On hope, faith, health care and branding.

Campaigning is not leading.

Obama strikes me as being a bit annoyed with things like press conferences. Bush did too. Bush, however, solved the problem by not having them. A presidential speech from the oval office would help Obama's sale of health care more than a presser. Speeches from the oval office carry more weight and health care is certainly a big enough issue to rate one. Still, Obama's desire to be present on TV all the time has now limited this option. Every time he speaks he lessens his impact.

Powerful Presidents dictate terms behind the scenes and judiciously pressure in public. One can easily imagine LBJ twisting arms in the White House to pass Medicare. Though, Congress wrote the bill there is no doubt that it was LBJ's Great Society being born. Obama has not dictated the terms of this debate. Believe it or not, Pelosi has had more influence on the terms so far.

Obama presents like the nation's life coach, encouraging us - en mass - to make decisions that may cause discomfort but will be "good for us." Like gulping cod liver oil. But he is NOT a man on a mission. FDR's New Deal was a mission. Kennedy willed us into space. LBJ's Great Society was framed as a national cause. There is something pathetic about seeing him bend press questions into cheap talking points for a plan that is still being written.

Can anyone say in one sentence what Obama's health plan is? To insure everyone? No. To cut costs? Maybe, but how? To reign in rapacious insurance companies? Uh...depends on the day and who's talking.

I can explain several pieces of major progressive legislation in one sentence:

Social Security: To ensure that people have a safety net after their working years.

Medicare: To ensure health care for people after their working years.

Headstart: The answer is in the name. To give poorer children a leg up.

Tennessee Valley Authority: Electrify rural Tennessee.


Family Leave: Job security for families in transition or crisis.


All of FDR's alphabet soup programs were targeted and easy to grasp.

In each case conservatives insisted "liberty" was on death door. Nonsense.

What is circa 2009 health care reform about? Considering how well Obama branded himself in 2008 one would think he could sell us on health care reform...or at least brand it.

This fight is far from over. The personal stakes for Obama are extraordinarily high. He may yet win. Still, he's now caught in the same quicksand Mrs. Clinton was in 1993.

August is the cruelest month in American politics. Policies and politicians are destroyed in August. Ask Michael Dukakis. In 1988 he roamed around in his station wagon while Lee Atwater buried his chances of winning with TV ads about furloughed rapists. If health care reform is to be killed yet again it will be murdered in August.

Many months ago I stated that Obama's fault was in inspiring hope but no faith. Hope is a fine campaign tactic but potentially disastrous afterward. Real leaders do not inspire hope. They inspire faith. Americans had faith in FDR. Hope was the result - not the starting point. Hope is about the future and is therefore suited for first term campaigns. Faith is about the present - which is, of course, where we live. Obama does not inspire faith. As the health care debate unfolds this becomes more and more evident.

It was 40 years ago today.

President Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon in this decade. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

One would be hard pressed to find a bigger event in the 20th Century than The American landing on the moon. I suppose the advent of antibiotics and the defeat of the Nazis may rank higher in terms of individual lives....still forty years on, let us feel a goodly mix of pride and humility for what these men did.

Check out some newly released, cleaned up, video from NASA here.

My parents went out and bought our first color TV to watch the moon landing - pointless since it was broadcast in black and white. Still, even though I was six, I remember it well. I grew up in that once muscular American middle of the middle class - on a suburban cul de sac in Orange County - no less. AND my mother won the Big Deal on Let's Make A Deal - the same year. I'm not sure what could have been more American than that in 1969 other than having Kennedy's dream fulfilled as everyone on our block gathered around our new TV set.

I think - but do not presume to know - it may be hard for those much younger than I to understand the level of importance the moon landing had for Americans in 1969.

It was downhill after that. We have been shrinking since. This must end if we hope to survive. If we pin our revival one one event - I hope it is the moon landing. I also hope Mr. Obama makes a very, VERY big deal about this anniversary.

And that's the way it - sadly - is.

Very Sad News: News icon Walter Cronkite dies at 92
A great and shining light of integrity is gone.

Watch CBS Videos Online


Watch CBS Videos Online

He ain't no Bill Clinton

Well I suppose it had to come to this eventually...liberal rapture posts a clip from that Rush fellow... ah well...such is life...even a broken clock is right twice a day...He is making a point about an answer BHO gave a 7 year old at a rally.

Obama (who may not exist. he might be a hologram...I'm looking in to it.) really isn't too good at this running for Pres. thing....Kids, someone has to say it: He ain't no Bill Clinton. Face facts Pods, without a teleprompter he is just crappy. He gives an answer which is perfectly suited for a gathering of effete Santa Monica 'I support workers since I shop at the farmer's market on thursday' liberals attending a small fundraiser at Ariana's Alimony Pad in Brentwood. The subtext is "this country sucks" which is what these people LOVE to hear. It ensures that they are not responsible...however, giving this answer to a 7 year old is just bad politics. Like Bush, unless BHO is strictly controlled he botches things. This is why he is being a coward about debating McCain in a town hall format. Rush L. gives the right answer - an answer that inspires FAITH in one's country- and an answer that would have danced of JFK's or Bill Clinton's tongue...

Here to hoping we have a rough and tumble, argumentative and VERY SAFE campaign.

Part of the fantasy being weaved about Obama is that he is in some way heir to JFK or RFK's legacy. This is ridiculous and I've said so. It is a misreading of history egged on by bird brains like Chris Matthews and encouraged by the Obama campaign. JFK was a war hero, 2 term Senator, and Pulitzer prize winner from a political family that has among other things contributed the Special Olympics to the American scene. RFK was in the fields with Caesar Chavez in 1967 and had a long and arduous political transformation into one of America's great progressives before he was murdered. Nothing in Obama's life comes close to either of these men. He is a one term Senator of no note, an alleged community organizer, and a decades long member of a disgusting pastor's church. As a life long Democrat and unreconstructed FDR liberal I find these comparisons repellant.

I fiercely go after Obama on Liberal Rapture. I will continue to.
I am appalled by his campaign, by the media's adoration of him, and by the seduction of the masses by him. I lay out my case. Sometimes with intelligence, sometimes with anger, sometimes with sarcasm. My motivation is 2 fold:

1. I don't like him. I use to. Then I looked closer. Then I watched him oversee a classically negative campaign while the media did his dirty work and ignored the dirty work he had to do himself. I don't like what he stands for - which is the opposite of the packaging. (Rev Wright is simply the clearest example yet of this) He is a fraud. A snake-oil salesman. His wife is more honest by half. Her stump speech is - at least - truthful in its contempt for the nation.

2. I don't like what he represents in our current media culture and what is says about us - merit and hard work and history are being gleefully debased by Move On, Olbermann, Huffington, Axlerod, and many more. In spiritual terms it is called "selling your soul." A large swatch of the Left, rightfully angry as hell about the last 7 years has checked their brains at the door. Clinton is not the politician to seize this group and forge them into her campaign - even if she did want to - which i doubt. Obama/Axlerod saw the opening and took it. But it is based in a grand lie: Obama represents change, a clean break. This is patently false.

His political stances are either run of the mill corporate nonsense or simply not there to be vetted. He skips out when the going gets tough. His recycled words are nice. But they have already worn thin. Actions speak louder than words. Axlerod is desperate to avoid an examination of his actions. This is why after 20 years in that church Obama kicked the minister in a balls and ran for the hills of MSNBC yesterday. They dutifully gave him the megaphone to tell more lies and to weasel his way out of two decades of his life.

Those 2 decades are not going away. Those 20 years speak directly to his judgment as a man.

The Obama Left is driven, I believe, by resentment - not hope - in the end. Resentment of women, Bush, and a society that has become vapid and empty of everything valuable. This is the place where the fad of Obama has entered our lives. He is not responsible for the state of the nation. He is taking advantage of it while at the same time offering nothing tangible, or helpful - other than words.

If for a moment in the last 4 months Obama had presented himself as a man of depth I would, I hope, have taken different attitude. I've been for Clinton all along but had resigned myself to Obama after Iowa. I have looked for a reason to support him. At every turn what I've seen does not deserve support.

But back to the JFK/Obama connection and the delusion it represents.

Part of the Obamite fantasy about JFK goes to martyrdom. John Avarosis, no fan of Clinton, on his site Americablog - told his much larger audience that he "wished people would stop saying JFK and Obama in the same breath". His concern was practical and not philosophical - but his point was salient and I agree with it. The story does not end well.

I will continue to blog about Clinton and Obama. I will continue to root for Hillary because she is clearly the only person left in the race who can make the brutal choices we now face. I will continue to write about Obama's hypocrisy.
I will continue to hope we get through this scary part of our history without violence on the home front.
I want the wars to end now. I also know why we are fighting. I know, that after all is said and done, Bush started a resource war in Iraq. To believe we fight for anything other than oil is to take part in yet another delusion. To deny the war is about oil is like saying the civil war was not about slavery. Extracting our nation from this war will take more than a speech from a state senator and a Prius. It will take leadership and hard work and sacrifice from all of us. We are in Iraq one way or another, in one form or another, for years to come. The sooner the Left grapples with this, the sooner they will return to sanity. As a start, I'd like to see David Geffen give up a Lear Jet - or two. Maybe he can take a train.

Things are closer than they appear in the rear view mirror and they are gaining on us. The dollar is fading, the Carlyle Group and Bear Stearns collapsed this week. There is every reason to believe one or two large banks will fail soon. Prices are rising fast. Bush will hand off a nation greatly diminished by his malfeasance. A seasoned adult will need to take the reigns. Clinton is the best choice given the ones we have. McCain makes me cringe but he will not have the neo-con bullshit to contend with. His foreign policy will be unfortunately conservative, but at least realistic. Obama has yet to show the country anything but smoke and mirrors.

Having said that: Here to hoping we have a rough and tumble, argumentative and VERY SAFE campaign. Onward!