Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/the_odd_choices_in_barack_obam.html
The odd choices in Barack Obama's career
It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting the election
results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and
convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of reaction,
not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the national cable
system. He will lose for one reason above all, one that has been overlooked
in any analysis that I've yet seen. Barack Obama will lose because he is a
flake.
I'm using the term in its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a
screwup, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating
incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energy", as the
Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a
fool with energy is a nightmare".)
Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it. The
chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible
to either understand or explain. These are not the errors of the poor dope
who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins
things out of compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck.
The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to
the ordinary world. It's as if he's the product of a totally different
evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly
at variance to ours. When given a choice between left and right, the flake
goes up -- if not through the 8th dimension. And although there's plenty of
rationalization, there's never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile,
people stop asking.
Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger
story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the American polity,
a member of once-despised minority, works his way by slow degrees to within
arm's length of the presidency itself. That's all well and good -- we need
national myths of exactly that type.
But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each step of
Obama's journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions, actions bizarre
enough to require some effort at explanation, through such efforts have
rarely been offered. It's as if the new Horatio made it to the top by
stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in his path. And we, the
onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put this man in the White
House, are supposed to take this as the normal career path for a successful
chief executive.
What are these incidents? I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me, but
let's go to the videotape.
Here's a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a
choice of positions anywhere in the country. He comes from a state generally
held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that can be
characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the world, with
harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks, but also
Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it off, a state
controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning Democratic machine. So
where does he choose to go?
To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the country.
One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is not. One that
remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S. (Cicero, Al Capone's
old stomping grounds, a suburb that is effectively part of the city, is
completely segregated to this day.) It would be nice to learn which of these
aspects most attracted young Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at the
beginning of the campaign, you'd still be waiting.
And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult. Jeremiah
Wright's Trinity United Church has been turned inside out since the
videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone ever quite
explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he joined up in the first
place. Street cred, so it's claimed. But there are a plethora of black
churches that would have provided him that without the taint of demented
racism that Wright's church offered.
Obama apparently had to swear an oath of belief in "black liberation
theology" when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that sort
that make it a "cult", and not simply a "church".) Did the thought of his
career ever cross his mind? Didn't he realize that church would inevitably
cause him trouble somewhere down the line? That he'd be required to
repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can ask -- but we won't get an
answer.
Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law Review.
This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind of thing that
would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his life, as has been the
case with Obama. But then... he writes nothing for the journal.
Now, let's get this straight: here we have one of the leading university law
journals in the country, one widely cited and read. Entire careers in legal
analysis and scholarship have been founded on appearances in the Review,
including some that have led to the highest courts in the country. Yet
here's an individual who, as editor, could easily place his own work in the
journal -- standard practice, nothing at all wrong with it. But he fails to
do so. And the explanation? There's none that I've heard. We can go even
farther than that, to say that there is no explanation that makes the least
rational sense.
We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he voted
"present" over 120 times. What this means, as far as I've been able to
discover, is that he voted "present" nearly as much as he voted "yes" or
"no".
Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues and
asks them them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not. Some ask, "Is
it a good bill?" and some don't. Either way, they customarily, except in
unusual circumstances, vote "yes' or "no". All except for Barack Obama. And
how did get away with it? How did mollify his colleagues? How did he square
himself with the party bosses? Echo answereth not.
(A good slogan could be made of this: "You can't vote present in the Oval
Office." I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)
We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal, only
to be disappointed. But it's not surprising, really. After all, he was only
there for 143 days.
And there lies one of the keys to Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed out in
a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time in any of
his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is what saved him
from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around long enough for his
errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.
But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for
president is under the microscope, and can't duck anything, as many a
candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic mode,
now is when it would come out. And has it?
The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going for
it -- the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued president,
the media in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped
as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the results have comprised
little more than one fumble after another.
First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it
all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes -- and allowed the revelations
to take on a life of their own before bothering to respond. Even then, his
thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he hadn't been listening for
twenty years) did little to settle the crisis, which instead guttered out on
its own after nearly crippling his campaign. Even months afterward it
threatens to pop back up at any time. The latest word is that Wright
