Obama's Problem

The underlying lesson of the Obama-Wright flap -- which the MSM, now the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, refuse to address -- is how far left liberals have gone. Only in a far left atmosphere of Democrat politics could Obama have forged a close relationship with a pastor who thinks the US government created the HIV virus and who applauded 9/11. It never occurred to Obama that he might need to create some distance from this wacko in order to avoid controversy when he sought the presidency.

Obama's problem is anti-Americanism. People don't want their Commander In Chief to hate America. But liberals can't think straight about anti-Americanism because they evade the problem. How can they address a problem they refuse to acknowledge? When any right-winger is so gauche as to bring up leftist anti-Americanism, liberals have been trained to leap up, pound the table and shout, "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION MY PATRIOTISM?" The question is designed not to explore the issue, but to stop all discussion. Leftist anti-Americanism is That Which Must Not Be Named.

This culture-wide evasion did not help Obama. He never even realized he had a problem until it exploded on You Tube. It is a classic case of a Democrat living in the liberal cocoon and then having reality slap him in the face when his ideas leak outside the cocoon.

His reaction was woefully inadequate. In his speech he falls back on more liberal assumptions: America is a racist nation, and so on. Like an alcoholic who just wants one more for the road, Obama continues to avoid That Which Must Not Be Named.

Obama's problem is the problem of the Democrat Party for the last 36 years. They cannot be honest to the voters about who they are and win the presidency. I look for signs that an open liberal can win the presidency forthrightly, the Kossacks' ideal, but it seems the American electorate is still not quite there.

Ironically, the Republicans seem determined to ape the Democrats in their evasion of reality. The Republicans have become a big government, welfare state party, but they won't admit it. They still pretend to hold small government ideals of a past era that recedes further from us every year and begins to look as quaint as Prohibition and the Spanish-American War.

Perhaps we should take heart that both parties still feel they must pretend to be better than they are to succeed with voters. Their hypocrisy is the tribute statists pay to the better ideas that Americans have yet to forget -- ideas such as individual rights, self-reliance and free markets. As long as our politicians twist themselves into pretzels pretending to conform to America's individualist, capitalist history, then there's hope.