FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1,  2008

•   A Frank Luntz focus group decided overwhelmingly that Barack Obama won the Democratic debate last night.  I did watch some of it, and felt it was a draw, but the focus group's response is jolting.  Did the members really believe it, or did they think it was the "correct" thing to say?  Is there a sudden "wanting" of Obama?  We actually see very little enthusiasm for him, except among specific groups.  But that may be enough to bring him the nomination.  Recall what has been written here before, that the Democratic Party doesn't need the Clintons, but it needs the black vote.  That need is described very well by John Judis in a New Republic article here.

•   As Obama gets greater scrutiny, at least from the few journalists willing to do some honest work, the findings become more disturbing.  The National Journal now ranks him as the most liberal senator in the Senate.  That's the same Senate that contains John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.  The key quote:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate

And The Nation magazine, deceptively described as "liberal" when its editor appears on TV - it is actually far left, with a moving affection for Lenin - essentially endorses Obama in an upcoming piece, as noted here.  The magazine's publicity director said:

"There were some people who agreed with Dennis Kucinich’s policy and some people who gravitated toward John Edwards," he said (The piece was written before Mr. Edwards dropped out).

It's the Kucinich part that's hilarious.  Here's a magazine that wants to be taken seriously, yet its editors have a Kucinich faction.  The yearning for Denny.  Liberal magazine?   Oh yeah.  I remember real liberals.  They had names like Humphrey and Jack Kennedy and Paul Douglas and Henry Jackson.  They would not recognize their own party, except for (whisper the name) Joe Lieberman.

•   The New York Sun, always on the case, now stops giving Obama the benefit of the doubt on his commitment to the war on terror and support for Israel.  The Sun, a small but influential newspaper in the conservative community, points out, in a hard-hitting editorial, that the candidate himself is raising doubts.  When asked which Republicans he might put in his administration, he replied with two names:  Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar, which the Sun combines as Hagar.  They are the two Republicans in the Senate who've been weakest in the war on terror.  The Sun says:

Early last month, we defended Mr. Obama "as having chosen to put himself on the record in terms that Israel's friends in America, at least those not motivated by pure political partisanship, can warmly welcome." But if the senator ends up aligning himself with the Lugar-Hagel tradition in the Republican Party, his actions will start to belie his words. Hagar's is an extremist minority. It stands against the bipartisan consensus in the Senate that wants a hard line against the terrorist enemies of Israel and America. Either Mr. Obama doesn't know for what Messrs. Lugar and Hagel stand, in which case, he's ignorant, or he does know and embraces it, in which case, he spells trouble for the cause of our country in this war and for those Americans who stand with the state of Israel. It will be illuminating to see whether Mrs. Clinton spurns the "Primary Colors" type of whispering campaign that was mounted in Florida, and about which we wrote on January 18, and instead confronts the issue of Messrs. Obama, Lugar, and Hagel out in open debate and before New Yorkers go to the polls.

It's unlikely that Senator Clinton will do so.  In today's Democratic Party, Senators Hagel and Lugar are probably considered heroes for their weakness in the war on terror, despite their overall conservatism.  This follows a long history of liberal hypocrisy.  J. William Fulbright, a racist and an anti-Semite, was canonized because he opposed Vietnam; Sam Ervin, a segregationist, was similarly anointed for his chairmanship of the Senate committee probing Watergate.  The left will throw its supposedly revered values right out the window if some temporary cause, or an invitation to a party in a neat New York co-op, demands it.

•   I was struck last night by a simple, and, I think, obvious fact:  Senator Clinton, despite her backbreaking, too-heavy-for-airline-travel baggage, is vastly more sophisticated in addressing policy than is Senator Obama.  One tires of listening to Mr. Obama announce that a new president must be "right from day one."  The self-righteous simple-mindedness of this is more appropriate to the election of a student-body president than president of the United States. 

And one tires of hearing Mr. Obama pronounce that he was right on Iraq because he opposed the war from the start.  We note that he was in the Illinois state senate at the time, not the United States Senate, and had no national responsibilities.  Nor did he have access to any classified information.  He was a hard leftist, and we have the sense that, secretly, he still is.  Like the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day, Mr. Obama, from his ideological viewpoint at least, made a lucky guess on Iraq.  Okay, so as president he'll be right twice a day.  Given his party's standards, that may be the best we can get.

This column will continue to raise questions about Senator Obama.  The mainstream press is simply not doing its job, and this disgrace may get worse, not better.  The AP presents to us the world, through liberal glasses.  There is wonder.  There is love.  Get this:

Germans are gaga over Barack Obama. He's got Japan pretty jazzed, too, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Russia's leaders, not so much: They prefer a Republican - as long as it's not Kremlin critic John McCain. 

And, for fantasy land, this:

To Britons, history's most popular postwar presidents were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton because of their perceived levelheadedness and intelligence, said Dunleavy. The most despised? President Bush and Ronald Reagan "because they were seen as erratic and unpredictable," he said. 

Y'know, maybe there won't always be an England. 

If Mr. Obama is nominated, he will have an army of press groupies unlike any we've seen before.  These are the people who went into journalism to "make a difference."  They represent the ultimate expression of sixties dreams.  You might ask the Cambodians about those dreams.  There will be silence.

•   Meanwhile, the real world goes on.  Michael Ledeen, in his superb book, "The Iranian Time Bomb," which you must read, lays out our dilemma with Iran, and what must be done to confront and defeat the mullahs.  At Pajamas Media, Richard Miniter reviews where the candidates stand on this critical issue, which seems to have disappeared from our press.  On Obama:

Senator Obama said he would meet without preconditions with any remaining member of the Axis of Evil to continue the traditional “talks.” As for Iran, he would also be willing to accept certain conditions before talking to the country, such as giving economic inducements for the regime to open a dialog and even promising that he would not seek “regime change.” These concessions would take any opposition to the Islamic government off the table, including support of dissidents.

Brilliant, huh?  No wonder Jimmy Carter loves the guy. 

On Hillary Clinton, as interviewed by Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Would you make a promise as a potential commander in chief that you will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power and will use any means to stop it?
SENATOR CLINTON: Well, what I have said is that I will do everything I can to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, including the use of diplomacy, the use of economic sanctions, opening up direct talks. We haven’t even tried. That’s what is so discouraging about this. So then you have the Republican candidates on the other side jumping to the kind of statements that you just read to us. We need a concerted, comprehensive strategy to deal with Iran . We haven’t had it. We need it. And I will provide it.

English translations are welcome.

A quote from McCain:

“I think the president’s right to start with trying to bankrupt them before we bomb them. That’s a good way to start. But we have to be prepared to take, again, whatever action. And I don’t want to go through every possible scenario other than to say that that would mean just what it says. Whatever it takes.”

We do have a choice, don't we?

•   USA Today reports that newspaper companies continue to struggle economically.  True, they face competition from the new media, like the one you're reading right now.  However, they've faced down competition before - from movies and from television.  The real problem, it seems to me, is that many people don't feel newspapers are that necessary any longer.  If the papers would provide a better product, keep opinion off their news pages, and give readers what they can't get anywhere else, they may actually come back to life. 

That, of course, may involve radical change.  Newspapers may actually have to hire people whose minds haven't been cooked by majoring in anthropology at Yale.  Should that start to happen, I will report it.  I'm not keeping the space open.

Be back later.

Posted on February 1, 2008.