Doing McCain’s work
Ariana Huffington has an article up at the HuffPo entitled Doing McCain’s Job For Him in which she claims that Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Obama are working for McCain more than Clinton’s aspirations.
It has been an article of faith in the Democratic Party over the last twenty years that when small town, working class whites vote for Republicans they’re voting against their economic self-interest. And why do they do that? Because every four years the Republican Party comes into those small towns and, to distract folks from the worsening economic situation, trots out a bunch of divisive, hot button social issues: “Let’s not talk about why you don’t have a job, can’t afford health care, or can’t send your kids to college; let’s talk about gay marriage, school prayer, illegal immigration, and flag burning amendments.” And Hillary is following the blueprint.
John McCain may as well take the next six months off, raise some money, maybe take a vacation — because Hillary Clinton is out there doing his work for him.
I’d argue that Democrats are working in concert to do McCain’s job of beating them in November. The last week has been joy for bloggers on the Right. We’ve got Democrats pandering to their various factions and showing middle America exactly what they’ll get in November if Democrats win both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Least of all is Obama calling backbone of the nation a bunch of bitter, gun-wielding, xenophobic, God-fearing rubes. But there’s also Nancy Pelosi standing up for FARC terrorists in Congress, exhibiting the over-protectionist tendencies not seen in Congress since the Hoover Administration. So extreme that 35 members of the Carter and Clinton administrations have asked her to tone down her blockage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement according to the Wall Street Journal;
“We believe this Agreement is in both our vital national security and economic interests,” the letter says. “We feel that the treaty should be considered as soon as possible and that any obstacles be quickly and amicably resolved.” Good luck with that last point given Ms. Pelosi’s eagerness to take orders from the AFL-CIO.
Not only that, but Jimmy Carter is in Israel and trying to get to Hamas to present our terms of surrender, ostensibly. Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal;
…Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel’s top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. “When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people.”
Come again?
Mr. Carter is on a tour of the Middle East, the most newsworthy aspect of which is a scheduled meeting in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the head of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. More on that below. For now, ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator’s opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, “Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will.”
That’s not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator “speaks” for “all” the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator’s conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not.
But Jimmy Carter is Barak Obama’s foreign policy mentor. I had to read Carter’s first memoir “Keeping Faith” when I was writing a paper in college on the Carter-Torrijos treaty. Carter explained why he gave away the Panama Canal even though 60% of Americans opposed him, he claimed that 75% of the people who understood the issue supported him. Of course, they understood the issue as he saw it. Nevermind that the year before he’d promised a New York Times reporter that he’d never give the Canal away. That’s the kind of elitist claptrap we’re going to get from Obama.
Then we’ve got Harry Reid ignoring the impending victory in Iraq, John Murtha’s office calls the cops on a soldier’s mom and refuses to meet (or even have his staff meet) with veterans last week. That’s the kind of treatment we’ve got to look forward to under Democrats.
I’m not complaining that they’re doing such a good job of convincing Americans to vote against them, I’m just saying.
Category: Politics
As Ariana Puffington repeats the complete misread of Middle America, she also repeats the erroneous view on why Dems have no chance there. The Dems could easily go into Middle America and give their views on flag burning, school prayer, gay marriage and illegal immigration, but shockingly, they don’t. What she and Obama completely misread, BECAUSE of their elitism, is that Middle America actually has opinions about those issues, regardless of their socio-economic position. It never occurs to them that San Franciscans also have strong opinions about those issues — just not in agreement with most of America. Does it occur to Obama that he and liberal urban-dwellers are leery of people who are different than they? The liberals actually believe that if Middle America had more material wealth, lived in urban areas, and could just open their minds, they would then suddenly become liberal Agnostics or Atheists who would agree to complete government intrusion, in place of religion, for their own good. The truth is that Dems go into Middle America as missionaries would go into the jungles. They suffer the “Liberal Man’s Burden.”
While Republicans speak to real issues that resonate in Middle America, because Dems insist on cramming gay marriage, illegal immigration, anti-Christianity, gun control, etc. upon them, Dems speak to issues such as why you don’t have a job, can’t afford health care, or can’t send your kids to college. Let’s talk about them. You don’t have a job because the Nancy Pelosis of the world won’t let you sell your wares to foreigners. You can’t afford health insurance because there is no competition between providers (thanks to the government), resulting in prohibitive prices. You can’t afford to send your kids to college because the government subsidizes it, again eliminating any competition between schools resulting in prohibitive prices. So what does the “typical white Democrat” propose to solve these problems? More government involvement. This is why Dems will never win over those who adhere to our Founders’ suspicion of a large, central, all-powerful government.