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Is He One of Us?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, April 25, 2008
As one looks at the polls, the issues and the candidates, the
election of 2008 resembles what poker players call a "lay-down hand."
Two-thirds of the nation believes the Iraq war a blunder.
Sixty-nine percent disapproves of President Bush. Eighty-one
percent thinks America is on the wrong course.
Inflation is at 4 percent and rising. Unemployment is 5 percent and
rising. Gasoline, heating oil and food prices are soaring. The
dollar has lost half its values against the euro. Homes are being
foreclosed upon at Depression rates. The stock market is in a
swoon. And 3.5 million manufacturing jobs have vanished under Bush.
Hillary and Obama have both raised far more than John McCain.
Democratic turnout in the primaries and caucuses is two and three
times what it was for the GOP. The youth, energy and enthusiasm are
on the Democratic side. Voter registration is rising dramatically,
and the new registrants are almost all Democrats or independents.
Thirty Republican House members are retiring. In the Senate, the
big question is whether Democrats will achieve a 60-40 margin to
enable them to kill Republican filibusters.
By all odds, Republican retention of the White House should be as
imperiled as it was in 1932, when the hapless Herbert Hoover faced
FDR.
Yet John McCain, who presides over a disconsolate party many of
whose leading lights not only do not love him, they do not like
him, is even money to be the next president of the United States.
What explains this?
Answer: Barack Obama, the probable nominee of the Democratic Party
-- his cool and pleasant demeanor aside, and his oratorical skills
notwithstanding -- is being steadily pushed by his own mistakes,
and rivals Hillary Clinton and McCain, outside the social, cultural
and ideological mainstream of American politics.
Hillary's victory in Pennsylvania confirmed what Texas, Ohio and
Florida hinted at. Barack has not closed the sale with Middle
America. Moreover, he may never close the sale.
What is Barack's problem?
Though he has stitched together the McGovern wing of the party --
the anti-war crowd, the cause people, the professoriat -- with the
Jesse Jackson wing -- 90 percent of the African-American vote -- he
is being systematically pushed out of the heartland of the party,
the white working and middle class. And reinforcing the impression
in Middle America that Barack is "not one of us" is the core of
both the Clinton and Republican strategies. And they are working.
In Ohio and Pennsylvania, resistance to the probable nominee
hardened and calcified among Catholics, ethnics, union and
blue-collar voters, even as Barack outspent Hillary two and three
to one.
Racism is the reason, wail the pundits. But this is not a reason,
it is an excuse. Barack, after all, ran up record totals in
virtually all-white Iowa and is favored to win in virtually
all-white Oregon.
Moreover, all politics are tribal. There was resistance in rural
Pennsylvania to voting for an African-American, but there was also
wild enthusiasm for voting for an African-American in Philly, where
Hillary -- spouse of "our first black president" -- was getting
about the same share of the black vote as Barry Goldwater.
On balance, as Joe Biden undiplomatically blurted out, the fact
that Obama is a black man is an extraordinary asset in 2008. It is
the reason a junior senator, three years out of the Illinois
legislature, is running first for the nomination, and has become
the favorite of a national media intoxicated with the idea of a
black president.
Barack's problem is social, cultural and ideological.
Increasingly, he is seen not as a man of the middle, but as radical
chic, a man of the liberal and leftist elite who confides to
closed-door meetings in San Francisco that folks in Pennsylvania
cling to guns, Bibles and bigotries as crutches, because they
cannot cope in the Global Economy and government has failed them.
He is seen as a man comfortable with friends still proud of the
radical role they played planting bombs in the 1960s, a man who
feels relaxed about sending his daughters on Sunday to hear the
racist rants of an anti-American berserker.
And if your wife, beneficiary of a Princeton-Harvard Law education
denied to 99.9 percent of the people, says she cannot recall ever
being proud of America before now, folks are naturally going to be
suspicious about why you dumped the American flag pin.
On the big issues of 2008 -- amnesty, the hemorrhaging of American
jobs, Iraq -- McCain is on the same side as George Bush, whose
approval rating is 28 percent. McCain can be defeated on those
issues.
But if, with a little help from Hillary, McCain can paint Barack
indelibly as a man of the trendy and radical left, he can win.
America will have nowhere else to go.
Journalists disagree on whether immigration, Iraq or the economy
will be the major issue in 2008. The real issue may be -- and this
is what is causing heart palpitations among Democrats -- is Barack
Obama one of us, or is he one of them?
SOURCE:
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=7wT4Z&m=1eFfTszDL1xN9f&b=qQd3fkPMA1a0hZqKYYFB_g