Hillary—and the conservatives—saying Obama is not a good man

Readers may feel I’m over-covering the Obama “bitter” comment. But never before has a national figure or presidential candidate said anything like what Obama—giving the phrase “San Francisco Democrat” a whole new layer of negative connotations—said at a San Francisco fundraiser a week ago and reiterated with slight word changes in Indiana a few days later. The statement touches on a question that has been of central concern to VFR during this campaign: would the election to the presidency of an openly anti-American racist black leftist finally “radicalize” the conservative half of the country—i.e., make them turn decisively against America’s modern liberal orthodoxy and its ideology of openness and surrender to the Other? It also raises the question: is there anything that the liberal half of the country won’t swallow?

As for the liberals, Hillary Clinton is using stunningly using strong language about her opponent. The Washington Times reports:

“Someone goes to a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco and makes comments that do seem elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing,” she said on the “Compassion Forum” broadcast on CNN. “That has nothing to do with him being a good man or a man of faith.”

The mild mannered establishment conservatives at Powerline are also using uncharacteristically tough language, describing Obama’s remarks as a “neutron bomb.” Going further (though I’m not sure that one can go further than a neutron bomb), Powerline reminds us that in the audio version of Obama’s book, which he recorded just a couple of years ago, Obama tells how

[Rev.] Wright’s denouncing Hiroshima and teaching that the world’s problems are caused by “white men’s greed” that, by Obama’s own account, brought him to tears,” and made him decide to join Wright’s (black racist) church.

Powerline then calls Obama

an extraordinarily divisive figure…. No Presidential candidate has run for office on an explicitly racist platform since the Democrats of the mid-19th century. But if Obama still endorses references to “white men’s greed,” as he did when he wrote Dreams From My Father, he is disqualified from office on grounds of racial divisiveness alone.

What is suggested by such condemnations is that in a “normal” world, Obama’s racist statements and associations would force him out of the campaign or make him leak so much support it would be hard for him to continue. If they don’t, and so far they haven’t, then Obama’s path to the White House remains open. However, even if Obama survives the revelations of his anti-white, anti-Christian elitism and is elected, that would not necessarily disprove my hope that the election of Obama would awaken a true, anti-liberal conservatism in this country. It would only prove that the left half of the country supports him no matter what. There is no way we can know how the conservative half of the country will respond to Obama’s occupation of the White House until it takes place.

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Meanwhile, Richard Baehr at American Thinker argues that Obama will lose to McCain, not because of the issues I’ve been discussing, but because of basic electoral math.

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David B. writes:

You are asking whether Obama’a election would finally energize the conservative half of the country. The probability is that, as you reference, electoral mathematics make Obama unelectable. Among the Democratic donor and voting base, ridiculing white working class people is a good thing, not a negative. It can cost Obama votes in the Pennsylvania primary, but will not by itself knock him out of the Democratic race.

Being “anti-gun” has cost many votes for Democrats in several Presidential elections. Some liberals have finally caught on to this. You will recall that John Kerry made a big thing out of being a hunter. Obama’s overall stance, such as it is, would cause him much more trouble in the fall than in the primary campaign.

Tim W. writes:

Obama has no experience with true people of the Christian faith. Hillary does, because she grew up in a conservative climate and later spent years in Arkansas where she was surrounded by Southern Baptists and other denominations who take their faith seriously. She doesn’t like them any more than Obama does, but she’s seen Bill court them for votes and win by doing so. As a consequence she would never dare slam them so overtly.

Obama’s Christian experience involves membership in a politicized left-wing church where anti-white and anti-American themes were more important than any traditional Christian doctrine. Just as he’s likely never encountered any anti-black racism in real life, he’s likely never spent any time around people who focus sincerely on God and the Holy Scriptures. He probably assumes that in the “typical white church” in small town America, the preacher spends 90 percent of his time howling about gun rights, illegal immigrants, and affirmative action programs. The possibility that there are countless people who attend church to worship God, read the Scriptures, and try to become better individuals never crossed his mind, because the church he’s attended his entire Christian life is a radical political entity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2008 10:48 AM | Send