Let me put this business with Barak Obama into some perspective: Hillary Clinton.
There are a number of Democrats who figure Hillary is going to run… Obama and his supporters among them. My take here is that Obama and his supporters know that there’s a long road ahead for them, to get to the rockstar status… and the name recognition… of Hillary Clinton. She’s got several years worth of head start. Further, Obama’s supporters are looking at the disaster looming should Hillary Clinton actually win the primaries… which is itself anything but a done deal. Let’s say they’re ‘motivated’.
I grant that he’s not bringing any credentials to the party, in the way of positives. Then again, he doesn’t have nearly the negative baggage of a Hillary Clinton, either.
There’s something a bit strange going on, here though. Has anyone seen Hillary Clinton in the last couple weeks? A quick and dirty web search revealed only one story about her, from a little newspaper in Wellsboro, PA, about a foul-up at the Rochester International Airport, dated yesterday. Past that, her campaign is considering an amber alert for her. The speculation is high that she’s not running this time, beacuse she won’t be able to make it by Obama in the primaries.
Reports are suggesting that Hillary and her people are nervous about Obama… and the story fits, given her high polling negatives.
All this bottom lines, though, at this:
All the noise about Obama centers around Hillary’s nagtives among both Republicans and leftist Democrats.
What we’re seeing is Democrat voters looking for a fresh face… and apparently, they’re willing to elect an unknown to get it. Rich Lowry points out: [1]
The Rose Law Firm was Hillary Clinton’s firm back in Arkansas that was the focus of a little criminal activity and a lot of obsessive right-wing conspiracy-mongering. Halliburton is the former Dick Cheney energy firm that Democrats in Congress will spend the next two years investigating and that has been a swear word for Bush critics all along. Both entities represent, more than anything else, the putrid partisanship and malicious monomania that have characterized the 14, going on 16, years of the Clinton-Bush era.
After all this, who doesn’t hunger for a clean break? Thus the energy behind the possible presidential bid of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement. And that is because everything about him says, “I’m not a Bush, I’m not a Clinton, and can we please talk about something else?”
But the dirty little secret about Obama is the cause for the excitement among the far left: He has a solidly liberal voting record. Nary a tax, a government program, or a give-away he doesn’t like. So liberal in fact, the “Americans for Democratic Action gave him an unheard of 100% rating. So the far left woukld far prefer Obama to Clinton. ANd we know the far left is by far more vocal than any other subset of the Democratic Party… or for that matter, the whole of American political life.
Consider with me for just a moment, the bizarre conditions under which Hillary Clinton is demonstrated to be the more moderate candidate.