Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Barack-Star Wins

No matter what your politics, Obama's locking up the Democrat nomination is a remarkable event in U.S. History. He's not just the first partially black candidate to make it to the "finals," but he beat the Clinton machine to get there. Amazing.

As the WSJ says today, he is really more of a phenomenon than he is a politician. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on the Obama train don't care a whit about details like how he would govern, or whether his record and background contradicts his campaign rhetoric.

They buy the Obama phenomenon. It isn't about policy or even logic. It is emotional. I can't recall any time in my lifetime when such a political meteor didn't get burned up in the political atmosphere. The Obama hasn't quite hit the Earth yet, but at this point the meteor looks plenty big enough to make it all the way.

Sorry to overextend the analogy, but what happens when a big meteor hits earth? At the very least, it creates a huge crater. But it can be much worse - by some theories, a big meteor killed off the dinosaurs. Are the Democrats the dinosaurs the Obama meteor will make extinct?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Clintons haven't made many mistakes in the past 30 years, but they made two key ones in the last several years - they overestimated the love Americans have for them and they worked to front-load the primaries on the assumption Hillary would secure the nomination early and inexpensively and have the rest of 2008 to run her general election campaign.

Obama's nomination is historic, as his defeat will be in November, especially if he picks Hillary as his VP.

Anonymous said...

Love to see Mrs Clinton out, but it's nauseating to hear Obambi's constant pandering.

You're right Rob, those voting for him care not a bit about specifics, they care about bashing Bush and weakening this country.

Anonymous said...

To actually believe that supporters of Barack Obama want to "weaken the country" is a weak and revolting excuse for not getting your way. Supporters of BO care for their lives and their country as much as you do. They just have different goals and different wishes for it. That is the way of democracy. You fight it out, continually. Ascribing bad and unpatriotic motives to your opponents is a sad excuse for not listening to them or even trying to understand them, just as you expect them to listen to you. It devolves our society into 3-grade-like cliques, fails to accept or try to understand the complexity of life, and is, frankly, kind of cowardly, I think.

This is about issues. There are a huge number of them in the US right now, as in most societies. If you can't honestly debate your opponents and must instead resort to ascribing nefarious purposes to them, you are never going to be making a significant contribution to the debate or to your country. And you will never win a debate.

Stand up and fight fair. You are not so special and your intentions are not more honorable than the vast majority of all other citizens around you. There is wide room for intellectual disagreement about the problems we face. If you can't see that and must resort to calls on unpatriotism, it is probably time for your to step aside and let history move forward without you.

Anonymous said...

Save that headline for November. And November '12.

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness the LEFT-LEFT-LEFT running down of America Democrat(ic) Primary phase is winding down. It can't get more obnoxious than that.

If Barack wants to win, he must tack to the right; that is, toward the center, without alienating the Loony Left, where he is clearly most comfortable.

If he does, it's going to be quite a show for conservatives. If he doesn't, he will lose because the underclass + the intellectuals simply can't produce enough votes.

P.S. Can anyone figure out why the intellectual class in the U.S. is so wrong? (Why are intellectuals are so leftist?)

MAX Redline said...

Anon 12:34, it is fortunate that B.O. has a gift for oratory, doubtless honed at the feet of his controversial mentors.

As far as I can tell, he has nothing else. He's not going to "change" the economy, for example. He may yak about it, but the President of the United States is not elected to be Economist-in-chief.

He's not going to end our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He may push to enact national health care, but then, health care is not a legitimate function of government.

Our governmental system was built to protect your right to life, to liberty, and to your pursuit of happiness. It was not built to make you happy, to provide you with "free" health care, "free" food, nor "free" housing.

The idea at our founding was to afford you the opportunity to provide these things for yourself without governmental or other interference.

Obambi doesn't understand that.

Anonymous said...

The changes he wants are going leave us helpless, then he's going to eat us alive.

First he'll stop letting us be the consumers we want and need to be. Then we'll loose our jobs cause there is no longer a need for our products and services. Then we won't be able to own our houses. Then we are entirely dependent on what he wants to graciously give us for free.

Or we could retain our rights to live and work and consume so we don't become paralyzed by and dependent on his wacko ideas.

Anonymous said...

"Our governmental system was built to protect your right to life, to liberty, and to your pursuit of happiness. It was not built to make you happy, to provide you with "free" health care, "free" food, nor "free" housing."

Max, that's the issue in a nutshell. Leftists want a socialist society, not the USA as it was intended.

I'm so sick pf the left acting like the middle class is somehow "suffering."

Every day I see people on their way to work in newer, functional cars, eating cheap food and wearing hole-less clothes. If you talk to a lefty, they make it sound like there are millions dying in the streets.

The US has some big problems, but Myanmar we are not.

BobZybach said...

Tried to reach you while you were on air on Lars' show, but it is/was a frustrating process! Same with the main switchboard at KXL -- you're a hard guy to reach!

Enjoyed the brief Inhofe discussion, but we are missing the point when it comes to "energy independence" or "alternative energy" in Oregon.

Despite the hype and pr from the Governor's office, most of Oregon's energy is wasted. One-half of our so-called greenhouse gases are created in forest wildfires and the subsequent rotting of wood. That is the very material that native Oregonians used for more than 10,000 years to be energy independent, and it is being left to rot and burn by the millions of tons annually -- totally wasted. Hardly a "leadership" approach.

At $4/gal for gas and $4.50/gal. for diesel, Oregonians are sending more than $11 billion a year (nearly $1 billion/mo.) outside the state for just these two energy sources. We could produce methanol and ethanol from dead trees, rye grass straw, or food waste, but we don't. We spend about $0 in that regard.

As a forest scientist I delivered a paper to an international symposium on forests and Global Warming in 1991 that was published by EPA in 1993. It showed how we could easily reach the 2020 carbon emission goals now touted by Democrats (and Senator Smith?). The paper remains unused and ill considered and all of my funding was dropped. That's one way "scientific consensus" (formerly an oxymoron) is attained.

I'd like to see the topics of 1) better managing our forests to easily attain carbon-dioxide emission goals, and 2) creating fuels in-state from wood and crop waste as important topics on your show.

Oregon is 1/2 owned by the feds, who own 80% of our forest biomass. Energy independence is a national security issue. Rural Oregonians need jobs. Democrats and John McCain worry about greenhouse gases. Why don't we do the obvious things first?

Rob Kremer said...

Bob:
I'm pretty easy to reach! You just did it here, my email is rob@oregoneducation.org, and I do a radio show every week!

I didn't know the technology for making methanol from grass and wood waste was economically feasible at this point. I agree that if we got there, it would be a great source of energy for Oregon.

I agree on the forest management issue. Our forests are going up in smoke. It is a crime.