Pennsylvania proves Obama can run but can't hide
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
The leadership of the Democratic Party has booked passage on the Titanic for November 4, 2008, and it is apparently too late to cancel.
No matter the woes plaguing the ever-unfolding Barack Obama or any trouble ahead, his presidential nomination is a done deal and cannot be undone.
So goes the announced wisdom of Chairman Howard Dean.
Getting Hillary Clinton out now is Dean’s fervent wish and also seems the hope of the media super-tankers cruising alongside Obama toward the iceberg in November – Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, the bloggers of MoveOn.org and the editorial shot-callers at the New York Times.
One would have thought Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary might have given pause.
Obama spent $12 million to Hillary Clinton’s $5 million in Pennsylvania. He ended the loser by 55-45 percent and more than 200,000 votes.
Yes, Obama is ahead in pledged delegates. But excepting his home state of Illinois, Obama has lost every big state a Democrat needs to win to become president, including California, New York, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Unless the party wants a 48-state convention, they will bring Florida and Michigan and she will have won them too.
The Times, however, was back Wednesday morning with an editorial page headline “The Low Road to Victory,” aimed at Clinton.
Pennsylvania, The Times wrote, was “even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.”
The New York Times notwithstanding, whatever happens to Barack Obama, he has brought on himself.
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal got it just as right Wednesday morning as the New York Times got it wrong.
Quoting Walt Whitman, she wrote:
“What you are, picks its way.”
Two decades ago, apparently with an ambitious eye to politics on Chicago’s South Side, he aligned himself with his black liberationist minister, mentor and spiritual guide, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. From the pulpit and on CDs sold in the church, Reverend Wright has prayed for God to damn America; taught the flock that the U.S. government introduced the AIDS virus to wipe out black people, and called the slaughter of 3,000 innocents on 9/11 “America’s chickens coming home to roost.”
While refusing to disown the pastor, Obama seemed to finesse the issue by changing the subject with a particularly brilliant bit of spell-binding oratory invoking the civil rights struggle.
The mainstream media, with the praiseworthy exception of ABC as moderator of one debate, were more than content to leave it at that. Apparently the voters of Pennsylvania were not.
Stumbling along his way, Obama has had a more than casual association of longstanding with the Bill Ayers-Bernadette Dorhn husband and wife team who bombed the Pentagon and other buildings as a members of the terrorist Weather Underground of the 1960-1970s.
Obama and wife Michelle have been close to Antonin “Tony” Rezko, the Chicago machine insider and businessman-fixer now under indictment in a corruption case. Rezko helped the Obamas buy their house and gave them money for other things.
Despite having a $300,000 a year job in education before resigning to join the campaign and a Princeton and Harvard education with affirmative action help, Michelle Obama still jabs away at non-liberal, middle-America with remarks such as never having been proud of her country until Obama ran for president.
Neither has it endeared Obama to some Americans that he stood with the Nation of Islam leader, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in the million man march on Washington.
The unkindest self-inflicted wound is Obama’s recent remarks during what was thought to be a private, off the record fundraiser in the backyard of a wealthy San Francisco backer. A tape recording surfaced, catching Obama opining that small town and rural Americans “cling” to religion, hunting and opposition of illegal immigration because of frustrations and bitterness.
And some people do not approve of Obama suggesting, as suited his oratorical and literary needs, that his own white grandmother was a racist.
Unless Clinton out-stumbles Obama with more whoppers about Bosnia firefights and the like, she will almost certainly climb back into the lead in the popular vote by August convention time in Denver.
It might be impossible for Clinton to overcome Obama’s lead in the delegate count. So it will all come down to polls and superdelegates.
Pennsylvania proved to us that Obama can run but he can’t hide – that is, from his growing record of bad judgments, questionable associations and offensive remarks.
If more of the same comes out between now and August while Howard Dean & Co. are still rearranging the deck chairs for Obama, Hillary Clinton’s presence in the race might be the only lifeboat on board.
April 2008
