What else has Obama got?
Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Monday, November 03,
2008 at 11:19pm
BARACK Obama’s predicted victory in the US presidential election is more likely to usher in a bleaker future for the globe, not the bright new dawn his optimistic supporters are hoping for.
Obama, an inexperienced first-term senator, has not presented the world with a blueprint for the future, he has run his extraordinarily successful campaign on nothing more than the promise of change.
As we have seen in Australia over the past 12 months, change is not always for the better.
See previous Aussie News & Views post:
Americans BEWARE Australian internet to be CENSORED by Australian Labor Party
Obama’s promised change is part of what pollsters are claiming as the mainstay of his attraction - vision.
Unfortunately, his vision is no more than the word. His vision is one-dimensional. It is in reality nothing less than a mirror in which supporters can see anything they hope to see. It is limitless, constrained only by the imagination of those who feel the need to embrace change and vision.
Empirically, however, all the evidence shows Obama is more limited than limitless. He is a creature of the historically corrupt Chicago political machine, an organisation that could teach WA Inc and the ALP’s notorious NSW Right about political larceny.
He is an enthusiast for the cause of victimhood and attended and wholeheartedly supported a racist church leader for the past two decades until the media reluctantly exposed the hate-spewing sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor of choice until the middle of this year.
Last weekend, when former US president Bill Clinton endorsed the man who defeated his wife Hillary in the long struggle for the Democratic Party’s nomination, it was worth remembering that Wright had preached in Obama’s church that he (Clinton) “Did us (black Americans) like he did Monica Lewinsky”. Obama didn’t object.
Clinton prided himself on his relations with black Americans and was called by many commentators an honourary black but that cut no ice with Wright, who also preached God damn America.
That would have suited the man credited with launching Obama’s political career, the unrepentant former urban terrorist Bill Ayers, and Ayers’ partner Bernadine Dohrn, who served time in prison for her role in the Weatherman domestic terror bombings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Obama has said his own limited political experience largely hinges on his work as a community organiser. That would be for the activist organisation ACORN, which has been cited numerous times across the US for falsifying information used to register voters.
On character grounds, Obama is fortunate in the extreme to have reached the dizzy heights of the US Senate, to have found himself as the Democratic Party’s candidate.
He needed Senator Clinton. Without a white woman contesting the party’s nomination, it seems unlikely a black man would have won the party’s vote.
Though Obama’s Republican opponent, war hero and former PoW and US Senator John McCain, has not raised race as an issue, the Democrats have used it to engender a sense of guilt in white Americans who harbour doubts about Obama’s capacity as the leader of the free world. Not to support Obama raises the question of whether that decision has a racist undertone.
Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at California’s prestigious Stanford University, characterised the phenomenon as arising from the fact that whites, since the ‘60s, have been stigmatised as racist.
He said since acknowledging a history of racism, segregation and slavery, whites had lived under the pressure of having always to prove they’re not racist; they developed political correctness for the sole purpose of being able to talk without seeming to be racist.
White people, he said, are desperate to vote for a black man to prove the US is not a racist society. Some people who have had the opportunity to meet Obama during the campaign have told me they are concerned what a Democrat victory will mean for Australia.
They say in conversation he showed an extraordinary naivete about economics, one describing his views as Cuban circa 1960; his foreign policy outlook was very ‘70s Eurocentric; and it was also pointed out that in his foreign policy statement he made no reference to Australia’s role in future schemes.
Further, it was noted that the Democratic Party leans towards greater protectionism and is well behind the ALP in its thinking on globalisation and the trade implications of modern technology.
While a vote for Obama may bring about a temporary boost of confidence in the US and a bounce on Wall Street, there is nothing to suggest an Obama administration will be good news for the rest of the world in the longer term.
Based on Obama’s record, voting for change, solely for change’s sake, is an affront to commonsense and a victory for stupidity.
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