Rick Moran watches with dismay the American Left’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Dali once famously said “The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” Something similar could be said for the differences between the Obama on the stump and Obama the real person. This became abundantly clear last night when the largest campaign crowd yet – more than 35,000 by most estimates – thronged to the park in front of Independence Hall to hear the probable/potential/possible next President of the United States chant his “hope and change” mantra while totally ignoring the reality of a man whose past associations include an incredible group of hate mongering anti-Americans, racist pastors, crooked “fixers,” and “politics as usual” politicians who give the lie to his pretty words and noble sentiments. ..

Have we become so cynical that despite all the evidence to the contrary – his lack of any track record in effecting change (even eschewing opportunities to do so when the presented themselves), his accepting help from politicians who practice the very kind of politics he rails against, his association with people who have no desire to “unite” the country, only tear it down – that so many would become besotted with “Obamamania” that they deliberately look the other way at this hypocrisy coming from their candidate?

This disconnect became all too visible the last few days as left wing blogs supporting Obama were beside themselves over the efforts by ABC debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephenopolous to pull back the curtain and reveal Obama as the hypocrite he truly is. Their primary beef with ABC? The moderators asked questions the candidate didn’t want to answer and his supporters didn’t want to hear. As long as the press coverage limits itself to the “issues,” only the Obama on the stump will be highlighted. As long as the press reports on the incredible crowds, the adoring fans, the candidate’s rhetorical gifts (not “issues” in any sense of the word but hey! – no one ever accused the left of being consistent about anything), Obama’s Legions are satisfied.

But let the press actually do their jobs and ask the candidate why he is on a first name basis with someone who is “proud” he tried to blow up the Pentagon and the crap hits the fan in Obamaland. Any attempt to reveal the life Obama has led outside of politics isn’t relevant. Not because it has nothing to do with why someone would cast their vote for their candidate – an incredibly stupid assumption that bespeaks an ignorance of why people vote – but simply because they don’t want to know and more importantly, they don’t want the rest of us to know.

The last debate having not worked out to to the satisfaction of the Obama campaign, the North Carolina debate scheduled for April 27 has been cancelled.

And, as Jay Newton-Small reports, Obama is currently avoiding the press and hiding behind his waffle.

This morning at a diner in Scranton Obama sat down at the counter to enjoy a waffle breakfast with Senator Bob Casey. He’d already spent more than 30 minutes glad handing the restaurant’s denizens, and with the 15+ press pool crammed behind the counter before him Obama dug in. Which is when one of the network reporters took the advantage of the close proximity to ask a question about Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas and Obama irritably answered: “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?”

At the White house we’d often shout questions at Bush, especially in his first term when press conferences were few and far between. His choice to answer them sometimes led to scenes like in Fahrenheit 911 when Bush, about to tee off on the golf course, called on all nations to do everything they can to stop terrorist killers and then smirked “Now, watch this drive.” Journalists in general don’t relish asking politicians questions in awkward situations, like on a golf course or over a waffle. But sometimes our hands are forced: Obama hasn’t given a press conference in 10 days and the questions, some of them — like Hamas — rather important, are starting to build up.

Wafflegate 0:18 video

Michelle Malkin defined “Swiftboating” correctly

But democrats still insist on pretending that charges about John Kerry made in the course of the 2004 Presidential Campaign by Naval veterans were either inaccurate or somehow unfair, despite Kerry’s only too manifest failure to refute them.

“Swiftboating” is back in the news as a term of art today used by the Obama campaign to preemptively stigmatize as “unfair” the possibility of Republicans raising questions about Obama’s radical leftwing history and associations.

ABC News reports that one of the leaders of the Machinists’ Union is concerned:

Rick Sloan says he doesn’t want to see the Democrats get “Swift Boated” again this time. So the communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has sent a couple of dozen friends — union leaders and Democratic activists, mainly — an urgent plea to pay attention to Sen. Barack Obama’s connections with the 1960s anti-war group, the Weather Underground, and other leftist thinkers.

Democrats “can’t be an ostrich on this” with their heads buried in the sand, Sloan said in an interview.

He sent a copy of the memo to ABC News by e-mail.

Titled “What Is Rove Up To?,” Sloan writes that Rove will seek to redefine Obama’s signature slogan “Change We Can Believe In” and brand it instead as “revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”

Sloan has cause to be concerned.

Sophisticated commentators on the Right, like myself, are perfectly well aware, that just as “progressive” is a carefully chosen alternative term for “Marxist,” Barack Obama’s campaign mantra “Change” does not necessarily simply constitute a conventional campaign season bromide. “Change” is commonly used in “progressive” circles to mean “the achievement of leftist goals.”

“Change” means a lot more to members of the democrat party’s activist base than a promise to raise taxes or impose new emissions regulations. A promise of Change in the language of the Left may, indeed, imply revolutionary change.

In other words, electing someone like Barack Obama promising Change, can be interpreted as the candidate’s promise that one will not be electing another Jimmy Carter, but rather electing Hugo Chavez.

——————————————————

Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff hastily responded to the left’s alarms, and are already on the job, preempting away, with a feature exculpatorily subtitled:
Seeing Ghosts: Obama’s ties to Ayers and Auchi are distant, but his foes plan to pounce.

Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won’t let himself be “Swift Boated” like John Kerry in 2004. “He’s not going to sit there and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the missiles are raining in,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come.” The move appears to be an acknowledgment that the Obama campaign may not have moved aggressively enough when questions about Ayers and Rezko first arose, and it comes amid fresh indications that conservative groups are preparing a wave of attack ads over the links.

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week’s debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago’s Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers’s house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. “Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them ‘detestable’,” says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood “but has not seen him for months.”

Obama, of course, didn’t just “attend an event” at Bill Ayers’ house. He launched his state senate campaign at an event held at Bill Ayers’ house. And he didn’t just serve on a non-profit board with Ayres. He served with Ayres on the board of the Woods foundation, where along with Ayres, he is known (so far) to have funneled money to radical Palestinian Rashid Khalidi‘s Arab American Action Network.

P.J. O’Rourke visits an aircraft carrier and becomes a fan of John McCain’s.

Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do–voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it’s full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you’re sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets at a make-believe political tea party. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.

And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can’t. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts–yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can’t hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can’t do that. Really, they communicate by “training telepathy.” They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. “These are the same kids,” a chief petty officer said, “who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they’re in charge of $35 million airplanes.”

The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks–and they do–half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there’s no ejection seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the Theodore Roosevelt a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were 20?

Supposedly the “youth vote” is all for Obama. But it’s John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the “women’s vote” is . . . well, let’s not go too far with this. I can speak to John’s honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I’m not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he’d been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary’s attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill’s life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the “women’s vote.”

These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.

Back on the COD you’re buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it’s over. You’re in steady, level flight.

A strange flight it is–from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters–who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick–presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

I think PJ is getting a bit overenthusiastic about McCain, but he’s right enough on Hillary and Obama.

The “Progressive” camp’s media hitmen are out in force attempting to avenge Obama’s loss of the recent debate as the result of critical questions about the democrat Left’s annointed candidate’s background and associations by ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson.

The Left likes to dish it out, but it doesn’t like to take it very much. Commentary’s Peter Wehner wonders just how “despicable” and “shameful” the same sort of questions would be if the shoe were on the other foot.

In an article today, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post cites various media figures–from Tom Shales of the Post to Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher to Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann–who are outraged at the performance of George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson during Wednesday’s Democratic debate. The ABC News duo’s performance, we are told, was “despicable,” “shameful,” and “disgraced democracy itself.”

And what did Stephanopoulos and Gibson do to earn this scorn? Why, they asked Barack Obama some probing questions, including one about his past relationships with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and a former leader of the Weather Underground, William Ayers.

Consider this thought experiment: Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book.

In addition, assume that this GOP candidate, in preparing for his entry into politics, attended an early organizing meeting at the home of a man who, years before, was involved in blowing up multiple abortion clinics and today was unrepentant, stating his wish that he had bombed even more clinics. And let’s say that the GOP candidate’s press spokesman described the relationship between the two men as “friendly.”

Do you think that if those moderating a debate asked the GOP candidate about these relationships for the first time, after 22 previous debates had been held, that other journalists would become apoplectic at the moderators for merely asking about the relationships? Not only would there be a near-universal consensus that those questions should be asked; there would be a moral urgency in pressing for answers. We would, I predict, be seeing an unprecedented media “feeding frenzy.”

As John F. Harris & Jim Vandehei observe, the Left is using its entrenched position atop the mainstream media’s high ground to punish deviation and to intimidate those not perfectly loyal.

My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.

Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?

Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.

That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places — who are doing the whining.

The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.

Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

Even Hillary Clinton has had just about enough of the democrat party’s radical activist base.

Celeste Freemon, at the Huffington Post, reports:

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the “activist base” of the Democratic Party — and MoveOn.org in particular — for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had “flooded” state caucuses and “intimidated” her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

“Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] — which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down,” Clinton said to a meeting of donors. “We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me.”

Get ready for the backlash. It will be impressive.

Thomas Lifson explains how Obama’s press honeymoon came to an end. The Left is still screaming about how unfair it was for George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson to ask all those questions about Obama’s character and associations, instead of getting out of the way and allowing him to make broad, vague, and general policy promises.

Barack Obama’s campaign has been all about image. The well-dressed, impeccably groomed, and elegantly articulate speaker was able to speak of hope, change, and unity, and for awhile the public bought it. Capitalizing on the huge store of guilt, compassion, and hope for better racial relations among the vast majority of Americans of all races, Obama posed as the man who might heal the wounds of the past.

The bonhomie lasted for months, as the press corps, no strangers to their own guilt and hope and leftist inclinations, averted its eyes from those elements of his politics and life story that were discordant with a unifier’s mission, and portayed him as almost supernaturally virtuous. Obama long ago learned how to disarm strangers who might find him an unusual or perhaps threatening figure, and as long as the scrutiny didn’t get too detailed, the game worked splendidly.

But that was before Hillary Clinton’s campaign took him seriously. Before the Clinton war room wizards, past masters of planting stories and themes in friendly media hands, got to work on him. American Thinker and other conservative websites long have been pointing to his Alinskyite past, noting his Senate voting record and his propensity to associate with left wing extremists like Bill Ayers. But until very recently, the major media were content to allow his chosen narrative of centrism and unity to prevail. No messy qualms about actual policies disturbed the aesthetic of hope and optimism and unity.

The press collaboration with Obama’s PR became so sickening obvious that Saturday Night Live was able to mock it savagely, and receive kudos for puncturing the bubble. With the impetus of scornful laughter haunting them, mainstream journalists began to pay more attention to Obama’s dubious associations. Video of Pastor Wright hit ABC, and from there the rest of the mainstream media began to pay attention to discordant notes in his rhetoric of reassurance to middle Amercia.

The ABC News-sponsored debate Wednesday night featured unprecedentedly tough questioning (at least for a liberal) by George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. Obama stumbled in his responses, comparing admitted terror bomber Bill Ayers to United States Senator Tom Coburn, a physician who has delivered thousands of babies. Even more astonishingly, when reminded that capital gains tax increases actually decrease tax revenue while cap gains tax cuts increase them, he actually retreated to the realm of class warfare, insisting that regardless of the consequences, he wants to punish the owners of capital in the name of “fairness.”

Welcome the new aesthetic of Barack Obama, the left wing ideologue. The signs have long been there, for those with the eyes to see them.

It is no accident that Obama has become the candidate of the Democrats’ left wing fringe, typified by the Daily Kos crowd, despite his continuing efforts to sound a centrist note. The kind of people who are comfortable working with a poster of Che Guevara looking over their shoulders have been attracted to Obama because they read the little signals belying his centrist pose. …

Barack Obama has been able to preach racial harmony while attending and donating to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church for two decades. He has been able to masquerade as a centrist while hobnobbing with the radical chic activists and unrepentant terrorists of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He has been able to pose as a centrist while believing in the necessity of punsihing owners of capital. But with Hillary Clinton and her minions aggressively pursuing him, and an awakened press chagrinned at giving him a pass for so long, those days may be numbered.

Dick Polman reports that Obama last night didn’t only lose, he was shaken, rattled, and rolled.

Just how bad was Barack Obama’s debate performance last night? Not as bad as Britney Spears’ song-and-dance routine at the MTV Awards. Not as bad as Bill Buckner’s legendary error during the ’86 World Series. Not as bad as Bob Dylan’s music during his God phase. Not as bad as John Travolta’s Scientology cinema experiment in Battlefield Earth. Not as bad as Mike Dukakis’ fateful ride in a military tank.

In other words, Obama could have done worse. Neverthless, if he still harbors any hopes of driving Hillary Clinton from the Democratic race by scoring an upset victory in Pennsylvania, he might be wise to get real.

Read the whole thing.

And having gotten his nose bloodied by that mean little girl from down the block, poor little Barry Obama is refusing to come out and debate with her any more.

Obama: Let’s campaign, not have more debates

Sen. Barack Obama on Thursday suggested he doesn’t see any point in having another debate with Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Wednesday’s debate on ABC may be the final face-off between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton has agreed to a debate next week, but Obama has not yet accepted the invitation.

At an appearance in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama said he has a lot of campaigning to do in a limited amount of time.

And he is whining about last night, and in public, too.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama dismissively talked about his debate with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the line of questioning from ABC News’ moderators, arguing that it focused on political trivia at the expense of the problems facing average voters. …

In criticism of his rival, he called the debate “the rollout of the Republican campaign against me in November” and said it represented textbook Washington politics that Clinton was very comfortable playing.

“They like stirring up controversy and they like playing gotcha games, getting us to attack each other,” he said. “Senator Clinton looked in her element. She was taking every opportunity to get a dig in there. That’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit … that’s the lesson she learned when Republicans did it to her in the 1990s.”

The Obama campaign also sought to capitalize on the debate, sending out a fundraising appeal titled, “Gotcha,” and soliciting $25 donations.

“Last night I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people,” Obama told the North Carolina crowd. “Forty-five minutes before we heard about health care, 45 minutes before we heard about Iraq, 45 minutes before we heard about jobs, 45 minutes before we heard about gas prices.”

He lost yesterday’s debate.

I didn’t actually watch it myself, and have not even read a transcript, but the Net is echoing today with howl of outrage from lefties.

Greg Mitchell calls it “A Shameful Night for the U.S. Media,” which is a clear indication that the MSM failed to do their job and did not deliver for the Left. They even irresponsibly went right ahead and asked “the candidate of Change” damaging questions on “trivial issues,” things like Senator Obama’s condescending remarks about small-town Americans, his relationship with the race-baiting Reverend Wright, and his refusal to wear the conventional political candidate’s American flag pin.

Mitchell cannot understand why the media’s representatives didn’t devote all their questions to the Left Blogosphere’s talking points, opposition to the War, class warfare, complaints about free trade, and so on. What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand what their job really is?

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, explains that Obama’s expressed opinion of the misfortunes responsible for the politics, religion, and avocations of small-town Americans, in fact, demonstrates that it is actually his own urban elite which is hostile to real diversity and afflicted with a negative and paranoid view of persons not exactly like themselves.

Obama’s promise rests on a false premise: that it is within the power of the president to restore the Rust Belt’s luster. Every incumbent president in living memory has sought at least one additional term, and the Keystone State has for decades been a key electoral battleground, both large and closely contested. If presidents had the power to make Pennsylvania’s declining towns wealthy, don’t you think one of them would have done so by now?

In truth, the decline of industries is simply a fact of life, like old age, sickness and death. Yet just as new generations supersede the old, a free economy produces innovation that gives rise to new industries. And while some places have declined, the nationwide economy has grown impressively for most of the past quarter-century.

Now consider the issues to which Obama claims these Pennsylvanians “cling” instead of economic ones. One of them, trade, is in fact an economic issue. It’s odd that Obama would criticize Pennsylvanians for “antitrade sentiment,” given that pandering to such sentiment has been a central feature of his campaign. You voters are idiots, and I promise to give you what you want!

Obama’s reference to “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”–which he notably did not repeat in Indiana–seems just a cheap shot, an appeal to his San Francisco audience’s antipathy toward people who aren’t like them. Or perhaps it is evidence that he was listening more attentively than he has admitted to the sermons of his “spiritual mentor” about the “U.S. of KKK A.” …

Underlying this criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns. “Workers of the world, unite!” meets “The Virtue of Selfishness.”

Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed last week stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we’ve got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama’s America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter.

When Feingold and Obama refer dismissively to cultural and moral issues, it is not because they do not take those issues seriously. It is because they would rather not take seriously the arguments on the other side. It is much less intellectually demanding, as well as flattering to oneself and those San Francisco Democrats, to caricature opposing positions as the products of poverty, ignorance and bitterness.

And Pat Buchanan, in Human Events, links Obama’s “bitter Pennsylvania small-towners” remarks to earlier statements, demonstrating that the sympathy Obama expressed in his famous Philadelphia speech to both sides separated by the racial divide is far from evenhanded.

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport. …

A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about America with the remark that, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Barack has now revealed how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation into us and them.

The “us” are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and his Ivy League upbringing. The “them” are the folks in the small towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks, Obama’s attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism. Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for their atavistic beliefs and behavior.

Though neither mocking nor malicious, Barack’s remarks are, nonetheless, steeped in condescension. Inherent in his words is that these folks in Middle Pennsylvania are in need of empathy, education, assistance and perhaps therapy. …

Note, from that Philadelphia address, the highlighted words.

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race … as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything. … They … feel their dreams slipping away … opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

“Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”

In Barack’s mind, black anger and resentment at “racial injustice and inequality” are “legitimate.” But the anger and resentment of white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are born of misperceptions — and of “bogus claims of racism” manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that are the real enemy.

Barack has stumbled into the eternal failing of the left-wing populist. He cannot concede that the anger of white America — that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals — is a legitimate anger.

Tim Blair quoting Dave S.:

Well, I do go a-churchin’ every Sunday with a bunch of bitter folks who complain about how the government is evil and screws them over, and we yell an’ whoop it up when the preacher rails against them Italians and Jews, an’ then we …

Oops, wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s Barack Obama.

In his famous Philadelphia speech on Race, Barack Obama justified the inflammatory statements of his pastor, friend, and former campaign advisor, the man he selected to marry him and to baptize his children, the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright by quoting William Faulkner’s famous statement that “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” pointing to “segregated schools,” “legalized discrimination,” and “a lack of economic opportunity (for) black men” as the historical basis for Wright’s vicious hatred and malicious lies.

(Segregated schools, legalized discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity were) the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

But, as Ronald Kessler points out, there is no truth in such a picture of Jeremiah Wright’s early life at all. Jeremiah Wright never experienced segregated schools. In fact, Wright attended the ultra-elite Central High School, essentially Philadelphia’s equivalent of New York’s Stuyvesant High School, a college preparatory magnet school, the second oldest public secondary school in the United States, and the only high school in the country authorized to grant academic degrees.

In his speech on race, Barack Obama tried to explain away his longtime minister’s denunciations of America by saying that for blacks of his generation, memories of “humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.”

But an examination… of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s background reveals that Obama’s characterization of his upbringing is mythology.

Described by Obama as his sounding board and mentor for more than two decades, Wright was born in Philadelphia in 1941. He lived in a racially mixed section called Germantown, which consisted of homes on broad tree-lined streets in northwest Philadelphia. The owners then were middle-class families.

For 62 years, Wright’s father, the Rev. Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, was pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Germantown. He was one of the first blacks to receive a degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Wright’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher. She was the first black to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High, the first to teach at Germantown High, and the first to teach at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She became vice principal of Girls High in 1968.

Rather than attend the more racially mixed Germantown High School at 40 East High St., Wright traveled a few miles to the elite Central High School at 1700 West Olney Ave., graduating in 1959. Opened in 1838, Central High has a distinguished past and admits only highly-qualified applicants who are privileged to attend from all over the city. It is comparable to the Bronx High School of Science and Boston Latin School, both public schools known for academic excellence.

When Wright attended Central High, the student body was 90 percent white, according to students who attended around the same time. At least three-quarters of the students were Jewish. Former students of the period say racial tension did not exist.

Bill Cosby, who attended the school until transferring to Germantown High, has referred to Central as a “wonderful” school. In contrast to Wright, Cosby has denounced blacks who take refuge in self-pitying victimhood and seek to blame whites for problems in the black community.

“Central High was a marvelous academic environment,” says Tod Mammuth, who graduated in 1965 and is now a Philadelphia-area lawyer. “You had to have high academic credentials to be accepted and a high IQ score. Many later said it was more rigorous than college. We had no racial friction.”

There was no legally-enforced discrimination in 1950s Philadelphia. Nor was Jeremiah Wright embittered as a young man. He attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, but was sufficiently patriotic in 1961 that he dropped out of college, apparently inspired by a speech by John F. Kennedy, to join the US Marine Corps. He subsequently became a Navy Corpsman, and trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wright served on the medical team which cared for President Johnson, and received three letters of commendation.

The radical “God damn America” Mr. Wright is not a product of 1950s segregation, but is clearly instead the result of Wright finishing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Howard University in the late 1960s, where he undoubtedly found a lifetime supply of leftwing politics and racial grievances.

“Lack of economic opportunity?”

Jeremiah Wright could have earned a very respectable middle-class income as a cardiopulmonary technician, but instead he finished college, acquired a master’s degree in English, then a second master’s in Divinity, and finally a doctorate in Divinity. In addition to being pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright has been a professor at two theological seminaries. He has served on the Board of Trustees of Virginia Union University, Chicago Theological Seminary and City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Evangelical Health Systems, and on numerous boards and committees of other religious and civic organizations. Wright has received a Rockefeller Fellowship and seven honorary doctorates.

He can expect a comfortable retirement. Ronald Kessler observes:

In retirement, Wright will continue a life of privilege that dates back to Central High. As a retirement gift, Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is building him a million-dollar home abutting Odyssey Country Club and Golf Course in the nearly all-white Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. The home sits on land the pastor purchased in 2004 for $345,000. In December 2006, Wright sold the land to his church, which took out a $1.6 million mortgage on the property. In April 2007, the church applied for a building permit for the brick and stone structure.

Wright’s new home has 10,340 square feet of space, about four times the size of a typical suburban house. It includes four bedrooms, an elevator, an exercise room, and a four-car garage.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ’68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.