We’ve heard about how much Barack Obama is going to be able to unite the country and the divided government for months now. He’s going to be the great unifier, coming into office on a wave of hope, change, and general niceness.
I’m all for all that.
But what I don’t understand, and have never been able to understand, is how a down the left line hard-line leftist liberal is going to unite the government in some show of cross-party unity.
That seems to be catching on as a point of contention with Obama’s campaign, now. Warner Todd Hudson encapsulates everything I’ve been saying for months in a very good post on Stop the ACLU today. Below is the part I found myself nodding at the most.
He claims to want to solve our partisan strife, doesn’t he? He claims he wants to work with Congress instead of against the other party. He is supposedly the man of “change” and “hope.” If you do a web search for “Obama reach across the aisle” you’ll get thousands upon thousands of hits. The general perception that Obama has succeeded in fostering is that he does, indeed, want to “reach across the aisle.”
Unfortunately for all of us, it is all a giant lie.
As a legislator, Barack Obama has absolutely no history of working with anyone “across the aisle.” There are instances when he has occasionally made statements that have seemed to auger support for an idea that is supported by the Republicans, but when ever it has come down to actual votes, his is always a straight up, far left, liberal vote. He has never worked with anyone on the other side of the aisle on anything. And there is no reason to suspect he’ll suddenly start such a practice upon stepping into the White House, either.
Worse, we have seen the sort of people he’s surrounded himself with and none of them are folks on the other side of the aisle. He is close friends with racists (Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan), he has the support of aging hippies who were domestic terrorists in their youth (William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn), he has even invited a young fellow who was mentioned as a communist while at Harvard to be his official campaign blogger (Sam Graham-Felsen). Then we get to his wife who is famous for having said that she was never “proud of America” until her hubby ran for president. She has also said things to disparage capitalism and called the country “mean.” But does Obama have any close associates and supporters who are Republicans, even moderate ones? No. Not a single one. And further more, he never has.
Then we add this little fact: Obama has rarely stood up to be counted on much of anything in his whole political career. He has never been a major activist for any cause. He has never led a movement or pushed an organized, identifiable agenda. He has no past of true leadership. His past is almost a blank slate.
While I’m not sure about his position on race relations and what an Obama presidency would do for them, I agree wholeheartedly on his stance on reaching across the aisle. Considering his liberal voting record and radical associations, what precedent is there in the Barack Obama history that will ensure that we won’t just have a hard leftist in office as opposed to a hard rightist?
It’s something worth pondering in the upcoming days as Obama becomes the candidate and the mainstream media starts pushing his campaign talking points as truth without any question.