Mark Steyn (now free from Canadian prosecution for un-PC speech) would prefer a less mystical adversary from the left.

The day after the debate I bumped into two Obama supporters in St Johnsbury, Vermont who said isn’t it great that he’s on course to win. Well, they were cute chicks, and I know an obvious pick-up line when I hear one, so I stopped to chat. God Almighty, it was like reverse Viagra: After ten minutes of Babes For Barack, I never want to meet a female woman of the opposite sex for the rest of my life. Their basic pitch was:

How do you solve a problem? Like, Obama!

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

That’s John McCain’s problem. Traditionally, when an unknown politician emerges on the national scene, it’s a race to define him. Governor Palin is a good example: within days, the coastal sophisticates were mocking her as a chillbilly ditz with a womb that spits out inbred kids faster than the First National Bank of Welfare Swamp issues subprime mortgages. That’s politics as usual: Define your opponent. But Obama is defined by his indefinability. When I pointed out to my Vermont gals that he lives in a swank pad that was part of some shady real estate deal with a convicted fraudster (Tony Rezko), that he entrusted his daughters’ entire religious education to a neo-segregationist anti-American nut who preaches that the government created the AIDS virus to kill black people (Jeremiah Wright), that he attended fundraisers with a political patron who’s an unrepentant terrorist proud of plotting to blow up young ladies just like them at a dance at the Fort Dix military base (William Ayers), when I pointed all this out, they looked at me as if I’d brought a baseball bat to a croquet match. Mere earthbound politicians are defined by their real estate deals and sleazy buddies, but Obama is defined only by his vibe. As his many admirers in France would say, he has a certain je ne sais quoi. And, if you try to pin down quoi precisely, then they don’t want to sais.

Besides, said one of the cuties, it’s racist to try to link him to unsavory white men (Ayers). And black men (Wright). And Arabs (Rezko). And, just to be on the safe side, any dodgy Uzbeks or Papuans who might have been lurking around the greater Chicago area for the last quarter century. The ladies weren’t exactly covering their eyes and going, “Neee-neeee-na-na, can’t hear you,” but the other cutie did begin waving at me her Obama sticker — the one with the giant blue-frosted O embedded in a manicured candy-striped upland — like the villain in the movie trying to hypnotize you with his pocketwatch. I began frantically looking around in hopes that a passing Hare Krishna or Scientologist type could get me out of there. But, no: Gaze into the giant zero of the Obama logo, the hole in the star-spangled donut, the vast fathomless nullity that is the gaping keyhole to the door of utopia. To a sad shriveled Republican cynic, there’s nothing there but the wide open spaces of Obama’s blank resume. But a believer will see therein the healing of the planet and the receding of the oceans. The black hole of Obama will suck you in through the awesome power of its totally cool suckiness.

Read the whole thing.

A prominent news agency is reporting that Antoin Rezko is singing like a bird to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that Illinois democrats are trembling in their boots.

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HillBuzz rumors that Fitzgerald is after the ultimate scalp for his personal collection: Barack Obama’s.

The Sun Times today gave a major clue that Barack Obama will indeed go down with Tony Rezko, sooner rather than later. It looks as though Rezko is about to turn on Alexi Giannoulias, the 30-year old State Treasurer of Illinois (who was elected only because Obama backed him).

Here’s where all the clues are…and then we’ll walk you through the local Chicago politics on how today’s hint by the Sun Times has us convinced, for the first time ever, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could indeed send Barack Obama to jail.

Sounds too good to be true, but we are certainly going to be keeping an eye out for further developments.

Kimberly Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal, admires the showmanship of Barack Obama’s promises.

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world’s most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don’t pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he “cut” zero? Abracadabra! It’s called a “refundable tax credit.” It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don’t. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as “welfare,” but please try not to ruin the show.

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he’ll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation’s biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It’s simple, really. He has a wand.

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You might have even heard that much of today’s financial mess tracks to loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules. Presto! …

Tada!

You can clap now. (Applause. Cheers.) We’d like to thank a few people in the audience. Namely, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has so admirably restrained himself from running up on stage to debunk any of these illusions and spoil everyone’s fun.

Read the whole thing.

In New Republic, David Samuels uses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a touchstone to penetrate beyond the “blank canvas” onto which the American electorate has been invited to project its fantasies and desires to capture glimpses of the real personality of Barack Obama.

Samuels is as ravished by the idea of so good a writer, so fine a speaker, such an intriguing literary creation as Obama ascending to the presidency as many of us are alarmed and horrified by the same portrait of a calculating and angry half-breed in love with power and eager to wreak vengeance for his own birth.

What a subject for Joseph Conrad Obama would have made.

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama’s story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison’s invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election. Crazy right-wing charges that Obama shares the loonier opinions of Dr. Wright or that he is a secret Muslim blend seamlessly into reports of his calls for immediately beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or his promise to sit down with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions, or the fact that he began his political career at Bill Ayers’s house in Chicago, or that his financial backer Tony Rezko was a scummy slumlord who paid for the Obamas to have a new backyard. None of it sticks, because Obama is not that kind of candidate. The campaign uses the Ellisonian condition of invisibility to its advantage while also exerting a powerful form of mental jujitsu on guilty white liberals, a species that Obama knows well: Attacks on the candidate are simply projections of the (racist) mentality of his accusers. As they erase the weirder and more specific points of his sensibility in a blizzard of superlatives, whites create an image of a black superman as a kind of photo-negative image of liberal guilt. …

In a scene (in Dreams of My Father) that owes an obvious debt to Ellison’s famous Battle Royal, in which two black boys are made to fight each other in a boxing ring, the narrator is taken out into the backyard of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro’s small house in Jakarta and is made to put on gloves and fight. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable, and often cruel,” he saw. “My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them.” Emboldened, Obama asks his stepfather if he ever saw anyone killed, and Lolo says yes.

“Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” the young Obama asks.

“Because he was weak,” Lolo answers, instructing his half-American, half-Kenyan stepson in the age-old logic of the world outside sunny Hawaii. Obama’s version of the scene ends with a searing recognition that the white part of his family lives in a fantasy world in which the need to learn such ugly lessons simply does not exist. While Obama’s Third World-ism carries with it a certain assumption of American historical guilt, it should not be confused with the cult of victimization that is still popular on college campuses. Obama identifies with his father, Lolo, and other post-colonial men because they are strong. Dark-skinned men can understand power in a way that white men like his grandfather can’t. If you are not strong, Lolo continues, “be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power–a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse,” Obama wrote, of his mother’s response to the inequities of Indonesian society. “Guilt is a luxury that only foreigners can afford,” her husband Lolo responds. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Obama’s identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal. White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author’s evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. Yet it is hard not to be haunted by the feeling that Obama’s admiration for dark-skinned strength is the mirror image of his personal feelings of weakness and inauthenticity, and that the personality that he has cobbled together out of the historical experience of other men in other time. …

Obama has impaled himself on the horns of a painful dilemma. While the identity that he constructed for himself in his autobiography has allowed him to blossom as a man and as a politician, it bears little resemblance to the conventional narratives of white men who run for president–and contains elements that are likely to frighten off large portions of the electorate, before or after November 4. The story of a man who identifies with a foreign father, and with people who are not Americans, and who does so on the basis of the color of their skin, flies in the face of the simplistic racial pieties that white Americans have embraced since the end of Jim Crow. The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.

Read the whole thing.

New McCain ad discussing Obama’s ties to domestic terrorist William Ayers.

1:40 video

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Ha tip to Captain Ed.

Jack Cashill thinks he recognizes similarities of style in the memoirs of both men.

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black (law review) president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar. …

I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.” In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

Unprovable, but intriguing.

Investors Business Daily points out that the Obama campaign has collected more than $190 million in anonymous contributions.

Newsmax reported last week that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign has collected “the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.”

Federal Election Commission data show that some $222 million of the cash Obama has collected came in the form of contributions of $200 or less, with the Democratic nominee’s campaign identifying the donors of less than $40 million of that sum.

Campaigns may accept donations of less than $200 without providing the donors’ names and addresses in campaign finance reports, but Sen. John McCain’s camp has made its full donor database available on the Internet. Independent campaign finance watchdog organizations have asked the Obama campaign to list all its donors, as well, but it’s refused. What is Obama hiding?

The Republican National Committee is making the most of this disclosure gap, filing a complaint with the FEC, demanding that it investigate the sources of Obama’s thousands of unknown donors and look into possible illegal foreign donations.

Major media have jumped on the story, with Newsweek noting that FEC auditors ordered Obama’s campaign to return large amounts from sources with fake names. One phony was “Good Will,” who listed “Loving” as his employer and “You” as his job. The address given was found to be that of the Austin-based nonprofit Goodwill Industries, which informed the Obama campaign last month that its name was apparently being used fraudulently.

Another made-up name: “Doodad Pro.” His listed address is a Nunda, N.Y., liquor store next to the now-closed Doodad Boutique.

More disturbing was $33,000 paid for Obama campaign T-shirts by two Palestinian brothers from Gaza who listed “Ga.” as their address, which the campaign took to be the state of Georgia. The purchase is considered a campaign donation.

This week, CBS News discovered two Obama contributors who gave $7,722 using fake identities, “Dahsudhu Hdusahfd of Df, Hawaii,” employed by “CZXVC/ZXVZXV” and “Uadhshgu Hduadh of Dhff, Fla.,” who works for “DASADA/SAFASE.”

The Newsmax report noted a separate FEC database of more than 11,500 overseas contributions to Obama totaling $33.8 million, with more than 520 listing their locations as “IR,” a possible abbreviation for Iran. (The Associated Press noted that “In FEC reports, the designation ‘IR’ typically stands for ‘information requested’ because the donor did not supply it.”)

Sixty-three listings had “UK” as the donor’s location. Other locales apparently providing money for Obama included Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing and Fallujah, as well as France and Italy.

Read the whole thing.

A Halloween treat from Iowahawk.

3:41 video

How dare the McCain Campaign make an issue of Barack Obama’s association with American terrorist William Ayres! Just watch the Obama campaign turn the tables by using the leading leftist news agency to charge John McCain with having ties to a group guilty of providing aid to freedom fighters in Nicaragua.

Obviously, throughout the Heartland this morning, the damaging revelation of McCain’s guilt of the crime of anti-Communist associations is bringing home to Americans just how outrageous it is for Republicans to criticize Barack Obama for surrounding himself with Communists.

Sean Hannity last night, on Hannity’s America, did a lengthy survey of Barack Obama’s radical associations and relationships.

Part 1- 8:16 video

Part 2- 6:22 video

Part 3- 8:11 video

Part 4- 7:38 video

Part 5- 6:38 video

Part 6- 6:33 video

William Ayers trampling US flag during 2001 interview in which he says he “acted appropriately” with respect to his participation in terrorist bombings during the Vietnam War era. This interview took place while Ayers was serving with Obama on the Woods Fund Board.

Sarah Palin in fine form.

2:05 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

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More humor: CNN takes a hard look, and, what do you know? concludes Bill Ayers was just some guy who lives in Obama’s neighborhood. Obama has seen less of Ayers since beginning to run for president, and “there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity.”

The election of 2008 reminds Fred Barnes of the election of 1912.

John McCain, restless and emotional, couldn’t resist the temptation to join the battle to rescue our financial markets and save the economy. It was the biggest and most important fight around, bigger and more important than his campaign scrap with Barack Obama. Being engaged in the action–in the arena–is where McCain always wants to be. So he cast his presidential campaign aside, temporarily, and headed back to Washington. The campaign could wait. It might even benefit.

Obama, placid and professorial, had a different reaction to the fight over the bailout. Even before McCain’s maneuver he’d rejected the idea of putting his campaign on hold and joining the legislative battle. He’d be available if needed. An abrupt change in plans, a sudden shift, is not his style. His campaign would go on. He returned to Washington reluctantly. If he hadn’t, his campaign might have suffered.

The contrast here is not only dramatic. It’s unusually revealing about the two candidates and how they might act as president.

There’s an analogy that captures the difference: the warrior and the priest. McCain the warrior, Obama the priest. (If “priest” seems confusing, substitute “professor.”)

McCain has been a player in every major fight, in war and in Washington, for more than four decades. As far back as 1962, he waited in Florida as a Navy pilot for the order to attack during the Cuban missile crisis. (The order never came.) As a senator, he’s never stayed on the sidelines. As a candidate, he likes the rough-and-tumble and unpredictable turns of town hall meetings.

Obama prefers set speeches delivered with the aid of a teleprompter, a reflection of his more aloof and less engaged approach to politics and policy. In Democratic primary debates, he tended to be passive. Where McCain is an activist, Obama is more a visionary. As a senator, he’s involved himself only on the fringes of big issues.

Long before the McCain-Obama race, the warrior and the priest comparison was applied to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in a book by John Milton Cooper Jr., a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. The Warrior and the Priest was published in 1983 and was not widely acclaimed, but it’s become a cult classic.

Cooper described Roosevelt, the warrior, as “exuberant and expansive,” a man who “epitomized the enjoyment of power.” He gained fame “through well-cultivated press coverage of his exploits as a reformer, rancher, hunter, police commissioner, war hero, and engaging personality.” And TR was “associated conspicuously and consistently with one issue above all others–war.” Sounds like McCain.

Wilson, the priest, was “disciplined and controlled,” Cooper wrote. “He seemingly embodied a less joyful exercise of power.” Until he ran for office, Wilson was “a spectator and a bystander.” Roosevelt was a “tireless evangelist for international activism,” but Wilson had “a more pacific vision.” His entry into politics at the highest level was created by his reputation as “a widely regarded public speaker.” Obama isn’t Wilson personified, but he comes close. …

In 1912, Roosevelt and Wilson met in the presidential race. The priest won the election. But there was a complication that hampered TR. There was another candidate, Republican president William Howard Taft, who finished third. Absent Taft’s presence, the warrior would have won. McCain ought to keep this in mind.