Subject: HUGH DOWNS-OBAMA WILL LOSE
It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting the election
results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and
convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of
reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the
national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all, one that
has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen. Barack Obama
will lose because he is a flake. I'm using the term in its
generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but someone who
truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted
disasters. A flake is a 'fool with energy', as the Russian proverb puts
it. ('A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy
is a nightmare'.)
Barack Obama is a flake, and the
American people have begun to see it. The chief characteristic of a
flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand
or explain. These are not the errors of the poor dope who can't grasp
the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins things out of
compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck.
The flake has a genius for discovering
solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It's as if he's
the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe
where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When
given a choice between left and right, the flake goes up -- if not
through the 8th dimension. And although there's plenty of
rationalization, there's never a logical reason for any of it. After
awhile, people stop asking.
Obama's rise has been widely portrayed
as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger story -- young lad from a new
state on the outskirts of the American polity, a member of once-despised
minority, works his way by slow degrees to within arm's length of the
presidency itself. That's all well and good -- we need national myths of
exactly that type.
But what has been overlooked is the
string of faux pas marking each step of Obama's journey, a series of
strange, inexplicable actions, actions bizarre enough to require some
effort at explanation, through such efforts have rarely been offered.
It's as if the new Horatio made it to the top by stepping into every
last manhole and open trapdoor in his path. And we, the onlookers, the
voters who are being asked to put this man in the White House, are
supposed to take this as the normal career path for a successful chief
executive.
What are these incidents? I'm sure
many of you are way ahead of me, but let's go to the videotape.
Here's a young man who graduated from
Columbia with high marks, with a choice of positions anywhere in the
country. He comes from a state generally held to be a close match to
Paradise. One, furthermore, that can be characterized as the most
successful multiracial society in the world, with harmonious relations
not only between whites and blacks, but also Japanese-Americans and
native Hawaiians as well. To top it off, a state controlled in large
part by a smoothly-functioning Democratic machine. So where does he
choose to go?
To Chicago. One of the windiest,
coldest, most brutal cities in the country. One that is also infinitely
corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is not. One that remains one of the most
racist large cities in the U.S. (Cicero, Al Capone's old stomping
grounds, a suburb that is effectiv ely part of the city, is completely
segregated to this day.) It would be nice to learn which of these
aspects most attracted young Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at
the beginning of the campaign, you'd still be waiting.
And what does he do when he reaches
the city? Why, he joins a cult. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church
has been turned inside out since the videotaped sermons appeared early
this year, without anyone ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was
thinking of when he joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it's
claimed. But there are a plethora of black churches that would have
provided him that without the taint of demented racism that Wright's
church offered.
Obama apparently had to swear an oath
of belief in 'black liberation theology' when he joined the church. (It
is the little touches of that sort that make it a 'cult', and not simply
a 'church'.) Did the thought of his caree r ever cross his mind? Didn't
he realize that church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down
the line? That he'd be required to repudiate it and its ideas
eventually? We can ask -- but we won't get an answer.
Back at school, Obama got himself
named editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is a signal achievement, no
question about it. The kind of thing that would be mentioned about a
person for the rest of his life, as has been the case with Obama. But
then... he writes nothing for the journal.
Now, let's get this straight: here we
have one of the leading university law journals in the country, one
widely cited and read. Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship
have been founded on appearances in the Review, including some that have
led to the highest courts in the country. Yet here's an individual who,
as editor, could easily place his own work in the journal -- standard
practice, nothing at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the
explanation? There's none that I've heard. We can go even farther than
that, to say that there is no explanation that makes the least rational
sense.
We follow Obama down to Springfield,
where as a state legislator, he voted 'present' over 120 times. What
this means, as far as I've been able to discover, is that he voted
'present' nearly as much as he voted 'yes' or 'no'.
Now, statehouses work very simply: a
member approaches his colleagues and asks them them to vote for his
bill. Some comply, some do not. Some ask, 'Is it a good bill?' and some
don't. Either way, they customarily, except in unusu al circumstances,
vote 'yes' or 'no'. All except for Barack Obama. And how did get away
with it? How did mollify his colleagues? How did he square himself with
the party bosses? Echo answereth not.
(A good slogan could be made of this:
'You can't vote present in the Oval Office.' I hereby commend it to the
McCain campaign.)
We turn eagerly to learn what his term
in the U.S. Senate will reveal, only to be disappointed. But it's not
surprising, really. After all, he was only there for 143 days.
And there lies one of the keys to
Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed out in a recent NewYork Times column
that Obama spent too little time in any of his positions to make an
impact one way or another. This is what saved him from the normal fate
of the flake: he was never around long enough for his errors and strange
behavior to catch up with him.
But a presidential campaign is a
different matter. A man running for president is under the microscope,
and can't duck anything, as many a candidate has had reason to learn. If
Obama is a flake in the classic mode, now is when it would come out. And
has it?
The case could be made. Here we have a
campaign with everything going for it -- the opposition party in a
shambles, a seriously undervalued president, the media in the
candidate's pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped as nothing
less than the new messiah. And yet the results have compr ised little
more than one fumble after another.
First came the Wright affair. Obama
apparently thought he was above it all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with
flakes -- and allowed the revelations to take on a life of their own
before bothering to respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing
explanation (that he hadn't been listening for twenty years) did little
to settle the crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly
crippling his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back
up at any time. The latest word is that Wright -- now a deadly enemy of
his onetime protege -- has written a book. I can't wait.
Obama learned his lesson, and
confronted the next threat immediately, tackling The New Yorker cover
with the avidity of a man having discovered zombies in the basement. A
development that could have been defused with a chuckle and a quip (the
customary method is for the politician to ask the cartoonist for the
original) was allowed to explode into a major issue. The campaign's
relentless attacks on one of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely
perplexed the country at large. After all, any Republican has had to
endure far worse.
Almost simultaneously, the birth
certificate saga was unfolding. On no reasonable grounds, the campaign
blew off requests for a copy of the document, at last releasing it
through one of the least reputable sites on the Internet, and so badly
copied that literally anything could be read into it -- and was. I'm not
one of those who believes that Obama was actually born in
Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I still have plenty in the way of
questions, almost all of them arising from how the matter was handled.
Well played.
The latest pothole (or one of them,
anyway) involves Jerome Corsi's=The Obama Nation. Corsi has been given
the full New Yorker treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John
Kerry's 'error' in not challenging Corsi's 2004 book, Unfit for Command.
What Obama missed was the fact that Kerry's major problem was not with
Corsi but with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted
with Kerry's hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran,
and set out to take him down. Corsi's effort dovetailed with the
veteran's campaign and to a large extent was swept up with it. No such
campaign is in operation against Obama. The smart method of answering
Corsi would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of
drawing attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This
appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.
We could go on. The victory tour of
Europe, and the speech in which Obama declared himself 'citizen of the
world', a trope guaranteed to focus the attention of Middle America. His
inept handling of Hillary, in which he wound up appearing frightened of
the opponent he'd just beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there,
what's-his-name) a starring role in the Democratic convention is not a
solution any sane individual would be comfortable with -- much less a
roll-call vote. This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire
affair into BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a
footnote. But it's all of a piece with the campaign Obama has waged up
until now.
We've never had a flake as president.
We've had drunks, neurotics, cripples, louts, and fools, but never a
career screwup. (I except Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere,
misguided goodwill.) And I don't think we're going to get one now.
Another three months of flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image
will do little to assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil
crunch, a gyrating economy, and a bellicose Russia. (Anyone doubting
that Obama will go exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church
fiasco, which unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently,
the campaign goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into all but
accusing John McCain of 'cheating' by failing to take his place within
the 'cone of silence' during Obama's part of the program. The grotesque
element here is that Obama's people and much of the liberal commentariat
-- including Mitchell -- apparently believe that the 'cone of silence',
a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series, actually exists and was
in use at Saddleback.)
Many of us have dealt with flakes at
one time or another, often in settings involving jobs and careers, and
not uncommonly in positions of some authority. We all know of the
nephew, the fiance, the boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose
reputation must be protected, who must be constantly worked around if
anything at all is to be accomplished, always at the cost of time,
money, efficiency, and personal stress.
In the fullness of time, we will
inevitably see such a figure in the White House. But not this year, and
not this candidate. Such acts of national flakery occur only when theres
no real alternative. In this election, an alternative exists. Whatever
his shortcomings, nobody ever called John McCain a flake.
