Despite Sen. Obama's uplifting, if clever, speech Tuesday, the Democratic Party presidential contest looks more like a contest of racial identity. However, Democratic partisans take at least some comfort in the growing evidence of an impending recession. (What a cheerful party they are.) The hope is for a good deep recession that will drive the fearful American voters into the tender embrace of their presidential standard-bearer -- no matter how bloodied he or she may be at the end of their civil war of a primary season.
And what a season it is turning into. Hillary "Stonewall" Clinton -- the Wellesley Eurosocialist of the 1960s -- has turned herself into the great white hope of the pickup truck and gun rack voters of 2008. I half expect her campaign plane to fly the Confederate flag proudly as it takes her to the Robert E. Lee catfish fry and bourbon night in backwoods Georgia.
Like her political inspiration, Richard Milhous Nixon, she has developed her own Southern strategy of appealing to the resentment of blacks by poor, uneducated Democratic Party white folk. She just received 70 percent of the Mississippi white people's vote and now is reaching out to the old Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo anti-black vote in the City of Brotherly Love. If she loses the nomination fight, she may pull a Strom Thurmond and form a Dixiecrat third-party ticket. Perhaps she could choose Bobby Byrd, the former pride of the Ku Klux Klan, for her running mate.
Not to be outdone in this political mondo-bizarro season, inexperienced, fresh-off-the-turnip-truck Barack Obama is running as a racial healer -- after having been guided spiritually for the past two decades by his mentor and family preacher, a fervent, white-devil-hating, America-damning, Sept. 11-cheering, HIV-conspiracy-believing eccentric. In his speech Tuesday, elegant as it was, Obama seemed to be saying something to the effect of: "Live with it, America; that is the way many people feel." As the speech gets understood more fully, it is likely to polarize the election cycle further. It is a commentary on the sorry state of the Republican Party that one of these two oddities is favored heavily to be elected president of the United States.
Meanwhile, the GOP presumptive nominee, John "I always do it the hard way" McCain, who honorably and correctly has championed the unpopular Iraq war, decided to double down on the proud claim that, as we go into what may be the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, he doesn't know much about economics. Nor does he talk about it much.
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
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