Monday, April 14, 2008

Giving Obama a Break, Sort Of

In fairness to Barack Obama, I sincerely believe that by "religion" he was explicitly referring to opposition to gay marriage, and politically, to the GOP's exploitation of the issue in Ohio '04. [Although it may not have made the difference, contrary to popular Democrat belief.]

From Barack's backtrack today:

So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage...



The rest of his explanation was sophistic hogwash, but I think he was honest there. After a free pass from the chattering class, it's ironic that he's getting it both barrels [gun pun intended, sorry] for the wrong reason.

On the other hand, Obama falls into Thomas Frank's Marxist-friendly "What's the Matter with Kansas" view of the human condition, that the Great Unwashed should vote their pocketbooks instead of their social values about what kind of country they want to raise their kids in.


Hey, I live in a cosmopolitan area---I know lots of folks who are unsympathetic, if not hostile, to organized religion. I can take it. But this is why Frank doesn't get Kansas, why Obama doesn't get America and why the left doesn't get what all the hubbub's about:


It's the leftism, stupid.

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2 comments:

  1. Michael Simpson4/14/08, 9:50 PM

    But the Man of Hope is himself opposed to the legal recognition of gay marriage, no?

    I've thought for over a year now that the nomination and presidency were Obama's to lose. He had so well managed to obscure or fuzz up his pretty doctrinaire lefty-ness through nice rhetoric and geniality that I thought the GOP was cooked. I mean really cooked - worse than 1974 cooked. And that still might be the case, but it's a steady drip-drip-drip of stuff that makes him seem, well, like that annoying professor in college, the guy who just sniffed off your questions as just misunderstanding his genius. The danger for Obama here is that he's very close to entirely flipping his image. Before, people thought of him as a nice, open-minded guy with some ideas you didn't agree with (see Doug Kmiec). Unless he can reverse the slide, he'll be marked as someone who's fundamentally slippery and willing to tell people whatever they want to hear so he can get what he wants. That could be pretty disastrous for his candidacy.

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  2. Tom Van Dyke4/14/08, 10:52 PM

    They wouldn't listen to the fact that I was a genius..."---Jim Croce, "Workin' at the Car Wash Blues"

    As former editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama will never find himself working at a car wash.

    But it might have been better if at some point, he had. He'd have met the guy who would end up owning the place, for one.

    Well observed, Mr. Simpson.

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