Too Little

Although Barack Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is what much of the MSM is talking about, the reality is that it represents poor political judgment and possibly, an inkling into the mindset of a politician who remains a cipher to many. It will pass.

What is far more important is Barack Obama’s world view. Young audiences and many progressives cheer when he states “We will change the world!” (What incredible hubris.) His campaign of hope and change appeals to emotion, not rational thinking, but that is how politicians are often elected.

Thomas Sowell, a conservative African-American writer, comments on the Obama phenomenon

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things -- using the mantra of "change" endlessly -- the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not -- all this is a re-run of the 1960s.

We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.

The violence and destruction were concentrated not where there was the greatest poverty or injustice but where there were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and hamstringing the police.

Internationally, the approach that Senator Obama proposes -- including the media magic of meetings between heads of state -- was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.

There’s a somewhat more recent history that Obama may very well recreate—the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter. As he alludes to his far-left positions, Obama sounds more and more like Carter—both the old Carter of the 1970s and the new Carter who has the temerity to call Israel an “apartheid state” and the stupidity to think that the thugs who lead Hamas are truly amenable to negotiation.

Could it be that the current emphasis on Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous positions is a subtle form of buyers’ remorse among many democrats and the MSM? Could be, but I suspect it’s too little and too late.