Hope for change

Obamistas will tell us that Barack Obama is a different kind of candidate – his emails to supporters tout the fact that Obama is different from every other candidate whoever sought the Presidency. Heck, even his supporters are different from every other candidate’s supporters. Reminds me of the type of goofus who stands at the the finish line of every marathon shouting “You’re all winners!”

Karl Rove, in the Wall Street Journal this morning, writes that Obama is the same old populist sock puppet telling the same old lies we’ve heard from a long line of sock puppets;

Mr. Obama told an Iowa radio station last October he didn’t wear an American flag lapel pin because, after 9/11, it had “became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues . . . .” His campaign issued a statement that “Senator Obama believes that being a patriot is about more than a symbol.” To highlight his own moral superiority, he denigrated the patriotism of those who wore a flag.

Yet by April, campaigning in culturally conservative Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama was blaming others for the controversy he’d created, claiming, “I have never said that I don’t wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins. This is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and, once again, distracts us . . . .” A month later Mr. Obama was once again wearing a pin, saying “Sometimes I wear it, sometimes I don’t.”

The Obama revision tour has been seen elsewhere. Last July, Mr. Obama pledged to meet personally and without precondition, during his first year, the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Criticized afterwards, he made his pledge more explicitly, naming Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Venezuela strongman Hugo Chávez as leaders he would grace with first-year visits.

By October, Mr. Obama was backpedaling, talking about needing “some progress or some indication of good faith,” and by April, “sufficient preparation.” It got so bad his foreign policy advisers were (falsely) denying he’d ever said he’d meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad – even as he still defended his original pledge to have meetings without precondition.

The list goes on. Mr. Obama’s problem is a campaign that’s personality-driven rather than idea-driven. Thus incidents calling into question his persona and character can have especially devastating consequences.

Michelle Malkin, in her syndicated column, has listed the “gaffes” that would have sunk a Republican candidacy before now;

All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.

But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:

Michelle’s list continues to grow;

The gaffes just keep on coming. Via Jim Hoft and Power Line comes the latest in a long line of Obama-isms which, as I noted last week, will get a pass from the MSM:

Sweetness and Light’s Steve Gilbert tried to track down Obama’s latest story about his uncle who liberated a concentration camp. Fighting a webmaster suffering a serious bout with Bush Derangement Syndrome, Steve got convoluted answers to questions we really can’t ask correctly because, like John Kerry, Barack Obama won’t give us all of the information we need;

Mr. Kitchell has still not produced any evidence to substantiate that this Mr. Payne is actually Mr. Obama’s great uncle, such as a serial number.

And, as we have noted, in most genealogy charts he is listed as Charles W. Payne rather than as Charles T.

Of course it would also be helpful if the Obama camp would tell us his great uncle’s full name and date of birth and other such handy details.

Pamela Geller, of Atlas Shrugs, quotes from Yid With a Lid that Obama’s enduring relationships with Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, et cetera-ists, isn’t a recent phenomena;

It seems that Senator Obama’s Old party was called the New Party. The party was a Marxist Political coalition. This was not a guilt by association thing. Senator Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. Read more on the Marxist endorsement that Barack Obama sought out:

Karl Rove sums up with conclusions that anyone not blinded by that divine light coming from Obama’s halo already knows;

Stripped of his mystique as a different kind of office seeker, he could become just another liberal politician – only one who parses, evades, dissembles and condescends.

In other words, give up hope for change.

UPDATE: Beer-drinkin’ buddy, TSO, dissects Obama’s commencement address to some group of besotted grads in “I keep feeling like he’s missing something…” I don’t know how TSO sat through reading that tripe – but TSO’s right; How do you give a commencement address on service the day before Memorial Day and don’t mention the military?

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Bloggers, Politics