What's Wrong With Obama?

As Obama fades in the polls, people are asking why this is happening. Alex Castellanos, David Brooks, and Classical Values examine Obama's weakness as a candidate.

I believe Obama's problem is that he has miscalculated because of his leftist premises. As a socialist and a postmodernist Obama does not believe that man can know the truth about reality. Instead, people's beliefs are determined by other things. You probably remember a few months ago when Obama said to his fellow leftists in San Francisco,

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This is a materialistic explanation of values: because of economic hardship people turn to guns, religion, bigotry or protectionism.

Leftists believe Americans labor under a "false consciousness" foisted upon us by greedy capitalists. Corporations keep Americans from seeing the truth that leftists, being special people motivated by altruism instead of greed, can see.

Thus, Obama believes the truth is irrelevant when you're talking to the American people. Obama can say anything, take any position, contradict himself if necessary. The only standard is: will his statement help him gain power?

For months Obama has either been so vague that his words can mean anything or when he has gotten specific, he has been all over the map, backtracking and flip-flopping. People are left wondering, "What does Obama really believe?"

Obama underestimates the American people. More people care about logic and the truth than he thinks. Perhaps he is now learning that if your words are meaningless long enough -- if your statements are not firmly tied to reality -- people stop listening.

How ironic it is that a man who won the Democrat nomination by appealing to voters' idealism has been undone so far by excessive cynicism. His idealism was as empty as his cynicism is rich and full to the brim.