10 posts tagged “obama”

It's amazing how big the world can still be. Becoming Orthodox has opened me to a near-inexhaustible library of astounding and propounding -- and indeed holy -- literature, both ancient and contemporary (seeing as how the contemporary is also ancient, given its infinite source), as well as in book and blog form. A great example would be Fr. John Tobias' review of David Bentley Hart's new book, Atheist Delusions, a book I have been so eager to read that I'm contemplating pushing back my next summer reading book back a slot. Few, if any, match Hart's eloquence in writing and wit, but Fr. Tobias doesn't leave his readers wanting.

Consider the following passage, in which Fr. Tobias clarifies Hart's thesis, for anyone who may have thought Atheist Delusions could or should be boiled down to "a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists." 

His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).

That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."

The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles. 

He has a good deal more to say on that subject and others, touching on even the recent (and suddenly receded) wave of hero worship around our new president. I found this part particularly enjoyable and insightful:

I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.

But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.

That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.

The whole piece, while admittedly I don't quite grasp it all, is quite intriguing, and makes me only more eager to read Hart's book. Can The Brothers Karamozov really stand to be pushed back?

Well, it's official. Barack Obama will be president. It's pretty amazing, really. Ryan mentioned in a voice mail to me that "something happened that I wanted to happen". Somehow, he thought, the Republicans were going to eke out a dirty win again like they seemed to have done in the past two elections. I admit I had a similar fear, irrational as it may have been. 

I'm glad Obama will be president. Very glad, in fact. In Obama I see someone who is at least willing to think about things and is committed to dialogue, and someone who is intelligent enough to conduct that dialog without preposterous epithets and blanket accusations. No more "coalition of the willing" and "axis of evil" speak. The fact that John McCain could utter the belief that America must "defeat evil" as exemplified in Islamic terrorists to rousing applause really bothered me. How can Islam and its adherents constitute evil in this world to American Christians when St. Paul spoke of our adversaries as spiritual when he said to the Ephesians:  For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. 

Furthermore, the Apostle often referred to our very selves as "the enemy". Our sinful passions, the "flesh", which war within us is what must be defeated, and never the "other", the foreigner who believes differently from us, even if he is willing to point and shoot at us: If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

This notion -- that there is evil in the world which must be confronted and defeated -- strikes me as a very UNchristian belief, unless the locus of that evil is within ourselves. Until we are able to confront the evil that is within us, we are only pointing fingers, reaching for the speck in our brother's eye. 

This is not to say that men and women do not DO evil things in this world. The Muslim extremists who insist on destorying themselves and everyone around them are I believe a true manifestation of evil in this world, and I believe it is important that we act within our means to keep them from trampling upon the helpless. But our actions must never be out of self-righteousness, and in this case, I think I fall much more in line with how Mr. Obama responded to Rick Warren's question regarding evil: ...I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. You know a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil… In the name of good and I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that. You know, just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean that we’re going to be doing good.

I'm willing to bet that most of the Christians at Rick Warren's convocation were not hardcore fundamentalists, bent on the idea that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. I'm willing to bet most if not all of them were your average, conscientious mainline Protestant. Yet McCain's response to Warren's question on evil was what stirred their hearts so to resounding applause, while Obama's registered not even an audible "Amen". Could it be that what they so heartily approved of was more American than Christian, more Romantic than Redemption? Are we indeed pursuing Christ in our pursuit of the heathen extremist? Is this Christianity?

Yanked from the NY Times Op-ed Columnist, Nicholas Kristof.

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

Read MORE.

Something truly amazing happened last night. Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown to anyone in the lower 48, spoke at the Republican convention and positively electrified the stadium. While I only listened to the radio broadcast, I could tell simply from the explosive roar from the stands after her every sentence that she had found herself a pack of lapdogs. I imagined the Republican delegates with mouths agape and drooling in their seats -- much in the same way they've persistently mocked Obama supporters from the beginning -- as they must've felt they finally have a reason to get excited about this presidential campaign. Evidently John McCain realized he was getting nowhere on his own in the realm of motivation, so we can safely assume, at least for now, his VP pick has proven a successful gamble.

There's one thing I can say for sure: Sarah Palin's got sass. I couldn't help but shudder a bit at the sound of her newfound disciples wallowing in her fine-tuned litany of sarcastic one-liners. I'm beginning to think that sass is all you really need to win an election in this country -- that, and perhaps a repetition of falsehood and contradiction so seamless that folks start to see black as white. In her speech, Palin kept in step with an entire season of Republican campaigning built not so much on the merits of the campaigning Republicans, as mockery of the Republicans' opponents. She delivered nary a sentence of actual substance detailing McCain's own bid for the White House. And rather than speaking much on the specifics of her own short tenure as Alaskan "commander-in-chief", she opted to degrade the value of both Obama and Biden's public service as Senators and otherwise, managing to perpetuate a few lies about them in the process. To Sarah Palin, her nearly two years experience as a governor qualifies her ever so much more than any senator's work. 

But is it not a tad ridiculous of Palin to so heartily vilify the work of senators when her own presidential candidate has only ever served as senator? Or could it be a tad ironic that these delegates must continuously summon the spirits of dead Republican heroes (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan) in an attempt to dispel the lingering specter of their current failed presidential tenure, who, I might add, served as governor himself (5 years) before wrangling his way into the oval office?

Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that had the Republican delegates their druthers, they'd prefer to switch the head and tail of their presidential ticket? We'll have to wait and see just how uproarious those same delegates prove when McCain takes the stage tomorrow night, to deliver what surely will be the "high-road" speech, somehow unattatched to the endless spew of vitriol from Romney, Huckabee, and Palin's mouths. Somehow he supposed to rise above the staple of Republican campaigning: Trounce your opponent so much that you leave no time to talk about your own policies and experience, save in small, popular soundbytes. For as much as Republicans love to tout McCain's 26 years as senator and effective status as "maverick", they sure as hell don't spend any time extry explaining just what kind of reform he's helped bring about. (It's hard to visualize given his voting record, anyway.) Instead, they're bent on giving every gruesome detail of his time in the Hanoi prison camps, raising it as the banner of his indisputable character, while not failing to muffle and denounce any mention of his sordid disposal of his first wife upon his return to the United States for another, more picture-perfect trophy wife.

So, last night's Palin Parade truly begs the question: Why all the mindless fervor over a woman that hardly a soul knows? This is the very question every faithful Republican has been flinging at the Obama campaign since June. And while I've heard quite a bit from both unofficial and official sources about how Obama must be the Antichrist, I'm beginning to think the McCain/Palin better fits that ticket.

John McCain (The Beast or Antichrist) -- And I saw a beast coming out of the sea (26 years in Washington -- thoroughly soaked in it). He had ten horns and seven heads (Very ugly), with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard (sun spots due to age), but had feet like those of a bear (he waddles) and a mouth like that of a lion (kind of like Charlie Chaplin). The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound (his near extinct primary bid last year... or the surgery he had to remove cancer from his head), but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? (he suffered five years in Hanoi) Who can make war against him?" (hardly a story critiquing him) The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. (Rev. 13:1-5)

Sarah Palin (The second Beast or False Prophet) -- Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth (Alaska). He had two horns like a lamb (horn-rimmed glasses), but he spoke like a dragon (hockey mom). He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs (getting Republicans excited), even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.

If you see other indications of the truth of this claim, let me know! We have to make sure everyone knows that John McCain is the antichrist and Sarah Palin is his prophetess! 

Obama Outwits the Bloviators

 

It's not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the Antichrist might just do it.

by Hendrik Hertzberg, via the New Yorker

The precise origins of Memorial Day are a little fuzzy. According to one version, it was first celebrated in 1865, a few weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant; freed slaves and black and white Union soldiers marched to the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Charleston, South Carolina, for some hearty hymn-singing and picnicking. Others place its beginnings in Waterloo, New York, a year later, while still others date it to 1868 and a proclamation by the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Northern veterans’ organization. What no one disputes is that the holiday’s founding purpose was to honor the Civil War’s fallen.

This year, thanks to HBO, the remembrances of the Memorial Day weekend encompassed another American civil war, happily less lethal to its combatants but far from trivial in its consequences: the election of 2000. HBO’s movie “Recount” has fewer shrinks than “The Sopranos” and fewer laughs than “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but its over-all factual accuracy has been attested to by close observers of the events it portrays. It reminds us of some essential truths about the election and its aborted recount: that more Floridians went to their polling places to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush; that a full and fair count would have confirmed the voters’ preference; that the White House was awarded to Bush, the half-million-vote loser across the nation, by a 5-4 Supreme Court diktat. The injustice of Bush v. Gore was obvious at the time; its sequel has proved it to be a tragedy.

The stock defense of Justice Antonin Scalia is a three-word sneer: “Get over it.” Many people find themselves unable to take this bracing advice. The wound to the country’s civic health remains fresh, though of course it is active, committed Democrats who feel it most keenly.

In the current Presidential primary campaign, as in the Electoral College, the “popular vote” has no official significance. According to the Party’s rules, the nomination will go to whoever can garner a majority of the delegates at the Convention in Denver, regardless of how many voters or caucus-goers sent them there, or didn’t. (The so-called superdelegates, who make up a fifth of the Convention, represent voters only in the highly attenuated sense of having earlier won public or party office.) Yet the popular vote, however juridically meaningless, carries immense moral and political weight with Democrats, for whom the 2000 travesty is a station of the cross and vote-counting a kind of sacrament. The superdelegates understand this. That’s why it has been clear all along that if one of the candidates is able to claim an indisputable majority of actual flesh-and-blood Democrats it will be difficult to deny him—or her—the nomination. But what if the majority is highly disputable, and everybody has one?

“We’re winning the popular vote,” Hillary Clinton said last week, after prevailing in the Kentucky primary by a margin bigger than that by which she lost in Oregon. “More people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination.” These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband’s descriptions of his personal entanglements. They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either.

In a nominating process, especially this one, the “popular vote” is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them. With or without participants in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington (i.e., states where voters’ preferences were expressed by gathering in corners and the like, and whose numbers can be estimated but are not pinpointed), and with the totals for both Florida (whose primary was unsanctioned by the Democratic Party, with the consent of all the candidates, and where no one campaigned) and Michigan (also unsanctioned, and where Obama’s name was not even on the ballot), Clinton’s claim that more people have “voted” for her is factual. But her claim to be “ahead” depends entirely on a tally for the Michigan primary that is distinctly North Korean: Clinton, 328,309; Obama, 0. However, if the bulk of the 238,168 Michiganders who voted “uncommitted” are assumed to have been Obama supporters—a reasonable assumption—then Obama leads by every possible reckoning. And if only Florida is included, then Obama leads whether or not those four caucuses are counted.

Next week, after the three remaining primaries—Clinton is expected to sweep the largest of them, Puerto Rico’s—the likelihood is that each candidate will be able to point to “metrics” showing that he or she is the people’s choice. Obama will almost certainly have the better case, especially in view of opinion polls showing that his national lead among Democrats has been growing, but the reality is that the two have been almost equally strong. Obama will remain the leader in the delegate count, owing largely to a more astute strategy, and he will be the nominee. If there is a loftier lesson, it is that the nominating “system”—and not just in the Democratic Party—is an irrational mess. But that’s not how Hillary Clinton sees it.

Last Wednesday, Clinton described the Democrats’ long-standing reluctance to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations in their entirety, a reluctance that she shared back when she saw her nomination as inevitable, in these words: “We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe.” In a speech in Florida, she invoked the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed,” the abolition of slavery, “our most fundamental values,” the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s-suffrage convention, the sacrifice of soldiers, the tear gas at Selma, “equal justice under the law,” and the Voting Rights Act. Worse, she invaded the Democratic sacristy, picked up the chalice, and flourished it like a club, saying that right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner. The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear. If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people is not realized and our democracy is diminished.

Well, that depends on what the meaning of “count” is, doesn’t it? Florida’s (and Michigan’s) votes in January’s rogue primaries were indeed counted, and everyone understood well in advance that the question of how they would be translated into delegates was, at best, problematic.

In an eerie echo of the “Brooks Brothers riot” depicted in the HBO movie, when shouting Bush operatives and Republican congressional staffers who had been dispatched to Florida managed to shut down the Miami-Dade County recount, CNN reported on Thursday that Clinton supporters “are planning to swarm the capital in a little over a week to pressure Democratic Party leaders as they gather to decide the fate of the Florida and Michigan delegations.” In 2000, the candidate most willing to deploy principles and trash them, according to the tactical needs of the moment, was awarded the prize. In 2008, maybe not. ♦

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

Obama: The Know-too-much candidate? by Roger Simon, borrowed from Politico.com

Having had the national media at his feet for more than a year, Barack Obama now finds them at his throat.

The fault is his. He has disappointed us. He is not winning every voting bloc in every state. He cannot close the deal.

Running against an older, white candidate, Obama has been losing the older, white vote.

Zounds. What did we ever see in this guy?

The Bubba voters, the NASCAR voters and the Joe Six-Pack voters don’t seem to like him. (This is according to exit polls, whose accuracy is an open question but whose results are the crack of media analysis.)

Pennsylvania proved to be the turning point. Even though it had been clear since the earliest polls that Obama would lose Pennsylvania, the press was shocked by Obama’s loss of Pennsylvania.

The significance of this loss becomes clear when you see it as part of a larger picture: The superdelegates, the party insiders who will decide the nomination, are watching events very, very closely. And what do they see?

Obama has now lost the popular vote in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. He has been hurt by the irresponsible statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama insulted small-town Americans when he accused them of “clinging” to guns and religion.

Hillary Clinton has accused Obama of being “elitist and out of touch.” (And Clinton should know: She lived in a governor’s mansion for 12 years and in the White House for eight, and you can’t get more in touch with real America than that.)

So far, however, there has been no great stampede of superdelegates to Clinton. (Since Super Tuesday, Obama has picked up 87 and she has picked up seven, according to his campaign.) Which just goes to show how out of touch and elitist the superdelegates must be. Or else, how politically savvy they are: They don’t find it shocking that Obama can’t win every demographic group in every state.

Not that he has to. No Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has won the white vote. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton found that if you win enough of the white vote and an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, you can get to the White House.

But what about Obama’s bigger problem? Comparisons are already being made between Obama and Adlai Stevenson, who was an intellectual (read: loser). Obama used to teach law at the University of Chicago, one of the brainiest universities in the country.

And Americans don’t want presidents who are too brainy. (Obviously.) We would rather plunge into foreign wars or fall off economic cliffs than have presidents who know too much. That is because braininess is elitist, and being an elitist is the worst thing you can be if you want to be president.

Obama now gets this. Since his loss in Pennsylvania, he has been emphasizing his non-elitist roots. At a recent news conference at a gas station in Indianapolis, he said, “I basically buy five of the same suits and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.”

(I guess Obama thinks this is supposed to appeal to the working classes, but my father was a truck driver, and he would have thought that owning five suits was a lot.)

At the same news conference, Obama said that what he ate while growing up also reflects his non-elitist upbringing: “I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas, where the dinner table would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana: a lot of pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

That settles that, I guess. Diet is destiny. But does anybody besides me find it a little dismaying that a person feels he has to campaign for president in this country based on whether he ate Jell-O molds as a kid? (Though, now that I think of it, how did my mother actually suspend those little marshmallows in the Jell-O? Wires?)

Wouldn’t it be more refreshing if Obama was saying what he used to say: that it is wrong to “slice and dice” voters into isolated groups and that it would be good for America to emphasize what unites people and not what divides us?

But Obama’s new approach is valuable for one thing: It teaches us that everything our parents told us was wrong.

“Study hard so you can go to a good school and get a good job,” parents say. “And stop dressing like a bum!”

But not if you want to be president.

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop
Obama's Super Saturday
It's not over yet.
Metabolic Syndrome Tied to Drinking Diet Sodas
Guantanamo in Pictures
Mr. Good Enough
The Levellers on Obama
Frank Schaeffer on Obama