Mrs. Obama has not been proud of being an American for her entire political life.
Her husband sees an America full of problems and promise.
Combine the two facts with his policy ideas and one begins to suspect that both Obamas long to return to the golden age of their childhoods. They long not for Camelot, but for Lyndon Johnson’s great society.
The problems of American, Obama implies in every speech, are caused by the failure of government to act on the promises Lyndon Johnson made in the sixties. He does not name Johnson, at least often, but he consistently emulates him with a modern social libertine twist.
The real vision of the Obama campaign is turning back the clock to the expansive domestic government action of the Johnson administration. Liberals have long agonized that the failure of the Vietnam War got this ambitious growth of government programs off track. Obama is trying to undue the agonizing (to the Left) Clinton proclamation that “the era of big government is over.”
Now the Republican have their own unpopular war the far-left of the Democrat Party can renew their hopes. Listening to Barack Obama tonight made it clear that in every particular his aim is to finish that task which it appeared Reagan, two Bushes, and a Clinton had killed.
Obama has promised much and will pay for it by increasing taxes on the upper middle class and rich and ending the War in Iraq.
There are three major problems with this vision.
The first difficulty for Obama is that the War is not as unpopular as his insular background lets him believe. One-third of the public still backs the President. Their votes are lost to him from the start. How many of the rest still want to win?
The Democrats can count on forty-percent of the vote if he is the nominee. Obama has won the hearts and minds of those he has to win. Now he must ask where the last eleven percent will be found. Bill Clinton could not find it. Jimmy Carter, in the election after Watergate, running as a centrist was the last Democrat to do so.
Will the Chicago great society liberal be able to do it? Why believe so?
The real question is whether John McCain can capture the eighteen percent that once backed Bush but are disenchantned. They may think the country off the rails, but their own lives are pretty good. Do the American people in the “middle” really want big change in their own lives?
These are the voters that may wish we had not gone to Iraq, but may not be eager to lose. Leaving Iraq within a year will surely undue all the gains from the Surge, will tarnish our image in the Middle East for decades, end any chance for a relatively stable ally in Iraq, and turn hegemony of the area over to Iran. Our best ally in the region, Israel, will be put in grave peril.
This is not Vietnam as John McCain will be able to argue with unique authority. The War in Iraq has been harder than those supporting it thought it would be, but it is not yet lost. If it is won, then much will have been gained.
Obama has not ever worked in any field where his views have received critical scrutiny. His life is one long trek through liberal dominated higher education and left-of-center public office. What will he say to Joe Lieberman about the War?
Second, Obama has very extreme cultural views, but not even realize it. He is no friend to the Second Amendment. He is virulently opposed to culture of life issue. He believes key traditional Christian moral views are themselves immoral.
Finally, the closer he gets to the nomination the more he attacks the “wealthy.” Most Americans are now invested in the market through their retirement. The Bush economy has not been bad, but good for the majority of Americans. They may not wish to see their money taken through confiscatory taxation. Obama’s promise to raise taxes amounts to Reagan’s old rhyme, “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.” but the middle class will get the brunt of it in the end.
The middle class is where the money is.
Whatever the merits of the War, defense of the nation is at least in service of a central constitutional job for government. The great society programs, which unlike a War will never end, are a huge expansion of the government into all areas of life not just in war time, but for all time.
Do most Americans want this when the choice is made to them plainly?
Obama has received almost totally favorable press to date, but leads McCain by only a few percentage points in all polling. Almost no Americans know the specifics of his views on gun rights, taxes, health care, abortion, and the family.
Do we want to give Lyndon Johnson the other term that history denied him? Or will America turn to a hero from Vietnam who learned different lessons from his painful experience of the sixties than those that Obama learned from books?
Obama is a better speaker than John McCain. I like him better. He almost surely has more “book smarts.”
I am betting the veteran and self-described foot-soldier of the Reagan Revolution beats the college professor turned politician, because the Democrats are about to over reach.