experts provide for them.

Therefore from the liberal standpoint, political progress requires that the government be controlled by experts, that office holders answer to experts rather than to voters (just as judges answer to the law and not to public opinion), and that the requirements of public service be defined in terms of obedience to the authority of social science expertise. In this framework, office holders are not supposed to lead, and the views of the voters are not supposed to matter. Office holders and voters alike are supposed to believe and do what experts tell them to.

In this ideal liberal world the board of experts that enforces the progressive regime of social science is supposed to be the news media, acting with the advice and support of higher academic experts who are quoted in interviews. The media (those heroes who saved America from fascism by exposing Watergate and publishing the Pentagon Papers) believe they have been entrusted with the quasi-official responsibility of exposing incompetence in office. The media also believe they are not expected to report news of actual events that readers may want to learn about, but to transmit images and conclusions that experts have determined are appropriate, so that members of the public do not get any wrong ideas: if, according to social science experts, criminals are not a problem, the NY Times may publish statistics about crimes and their alleged causes, but nothing about criminals. It may not be news, but it's "truth", since it's what social scientists have told the journalists we should know.

Why then do liberals say that the Governor of Alaska is "unqualified" to be vice-president? And why will we hear in the next election too that the Republican candidates are ridiculously "unqualified"? Is it because Republicans just can't find anyone who got a higher grade than C in political science to run for office? Or because Republican voters don't know the difference between an expert like Joe Biden and a rube who winks at them? Liberals might say "all of the above," but the truth is, "none of the above." Liberals will continue to find non-liberal candidates "unqualified" because certain people, like Republicans and the Postliberal here, don't subscribe to the liberal ideology: we don't believe that government should be an expression of social science. We think that human affairs do not follow such regular patterns and laws as social scientists would have us believe, and that the policies of social scientists can and indeed have led us into great error. We believe it is better to have officeholders who think for themselves, and that citizens who think for themselves are also better than citizens who have been indoctrinated.

So why then did John McCain select Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee? Was it because he submitted her to a Ph.D. oral examination about foreign policy and decided that she passed it? Or because he meant to give her the exam and forgot? Or because he thought she could win votes even though she flunked the exam? None of the above. I am absolutely sure that McCain selected Palin because he knew about her work as the Governor of Alaska, he got to know her personally, and he concluded that she had what it took for the job of vice-president and running mate that he needed done. Of course, that wouldn't be the way to appoint a judge. But for a vice-presidential candidate it makes perfect sense, much better sense than the process of "vetting" demanded by liberals who know about "issues" but don't know what vice-presidents and presidents actually do.

The problem here is not Palin's ignorance. It's the ignorance of liberals. These textbook-taught experts have no capacity for self-criticism. They do not know that real scientists test their own hypotheses and not just those of rivals. They are so blinded by their social science paradigm that they cannot even imagine an alternative to it, and so they simply dismiss anyone who doesn't subscribe to it as an idiot, religious fanatic, or some other kind of intellectual deviant. Sorry, liberals. Some people aren't like you. They're smarter. Sarah Palin is one of them.

And the voters--including those who actually are liberals themselves--are also smarter than liberals think they are. If anything about the present election is more aggravating than the media-bashing of Sarah Palin, it is the persistence of the media in attempting to coerce us into voting for Obama. It's offensive and disturbing. It's not just about electing Obama; it symptomatizes a lack of faith in the voters, and therefore a lack of faith in democracy. We who think for ourselves had better show our protectors what thinking people can do. Casting a vote for McCain and against Obama would be one step. Dropping subscriptions and turning off the news would also help--with the web, who needs the media any more? But there are other steps that may be taken after the election. The Postliberal will propose some. And if anybody has suggestions, please share.

Obama's Polling Numbers

2008-10-02T15:59:00.004-04:00

The polls are looking good for Barack Obama. But what do they really mean?

The current polls reflect a mood of confusion and panic among the voters. The nation is facing a crisis, voters were taken by surprise, they don't understand what happened, what will happen next, or what to do. In such a situation, when a voter is asked his or her preference about the upcoming election, "undecided" would be a very lame answer. So it should not be surprising that voters who only two weeks ago were undecided or leaning have declared themselves for one side, at least temporarily.

Nor is it particularly surprising that more should have declared a preference for Obama rather than McCain, since the polls have indicated all along that in 2008 the Democratic brand is preferred to the Republican. And since the particular crisis at hand concerns the economy, the reflex preference is for Obama, the Democrat.

I fail to see that much has happened in the campaigns themselves to move voters from Undecided to either candidate in the past two weeks. Some deflation in the Palin bubble may have contributed. But the main factors appear to have been external to the campaigns and the candidates. In other words, Obama has gotten lucky. But except for early votes, which probably are not cast by undecided voters anyway, none of this luck actually goes on the scoreboard. Obama is running up a lot of yardage. That doesn't always lead to points.

Perhaps a football game is not the most relevant analogy. What about George Bush's approval ratings in the aftermath of 9/11? Very, very high. But they didn't reflect an underlying confidence in his leadership, and they didn't stay high forever. If people didn't care much for Bush on September 10, 2001, and didn't care much for him on September 10, 2003, why did they support him so much on October 11, 2001? Not really anything that he did. But the public was in a state of shock, and "I don't know" wouldn't have been a very responsible attitude.

Obama now is enjoying a temporary rise in preference, but there is no reason to believe that it reflects a fundamental change in the way voters think about him or McCain. As the sense of crisis passes--even if the economic distress becomes regular, and not a new shock a day--voters will again return to thinking about what they will do. When that happens, Obama will have to win their support on the basis of what they know about him rather than their confusion about everything. If Obama can rise to that challenge, he will win the election.

But it will not be easy for him without more luck of the sort that has helped him for the past two weeks. The fundamental weakness of Obama's candidacy is Obama's complete lack of accomplishments. Voters have no reason to trust him to fulfill his promises, because they have no reason to think that he is up to the job. And even if Obama could give them reasons by scowling and talking in a deep voice, his campaign's message is still Hate Bush, Hate McCain, over and over and over again. It isn't a very persuasive message, especially coming from a candidate who also claims that he is a transformative healer.

Moreover, many of the deep weaknesses in Obama's candidacy are only beginning to come out now. In the long run the financial crisis will hurt Obama's reputation a lot. Who ever heard of ACORN before House Democrats tried to channel billions of dollars of taxpayer bailout money into it? But Americans know about ACORN now, and more find out as every day passes, and there's no telling how much there is to know. For a while Obama was bashing McCain for causing the mess through his advocacy of deregulation. But voters who have seen the CSPAN video of the 2004 House hearings on regulating Fannie and Freddie are not going to find that line persuasive at all.

On the contrary, it is now Obama who can and should be put on the defensive about his involvement with ACORN, and what ACORN's methods and goals really are. Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright--these associations, significant and discreditable though they are, are merely symptoms of Obama's ideological commitments and activities. Obama knows as well as anyone that voters will not be pleased to learn what ACORN is, much less how deeply he has been involved in it. That's why Obama and his "Lie Squads" have tried everything to keep it hidden throughout the campaign.

Needless to say, voters won't be learning much about ACORN from the MSM (or Pravda as I sometimes call it). And in the short run the unremitting crowd-noise of the MSM does help Obama. But news travels very fast these days, and more and more people are finding out things that the MSM doesn't want them to know. And they are also finding out that they can't trust the MSM. Ill-gotten gains can backfire. It won't help Obama when people have time to think about how many lies they've heard about him. They'll resent it.

I'm not predicting anything about the election. But I don't think that Obama's star is on an upward course, despite appearances this week. Much trouble is breaking around him. If he survives the election and gets to the White House, the president he'll commune with most at night will be Richard Nixon. That second term must have been rough.

Debate Format Biased: Favors Journalists

2008-10-01T18:57:00.002-04:00

Should Gwen Ifill be disqualified from moderating the VP debate because of her book on Obama? Absolutely. There is no reason to expect her to be neutral, and the expectation of neutrality is precisely the reason for having the debates moderated by supposedly professional mainstream journalists.

But who said that journalists are neutral anyway? If that fiction was ever believable, if journalists made a serious effort to maintain trust in their professionalism and neutrality, those days are far behind us. I don't know whether Gwen Ifill is more biased than anybody else; I just know that there's reason to doubt it, and in that case the debate becomes merely a press conference and not a "bipartisan forum" for the benefit of the voters.

One of the problems with the present system is that it pays Gwen Ifill and others in her line of work a compliment they don't deserve. The bipartisan national debate commission should quit dignifying the sordid profession of journalism. Let the candidates speak on whatever issues they wish, with agreed upon time-limits, and some provision for responding to each other's points--as in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Minimal moderation is called for. Let the candidates suggest moderaters from any profession, provided that they agree they can manage the clock fairly--the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be fine if the candidates agreed. But why put journalists between the candidates and the voters? So many of the questions they ask are stupid. "Where do each of you stand on the bailout package?" The bailout package then still being negotiated. How can anybody have a sensible discussion around an unanswerable question like that?

If journalists have to be involved, it would make more sense to have the candidates ask the questions and let the journalists answer, as if they were giving a briefing to the president. After all they lay claim to our attention by implying that they know all about sophisticated matters like the Bush Doctrine, etc. etc. Then if a candidate caught a journalist in a serious gaffe, he could act presidential and fire the at-fault adviser on the spot. There's a press conference for the post-liberal era.

New Slogan for Changing "Times"

2008-09-30T17:42:00.004-04:00

"All the News That's Fit to Print" : isn't that a lame 20th century slogan for a trendy 21st century content provider like The New York Times? The last time I read the "Paper of Record" most of the articles were about demography ("In Florida, Gefilte Fishermen Face Shrinking Catch"), most of the photos were 98% sky and 2% mud, most of the "news" was deep-sourced speculation about speculation about speculation about whether John McCain was planning to use the White House as a place to meet interns at taxpayer expense.

The self-transformation of this organ of journalism seems to have a method and a goal. I'm hearing a statement about all of us standing together as one, never blaming the victim, and always saying boldly what needs to be said, especially when it's unpopular because it's not the truth. An organ like this needs a new slogan for a new century. Here's a suggestion for the masthead of the Times: "We Are All Jayson Blair".

Doesn't that just about say it all?

Forget "The Aristocrats": The Funniest Joke is "The Democrats"

2008-09-29T22:03:00.005-04:00

With Tina Fey fully occupied impersonating an idiot impersonating Sarah Palin, immature Americans wonder who they'll see on SNL this weekend impersonating the "toast" of Washington, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Most often mentioned: guest appearance by standup veteran Joan Rivers!

It must be once in a generation that a Speaker of the House gets to announce a major piece of legislation before a national and international audience anxious with anticipation. Speaker Pelosi's history-making moment came yesterday around 5 pm when she approached the microphone to congratulate herself and fellow Democrats for fixing Bush's bailout bill and saving "Main Street".

Then it turns out that 40% of her own Democratic caucus votes against the bill? Didn't Pelosi know who was and wasn't on board when she made the announcement? Isn't that, like, the most basic job of the caucus leader?

The Democrats should change the lock on Speaker Pelosi's door before she does more damage to their brand. She probably won't notice before the weekend anyway. Maybe if she's lucky she'll find out she's been fired by turning on SNL--nothing softens the blow like a little laughter! And the wit-challenged SNL staff won't have to worry about material for the skit. Pelosi herself is the gag.

Presidential Debate: Losing Audience Share?

2008-09-28T10:04:00.009-04:00

Supposedly the TV audiences for the presidential debate Friday night were lower than expected and lower than those for the Bush-Kerry debates four years ago.

Although before the debate I would not have predicted that myself, in retrospect I don't find it surprising. The debates of 2004, like 6 of the nine previous TV presidential-debate series, featured a sitting U.S. president. The other three series featured a sitting vice-president. Part of the appeal of these debates was the spectacle of seeing a political heavyweight titleholder perform extemporaneously and confront a challenger. In Friday night's debate both candidates were non-titleholders. I would imagine that for many Americans (of all ages; not all viewers are actually of voting age) this might have made the debate a less exciting attraction.

Since I thought that McCain acquitted himself better than Obama I would have preferred that he do it for the biggest audience possible. I wouldn't speculate upon how the smaller audience might affect the evolving campaign. But in thinking about its causes, I suspect that they symptomatize something working against Obama. Everybody concedes that Obama outdoes McCain in media star power. People show up in great numbers to see Obama in a stadium, at a monument, or to watch him on TV. Except that this time they didn't. The lower than expected ratings for the Friday debate probably means that Obama's stardom is waning. He's being seen as a regular boring politician rather than the reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

The smaller than expected audience also suggests that Obama has not been as successful as he'd like in convincing people that John McCain is a surrogate for George Bush. In 2004, many people who were not the least bit undecided about the candidates watched the debates in the hope of seeing Bush humiliated by Kerry. Americans who are still angry at Bush and would like to see his work repudiated by their liberal knight might have been expected to turn on the TV just to see Obama lay into McCain. But apparently McCain isn't enough like Bush to make him a really entertaining target. If so, part of Obama's message isn't working as well as he wants it to.

Even supposing these hypotheses are true, it would be reckless to project their effect on the actual voting. But if true they do indicate a changing dynamic in the campaign. It is clear, just from listening to Obama's stump speeches and his answers in the debate, that he has now decided to make himself heard by talking into the lunchbucket as loud as he can. It's a kind of politics, and elections have been won with it. Also lost. This week Obama seems to be doing all right.

First Debate Winner: U.S.

2008-09-26T23:42:00.007-04:00

The presidential debate was the best I've seen. Both candidates articulated their positions clearly and with confidence. Partisans of each candidate will feel that the positions they advocate were presented well. Notwithstanding all the punditry about "winning" and "losing" debates, what each candidate "has to do" to advance his campaign, the two candidates together did something that rarely happens: they laid out their positions and differences for the people to see what they are, and let them decide.

McCain had the steeper task, because he advocates accepting the challenges of leadership, and many citizens see the actual losses more easily than the potential risks and advantages. McCain gave the American people and the world a lecture about Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan that deprived us of the comfort of thinking that we can maintain our safety without work and risk. He did not make false promises, but outlined the seriousness of the problems and his determination to confront them and his ability to do so.

Americans heard this point of view, and they could see that the man explaining it did not just find it in a book, but developed it through extensive experience in government. They saw a real statesman explain what statesmanship is for. I don't think the American voters have ever seen this in a presidential debate, so they might not know what to make of it. They'll have to choose whether it's what they want, but at least McCain has given them a chance to check it out. In that regard, McCain did great. He's a very impressive man.

Obama performed theatrically better than I expected him to. Now that he's been running for president for almost two years, Obama's begun to believe that the phrases he repeats are actually "positions" he thought up himself. To anyone who didn't know better, he sounded and looked like a leader. Those who already supported Obama and his positions probably felt entirely encouraged (except maybe when he mentioned missile defense), and many of those who supported his positions but weren't sure about the man probably feel more secure with him now.

The ultimate effect of the debate will not be in the instantaneous evaluations, but in the material it provides for continuing discussion in the campaign. Of the two candidates I think that McCain was the only one who could change minds--which I hasten to add is not the same thing as winning votes. McCain has changed even Obama's mind on a number of points, to go from what Obama himself said. Any conscientious citizens watching the debate could not fail to see that McCain was more thoughtful and knowledgeable about American statesmanship than they are themselves, and more thoughtful and knowledgeable than Obama; and that even someone who disagreed with McCain's positions could and did learn something from him. McCain won more attention. Now as the campaign continues he will have to work to persuade the voters whose attention he has gotten. (Ads attacking Obama's sex-ed bill in the Illinois legislature will squander the attention that McCain has focused upon his own leadership.)

Obama won some respect, but he didn't win attention, and he didn't demand it. Obama said things about taxation, spending, and diplomacy that you like if you agree with them, and if you don't believe too much intellectual work is necessary to reach the right conclusion. No minds can be changed by this.

Ultimately it is the voters' wisdom that will be tested in the election. The Democratic ticket has many advantages over the Republican; but virtually none of these advantages has to do with the candidates. Dissatisfaction with the economy and the Bush administration have put the Republicans at a huge handicap. But the Democrats have been unable to exploit it decisively, because they nominated a man who as a presidential candidate does not stand comparison to the Republican nominee. If Obama could not rely upon the voters' assumption, or their wish to believe, that they are suffering from Republican problems that Obama can fix just because he's a Democrat, his presence on a debate platform with John McCain would make even Democrats cringe. Barack Obama is no John McCain.

In his conclusion Obama talked about the diminished image of America in the world. I think that viewers of the debate abroad saw a country choosing its new president from between two men both of whom would be considered very highly qualified to lead the viewer's own nation. Indeed, many viewers will have had to admit--however reluctantly--that both candidates are far superior to the leaders they now have (and that would include many viewers in the U.S.).

Viewers abroad will also have seen--I know this sounds like elementary school civics--a open exchange of competing perspectives conducted with civility and intellectual respect. The debate displayed America very well. Obama contributed to that display, but he didn't have to get elected to do it, so in that important sense the debate as a whole undermined his final point about how an Obama presidency would improve America's image. Both candidates have improved America's image, but McCain's performance in the debate improved it more, not by offering a promise of what an American president might be, but by showing what a distinguished American senator already actually is.

The U.S. would have to be rich in talent indeed to decide that we could find a better president than John McCain.

Betting Long: Obama and Other Bubbles

2008-09-22T22:50:00.004-04:00

The meltdown of the financial markets has led to a lot of fingers pointed in the direction of Wall Street, not least of all by the presidential candidates. No doubt about it, the investment community has broken all boundaries in inventing new derivatives so mathematically abstract that even economists cannot understand them. But is Wall Street really unique in placing big bets on fantasies of the future? A lot of Americans have been in on the game, most obviously those who were tempted into borrowing money to buy homes they couldn't afford.

But not all the blind hope involved finance. Who is Barack Obama to decry the imprudence of investment bankers? Obama himself was nominated for president without ever accomplishing anything of substance in his brief public career--or even trying to. What is Barack Obama's candidacy if not a speculation bubble? A man with no record and no plan "wins" the Iowa caucuses and gets proclaimed a viable presidential candidate by the media? Are Americans supposed to think that Barack Obama can actually serve them as president because several million college students and their vintage '68 grandparents think he's the reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King rolled into one? Even Sarah Palin knows that reincarnation is a fib.

Right now Obama still occupies the role of "frontrunner," but what is that? Just a device of journalistic accounting. It doesn't mean that he's qualified to be president, or even that many people really think he is. The polls and newspaper analyses that support the credibility of Obama's candidacy are as fictitious and manipulated as the balance sheet of Enron. Sure Obama won millions of "votes" in the Democratic primaries, but primaries are not real elections, because the voting does not result in anybody taking office. Primary elections are basically fancy polls that use voting machines instead of telephones. Caucuses are even further from real elections.

The political capital won in primary elections is also deceptive because the opponents as well as the voters are all of the same party. All the speaking essentially addresses the already converted, so that a candidate like Obama never had to persuade voters to change their minds. Since in Democratic presidential primaries the candidates all conform closely to a single formula, a candidate is never fundamentally challenged: indeed, his positions are actually confirmed and strengthened by his rivals. So what's the cash value of the millions of "votes" that Barack Obama got? Nobody knows.

Once the public begins to get serious about the election, a lot of people who wish they could vote Democratic are going to realize that their party unfortunately forgot to nominate a candidate. It won't require a gaffe. Obama isn't unqualified because he's unintelligent; he's unqualified because he has a record of zero accomplishment, and un-childish voters are not indifferent to that in a potential president. Nothing that Obama does from here on can change the record he brings to the election. It's a fact that hangs over the guy's head like a bowling ball about to drop. It's there; a few people who have been hoping and not looking just have to look. Once that happens a panic will set in as Democrats realize that they will lose with Obama even if he wins the election. It may happen tomorrow, or November 4, or November 5 if the country is unlucky. But it will happen, to the embarrassment and consternation of many.

Obama's Most Unexploited Weakness

2008-09-19T21:03:00.003-04:00

As the Obama campaign apoplectically tries to smear John McCain's outstanding record of public service, The Maverick has responded by running ads that inform the voters of unpleasant things they don't know about the Democratic nominee. I found it useful to hear about the Illinois sex-ed bill, although I thought the critical weakness it exposed was not that Obama had a perverted plan to teach sex-ed (I don't think he did), but rather that he didn't even know what was in the bill he supported, and was content to leave details to teachers. ("Does Barack Obama know what's in the legislation he supports?")

Nevertheless I feel that attack ads like these run a risk of alienating voters who may suspect that if they didn't hear about the sex-ed bill before, it probably wasn't important. But I also think that Obama has a weak spot voters know about but haven't gotten in focus: the Democratic primary campaign that won Obama his party's nomination. How did he do it? This is an important question for the McCain campaign and for voters, because if Obama is to be considered unworthy of election to the presidency (because of inexperience, bad judgment, or suspicious associations) then he should also be considered unworthy of the Democratic nomination. Correspondingly, if it is conceded that Obama was worthy of nomination, then it is also conceded that he is worthy to serve. For this reason Hillary Clinton's attacks on Obama in the spring were more powerful than McCain's now, even when McCain raises the same issues, for the simple reason that Clinton was arguing that Obama did not even deserve to be nominated.

In that vein it should be noted that the attacks on Sarah Palin are extremely strong because they insist that the Governor of Alaska is not qualified even to be the Republican nominee. Responding that Obama is even less qualified does not return the volley unless the response states or strongly implies that the Democrats insulted the voters' intelligence in awarding Obama their party's nomination.

There is one imporant difference between Palin's nomination and Obama's that I have not yet heard mentioned. Palin did not campaign for the vice-presidential nomination: she was serving as governor of Alaska when McCain selected her as his choice of the right VP in a McCain administration. A first-term governor of Alaska would indeed have been rash to oppose John McCain and Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination. But among all the crazy charges that have been thrown at Sarah Palin, nobody has tried that one.

Yet Barack Obama did decide to run for president when he had served hardly more than the first year of his first term in the U.S. Senate. Moreover in doing so he decided to oppose members of his own party--one in particular--whose records of public accomplishment and service far exceeded his. What did Barack Obama think about the presidency and its requirements when he picked himself as the best person to lead the Democratic ticket? And how did he bring it off?

Much has been said about Obama's "charisma" and the promise that he would Make History just by standing on a platform and running. One could observe that Obama has no charisma and that "First (race, gender, state of origin) Nominee" is material for the Guinness Book of World Records and not history (which Obama could have made as a legislator in the Senate if he was serious). But attributing Obama's success to charisma or Faking History gives the Democratic nominee far too much credit. This junior senator with no record of accomplishment, no signature issue, no wealth, no family, and no important political alliances needed a lot of help in gaining funding and legitimacy before he could make a credible run for the Democratic nomination. Those who possessed the fuel Obama needed could have told him to serve in the Senate before running for president--or destroyed him if he didn't. So why did so unsentimental a pol as Ted Kennedy support Barack Obama in 2008? Belief in reincarnation? Even supposing that Obama offered the promise of inaugurating a blissful postracial America, wouldn't Obama have done it better when he was ready, and with the whole Democratic Party behind him?

Why Obama in 2008? Why was it even thinkable?

There's no big secret behind this. Obama was useful to insiders as a tool to stop Hill and Bill from establishing a Clinton dynasty. Even Obama's appeal to his childish groupies was largely due to the fact that Hillary was too much of a real politician and therefore had "baggage," while Obama was a screen onto which they could project their fantasies, precisely because he wasn't real. But for the insiders in the Party and the media who got behind Obama, the Obama campaign was never about anything other than stopping Hillary Clinton. Because there was no other reason to support a rookie like Obama whose every policy idea came straight from the Democratic discount rack.

Now stopping Hillary Clinton may have been a good idea, or it may not have been. But what was definitely a bad idea, for America, was putting up a pawn to do the job. Because a pawn cannot serve as president. He doesn't have the independent base he needs, and Barack Obama wouldn't have it even he had served three years as governor of Hawaii and topped Sarah Palin in executive experience. A President Obama will be tied to the strings of all the backers, advisors, and media pundits who have maneuvered him into the position he is in. That's a prescription for one of the worst presidencies in history, no matter what Obama himself thinks or what he'd like to do.

That's why one of Obama's critical weaknesses is just the very fact that he is the Democratic nominee. The party and media power brokers nominated a facade. McCain's campaign should find more ways to remind the voters of that.

Hostage Alert: Roe v. Wade v. Women Voters

2008-09-13T06:39:00.000-04:00

During every presidential election cycle, and any time a sitting president must fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, American women report anxiety lest a step be taken toward a five-to-four majority on the Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade and, according to what many of these women say, illegalize abortion in the United States and abolish a woman's "right to choose." In the current presidential campaign we are hearing again that women are "afraid" of McCain and Palin, and in discussions that The Postliberal has had with women friends and family, concern about protecting Roe v. Wade almost invariably surfaces as the bottom-line issue that forbids consideration of the Republican nominees.

The concerns of these women are very deeply felt, and I should think they would merit sympathy not only from those Americans who support legal abortion, but even from fellow-citizens who don't. Anybody who believed that a civil freedom of importance rested in the hands of only five people--five people unelected and serving for life--would have to feel that the situation was intolerable. The women's frustration is made all the more urgent by the conviction of many--the almost certainly correct conviction--that the legality of abortion is supported by the majority of voters, male and female. So why should it be possible for five judges appointed for life to overrule the views of millions of Americans? Who gave five judges the right to decide whether women can or can't have legal abortions?

In my discussions with women about the legality of abortion I am struck by something the women are silent about, almost as struck as I am by their vigilant defense of Roe v. Wade. It is invariably left to me to point out that the legality of abortion in America does not actually depend upon Roe v. Wade, and that even if Roe v. Wade were overturned it would not necessarily mean that abortion would become illegal in the U.S. Usually this observation of mine is met with surprise and disbelief, although occasionally (since some women of my acquaintance are lawyers) with a certain reluctant acknowledgement. Why are American women, American women who are so concerned about the legality of abortion, also so predominantly unaware that abortion was legal in several states before the Roe v. Wade ruling, that other states were in process of considering making it legal, and that all states were constitutionally empowered to make abortion legal within their borders if their citizens decided it should be? With all the money we have invested in schools, with all our women's magazines and television talk-shows, with all the money that is contributed to the National Abortion Rights Action League and other organizations purportedly devoted to advancing the rights of women, one would think that someone in the business of speaking with good will to girls and women would take the trouble to inform them that the legality of abortion in the U.S. cannot be abridged by five votes on the Supreme Court as so many of them wrongly believe.

If somehow Roe v. Wade were overturned, the American men and women who favor legalized abortion would simply have to pursue the political task of making abortion legal in each of the fifty states. They are certainly up to it. So everybody can just relax about the composition of the Supreme Court. It will not, and cannot, "take over women's bodies," no matter who is elected president and no matter whom the president appoints. There's nothing for women who favor legal abortion to be afraid of in this election. In fact, should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned, it is the opponents of legal abortion who would have the most to fear. Why? Because by all indications their numbers are fewer than those of the advocates, and as a matter of both principle and general practice in our country, majorities rule.

So who was it that gave five judges the power to decide the abortion issue for tens of millions of voters, women and men? Nobody other than the "women's advocates" who financed the plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade, and the seven Supreme Court justices who ruled in their favor.

When "women's advocates" and their supporters chose to put the legality of abortion in the hands of the Court instead of leaving it in the voters', they also simultaneously gave the Court the power to take the legalization away, and deprived the voters of the power to keep it. That is the only reason why anybody would be worried about a Supreme Court that might declare abortion illegal just by overturning Roe.

It should be obvious to any supporter of legalized abortion that if today, more than thirty-five years after the Roe decision, American women still have to worry every time they think about the White House or vote for president, the "women's advocates" who won the freedom to have legal abortion for American women established that freedom on a very flimsy basis. That's not because they did the best anyone could in a backward country still alarmingly dominated by white Christian ignoramuses who believe in creationism and want to enslave women--because few if any people who fit that description actually exist, even in Alaska. Legalized abortion is established on a flimsy basis because the "advocates for women" didn't do their job well. They took a short cut. "Haste makes waste": that's something all our wise grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew, but the "advocates for women" today do not. In deciding that the justices of the Supreme Court were more to be trusted than the millions of American voters, women and men, working to establish their common laws through processes of democratic dialogue and legislation, the "advocates for women" chose convenience over thoroughness. American women have been paying the price for their impatience ever since, in their unending anxiety over the possibility that abortion might be illegalized by the Court.

Since Roe v. Wade thirty-five years have been wasted while citizens who could have voted for legalized abortion have been forced to sit on their hands. If millions of American voters, men and women, state by state, fought democratically to legalize abortion in our land, there is no power under our constitution that could frustrate the consensus of their voices. Millions of determined women voters do not have to worry about what five judges think of their bodies and beliefs. American voters, men and women, have always had the power under our constitution not only to legalize abortion, but to give that legalization all the force and stability of their determination and numbers. The only thing standing in their way now is...Roe v. Wade.

Why don't American women know this? Why are they needlessly afraid? Why aren't their "advocates" telling them how powerful they are under the principles and laws of our democracy?

At the national Democratic Party convention last month we heard a lot of praise for the work that an earlier generation of women did in establishing suffrage for women by amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We did not, however, hear anybody say that women should have the right to vote on the question of legalizing abortion. Did the Nineteenth Amendment somehow grant women the right to vote on every issue of community concern except the one that matters most to millions of them? Was it the vision of the suffrage movement that women voters would be kept in the dark about the real power of their votes in our democracy? Kept in constant fear of authoritarianism lurking both on their courts and within the homes of their own neighbors and fellow-citizens? And bullied into voting for one party, election after election, regardless of how they judged the particular candidates and issues in any particular election? Did women win the vote so that their strength could be held hostage and controlled by the self-proclaimed advocates for women?

The Postliberal thinks it is about time American women took back the right to vote in its entirety, so that they can establish legal abortion on the foundation of millions of votes instead of five or seven. To do this, however, they will have to join those who ask for Supreme Court appointments who are conscientious in their respect for the U.S. Constitution, the document they are sworn to uphold. It doesn't seem like much to ask for. Justices like that may well some day overturn Roe v. Wade, but if and when they do the effect of their decision, and in all likelihood its intent, will be to return the power of legislative choice to the citizens. In the present presidential election it is the Republican candidates who are most likely to support a Court that gets out of the voters' way, but there is no particular reason why the Constitution should not be championed by both parties. Women who support Democrats and legal abortion should realize that these ends are ultimately compatible with opposition to Roe v. Wade, and may even be better pursued without the intrusion of a patronizing Supreme Court. A movement for Choice without Roe would be neither progressive nor conservative, Democratic nor Republican. I'll call it Post-Liberal.

There is a pro-choice, anti-Roe position. Women should be speaking up for it, because in the long run it is the position that offers women the most empowerment, not only as biological childbearers, but as citizens of a democracy.

The Donkey in the Room Kicks Obama

2008-09-11T07:23:00.000-04:00

When Barack Obama characterized his opponents' campaign for change as "lipstick on a pig," was he implying that Sarah Palin, the world's most famous Pit Bull in Lipstick, was a pig? When the McCain campaign, and some observers in the public and the media, take umbrage at Obama for insulting Palin's gender, are they for real? Both questions admit of multiple, provisional, and even contradictory answers, because the entire situation condenses so many "subtexts" it could have been written for the stage by David Mamet or Philip Roth (that is if Philip Roth wrote for the stage).

Whatever Barack Obama's indiscretion may have been, it was a one-billionth fraction of zero compared to the assaults directed against Sarah Palin by the mob of stone-throwing TV scandal-baiters, newspaper opinionators, and Beverly Hills bloviators, not to mention the ugly world of the web, where any high school sophomore can outslime Rupert Murdoch. Stoning Sarah Palin has become an American liberal pastime. But Governor Palin has dealt with the attacks so professionally she might as well be, I don't know, Johnny Podres pitching in Yankee Stadium. No screaming fan ever got a hit off her, and from the looks of things they never will. Sarah Palin neither needs defenders nor has sought them; she's too busy attacking, because at the moment that's a big part of her job, she's good at it, and her opponent Obama seems unable to open his mouth without providing her with more opportunities. John McCain knows that Sarah Barracuda requires no "special treatment" to protect her against sexism, because she's more than a match for anyone or any mob that might try to harass her; and undoubtedly he selected her as his campaign running mate, and as a potential vice-president, for that very reason. So yes, I think there is something quite disingenuous about Team McCain giving Obama grief over his clumsy "pig" joke.

If Team McCain just wanted to talk Straight Talk about Obama's joke, these are some of the things they could have said.
-----They could have said that "lipstick on a pig" was a stupid cliche Obama parroted from the despised Dick Cheney.
-----They could have said that Obama has for weeks been robotically repeating a single empty mantra--excuse me, message--and that the Democratic candidate clearly has nothing in the tank.
-----Finally, they could have said that Obama's so-called message is a blatant lie, because what "lipstick on a pig" means is that McCain = Bush, and everyone--including Obama himself if we want to speak about disingenuousness--everyone knows that McCain isn't Bush. These responses, which are all true, are much more serious indictments of Obama's insipid joke and what it symptomatizes than the disingenuous complaint that it is offensive to women.

So why then would the McCain campaign make a defensive, whiny, and transparently disingenuous attack on Obama, when they could have decked him, or treated the joke itself as merely the trivial one-liner it is?

The reason Team McCain went whiny this week, I believe, is that they saw in Obama's "pig" remark an opportunity to smoke out an issue that is very important to the Obama campaign and indeed to the nation at this time. The issue is neither sexism nor offensive speech. The issue is Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Donkey In The Room in the 2008 Presidential campaign, because Political Correctness is both the sole rationale for Barack Obama's candidacy (as an alternative to, say, Hillary Clinton's) and an issue that he alone of the candidates can claim. So from the standpoint of Team Obama PC is their candidate's WMD, not simply a game-changer but a rule-maker. The endlessly repeated pseudo-news that Obama's nomination is a "historical achievement" solely because the candidate is African-American, with the implication that his election would be an even greater "historical achievement" for the same reason, constitutes a blatant effort to coerce citizens into voting for Obama and to inhibit and discredit any criticism of Obama's qualifications. According to the Democrats, Americans face a monumental choice in 2008: for History or against it. Well, if you put it that way.....

All throughout the spring, as political operatives and experts who had declared Obama inevitable tried to deny that Hillary Clinton had put him on the ropes, we heard in interviews about the supposed "difficulty" of running against Barack Obama. For most citizens this commentary was "analysis," but for John McCain it was business of the most practical sort, because unlike the rest of us John McCain is in the unique position of actually running against Obama, and if there is a difficulty involved in running against Obama one of McCain's fundamental tasks is to overcome it. If he doesn't, he will lose.

So what was the difficulty of running against Obama supposed to be? What it amounted to was this: the public, or anyway all of it living in cafes instead of caves, allegedly felt a certain adoration of Obama that had nothing in particular to do with "issues"; and therefore the public did not want to hear Obama criticized on the issues, not to mention on other grounds. The basis for the public's alleged love affair with Obama was not exclusively his ethnicity, but more importantly his charm, seriousness, and potential to inaugurate an era of racial harmony devoutly to be wished. Obama was, in short, No Ordinary Candidate, and an ordinary opponent foolish enough to treat Obama like an ordinary candidate would find--or so the experts predicted--that all arguments against Obama would rebound fatally upon the opponents, because the public did not want to hear Obama brought down to the level of ordinary politicians. If anyone tried it, the public would think--indeed, the public would realize--that the opponent was opposing not just a candidate but the bright future of racial harmony itself. And anyone who would do that might well be a racist, especially since the candidate they were so unfairly opposing was African-American.

Hence, according to the commentators, campaigning against Obama would be "difficult" for a politician to do. What they really meant is that it would be impossible, and that they would make it so, because in "doing their jobs" as journalists and expert commentators they would have the solemn responsibility of enforcing rules of discourse that would fix the campaigning in Obama's favor and deprive the American voters of an open democratic discussion and freely made decision.

The fundamental task confronting a candidate running against Obama, therefore, is simply that of asserting the people's right to have a campaign, instead of the parade the Obamacrats had concluded was their entitlement. Obama's opponent must establish the democratic right to say out loud that the Emperor has no clothes, and to establish the right of the people to hear it, whether they want to or not; because that, Norman Lear, is the American Way. Moreover some voters do want to hear it, and others who think they don't will be glad to have the alternative perspective once they have the chance. McCain has already changed minds in this election, but to do it he had to violate the speech code. The offensive words that sounded like drills in the ears of liberals were these: "Sarah Palin." Among the other things liberals said about her, they said that McCain had offended women merely by putting her on the ticket. Now that's what I would call hypersensitivity, if I didn't know how disingenuous it really was.

Yes, Team McCain is disingenuous in slamming Obama over sexism, but precisely this transparent disingenuousnesss makes their real charge against Obama stronger instead of weaker, because the charge is that of trying to win the Presidency by imposing upon the campaigns a speech code that would shield Obama from legitimate and tough criticism. McCain's issue here is not sexism but Political Correctess, and disingenuousness is constitutive of Political Correctness, which could be defined as disingenuous allegations that feelings have been injured by insensitive (i.e. unintentionally offensive) speech or conduct. Team McCain's whining is a caricature of PC, but it will stick to Obama and not McCain, because everybody already knows that Obama's campaign has been powered by PC since day one and would ride it to the White House if allowed. The Obamacrats don't like finger pointing? Look who's talking!

Is this analysis too subtle for John McCain? No. McCain is a man who thinks. Not even Sarah Palin's worst enemies could deny, if they were honest, that McCain's selection of her was a stroke of political genius if nothing else. Comparing McCain to Karl Rove is far too complimentary to Rove: Rove might have picked Palin (though I doubt it), but he wouldn't have picked McCain. Only McCain had the insight and guts to realize that Palin could be his complement. If voters want change they can believe in, that's the kind of creative leader who can give it to them. And no liberal can ever provide that kind of change, not because liberals aren't quantitatively smart (high SATs, multiple degrees), but because ideologically liberals don't believe that any such thing as intellectual creativity even exists, so they expend their energies denying it rather than cultivating it. That's what it means to be an expert, and why experts are always ready to say that something surprising and not already approved must be stupid. But The Post Liberal will address the ideology of liberalism (i.e. the Progressive, not the classical type) at length at another time.

Special Needs Humor

2008-09-08T21:30:00.000-04:00

The Democrats would like to run against George Bush. Unfortunately for them, Bush isn't running for reelection, so regardless of who wins in November, Bush will be out of office by next January. Apart from the purely political difficulties Bush's departure poses for Democrats in the election, it's also a crisis for our culture: with Bush gone, the high IQ-lifestyle demographic will lose one if its richest domestic reserves of entertainment, the "Bush is a Retard" jokes that never run dry. Where will the Bill Mahers and Michael Moores turn to serve working sophomores left hungry by the drop in opportunities for Special Needs Humor?

Those who crave a cheap daily hit of self-esteem can look to senility as a hot new disability issue liberals will include in their Comedy for America policy. For example:

Where did Barack Obama become such an expert on what John McCain doesn't know about American families, or doesn't get about them?

And regarding that deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented remark McCain made about the number of houses he owns--what's that Democratic ad about how McCain says he doesn't know how many houses he owns any more? Where did the any more come from? Not from John McCain. It must have been supplied by someone much more in touch with the special needs of the elderly, some caregiver or community organizer, or maybe a professional publicist in the pay of one.

Well, if any readers of the Post-Liberal missed the humorous insinuations about John McCain's senility, they needn't worry. The fun is just beginning. We'll be hearing plenty of contemptuous allusions to John McCain's cluelessness between now and November. And after November too, if the Democrats once again find that the voters still cling to whatever it is they cling to when they sense they're being patronized.

Will Hillary Work For Low Wages, No Benefits?

2008-09-07T12:17:00.000-04:00

According to plausible scuttlebutt, the Obama campaign is hoping that the spearhead of its response to Sarah Palin will be: Hillary Clinton. That's "The Audacity of Hope" for you! A week ago the professional experts were declaring that McCain's unorthodox VP pick had doomed his campaign to a defeat more ridiculous than McGovern's. Now the Democratic ticket's two "Presidential" senators are so intimidated by the former mayor of Wasilla that they're running for shelter under the skirts of the Presidential aspirant they defeated. I think they'll find that Hillary's wearing pants.

Hillary Clinton would probably like to know why Barack Obama didn't support her run for the Presidency. And it certainly wasn't very respectful of Obama's Democratic supporters to declare HRC's candidacy dead-on-arrival as early as mid-January, and then continue to imply, for months afterward, that the Senator from New York had a lot of nerve even to run a campaign against Obama, as if by seeking the Presidency herself she was standing in the way of A Historic Achievement. Hillary's assigned role in History, like theirs, would be to stand aside and salute the parade as it passed.

One has to wonder at the wisdom of politicos who think the best way to win an election is to avoid a campaign. Because in a democracy the important offices usually go to those who win campaigns. The assumption that campaigning shouldn't be necessary if you are supporting the right causes (or "policies"), and correspondingly should be forbidden if you aren't, is actually a chapter in the conceptual poli sci textbook of progressivism, an axiom that almost all progressives (a/k/a liberals) accept to some degree; and Hillary's own acceptance of it did as much to cost her the early Democratic primaries and caucuses as Obama's campaigning. The people who dismissed Hillary Clinton and her campaign for the Presidency--and they did dismiss her, and it--they thought they were doing a very smart thing. But they weren't.

Nine days ago the incomprehensible name "Sarah Palin" stirred the liberals/experts out their torpid complacency into such an uncanny terror you'd think they'd discovered a horse's head in their bed. John McCain was campaigning for President! He was practicing "Karl Rove politics"! Is that the American Way? Is it legal? What do we do? What expert do we call? Who on our side would know something about campaigning for President?

Hmm, what about Bill Clinton's wife, that nasty pit belle who caused "America" such a pain in the ass by winning those primaries against Barack Obama after the real Superdelegates had already decided that History was a done deal. Let's get her to do to McCain what she did to Barack! Ka-ching!

Well here's a news flash for Barackocrats: Hillary Clinton does not want to Make History as the first person, male or female, to be nominated for the ceremonial, part-time position of vice-vice-president of the U.S. The responsibilities, wages and benefits are well below those of the job she has, and if in any way she does agree to do contract work on behalf of her erstwhile rival, she will only embarrass him, because the better she does at campaigning, the more people will wonder why they can't vote for her, i.e, why Hillary Clinton wasn't the nominee in the first place. Barack Obama doesn't want to be seen as a guy who asked the senator from New York to mop the glass ceiling for him. If he needs that kind of help, maybe he can get John Kerry at a reasonable rate.

Pinocchiobama

2008-09-06T20:07:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the DNC was so quickly overwhelmed by John McCain's announcement of his running mate and its sensational aftermath that the speech itself has received little discussion. Truth to tell, there wasn't much in it to discuss. But those interested in the integrity of the democratic nominee may wish to consult a fact-check report on the speech, which they can do at factcheck.org, under "FactChecking Obama," 8/29/08.

The article contains the by-now familiar corrections of quantitive assertions to which the speeches of both candidates are subject. Of particular concern to the Post Liberal, however, are the personal claims made by Senator Obama about Senator McCain and the statements Obama attributed to him. These distortions of fact are especially disturbing, at least to me, because they could easily have been avoided, and served no other purpose than to smear Senator McCain's good name as a citizen. I quote a couple of bullet points from the FactCheck report.

Obama twisted McCain's words about Afghanistan, incorrectly implying that McCain saw no need for more troops there.
Obama: When John McCain said we could just "muddle through" in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.
Actually, McCain said in 2003 that the U.S. "may' muddle through, not that we could or would. He also said he was very concerned about a rise in al Quaeda activity there. He said then that he was "guardedly optimistic" that the government could handle it.

The FactCheck report then continues with a fuller quotation of McCain's actual words, which I urge readers of the Post-Liberal to examine for themselves.

Here's another observation about Obama's speech from FactCheck:

Obama used a clumsy attempt at humor by McCain as evidence of his supposed insensitivity to middle-class economic realities:
Obama: Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans; I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year?

What McCain actually said at the Saddleback Church forum on Aug. 16 was that he favors low taxes for all income levels. He drew a laugh, then said, "but seriously" as he struggled to make his point.

The FactCheck report continues on to quote the exchange at greater length, and again I urge readers of the PostLiberal to consult it themselves, because it doesn't reflect badly on John McCain at all. Indeed, after getting a laugh for the $5 million remark, McCain is quoted as saying "But seriously..."and then adding, "I'm sure that comment will be distorted." Again, McCain was right. First the surge and now this!

It would not be unfair to say of Senator Obama that his misleading references to Senator McCain's words represented awfully sloppy work for a man who wants to be our president, particularly on an occasion which, if really "historic" as claimed, will be remembered and studied for more than one day. As Obama himself might say, we can do better than this! And if we elect as our president a man so tone deaf that he can't tell when John McCain is cracking a joke, what will he do in his meetings with Ahmadinejad and Putin if they get sarcastic with him? The fate of the world might depend upon President Barack Obama's sense of tact! (Just kidding.)

But it would be truly patronizing to Senator Obama to suggest that a guy with degrees from Columbia and Harvard doesn't possess the reading and listening skills to understand what McCain actually said. What Obama doesn't possess is the integrity to care about what McCain said. All Barack Obama cares about is getting into office.

I have found it rather shameless of the democrats and their supporters to accuse their opponents of "swiftboating" Obama, using fear tactics, etc. etc. etc. The entire Obama campaign amounts to little more than "They're stupid, they're stupid, they're stupid." And that is capped by an inspiring peroration about bringing America together! How stupid does he think we are? You can run against the Republican Party and its popularly elected officeholders as the embodiment of unmitigated stupidity, and you can run as the candidate who will bring America together, but you can't do both at the same time. And since John McCain is not nearly as stupid as Barack Obama and his supporters would like us to believe, Obama can't do either. It is Obama's campaign that is leading the divisiveness, demagoguery and fear-mongering. What I'm afraid of is that it will get worse and worse as the election approaches. Especially if the voters don't seem to be fearful enough of McCain to vote for his opponent.

Butterfly Stings Eustace Tilly

2008-09-05T22:49:00.000-04:00

The September 8 New Yorker has a short "Talk of the Town" piece by Philip Gourevitch about Sarah Palin that the editors must not have vetted. Entitled "Palin on Obama," it reports on a pre-nomination interview that was apparently worthy of Eustace Tilly's amused curiosity because it catches the Governor of Alaska speaking some entirely non-partisan words about Barack Obama's popularity in her state! And the article concludes by quoting Governor Palin as saying "we better have a real clear plan for this war." All this was supposed to embarrass John McCain: look, even the idiot's own running mate supports his opponents and their positions! But what the interview actually shows--read it for yourselves--is that both McCain and Palin are the non-partisan, outside-the-box thinkers they claim to be. Not something anyone could honestly say about The New Yorker : the tidbit on Palin was preceded immediately by editor David Remnick's smug dismissal of Palin as a "baffling rejoinder to the assuring nomination of Joe Biden." Remnick's declaration went to press before Sarah Palin addressed the RNC and the world. Obviously the slow-moving Senator McCain was a few steps ahead of The New Yorker's pompous editor.

The Post-Liberal

2008-09-05T17:04:00.000-04:00

The Post-Liberal--moi--is a McCain-Palin supporter who is the kiss of death, because he has voted for the loser in every presidential election since 1972 except three: 1976, 1992, and 1996. The Post-Liberal grew up in New York City, graduated from two Ivy League universities (B.A. and Ph.D) and has been a subscriber to the NY Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. But this university professor and lifelong Democrat--and now post-democrat--is solidly behind John McCain's campaign for the presidency. My fellow "cosmopolitans" would like us to believe that John McCain "doesn't get it" and that only those who don't get it or don't care would support him. In this space I will post occasional essays explaining what I think John McCain gets that Obama, the NY Times and my twentysomething children do not.