FOR ALL THE NEW-YORKERISH PARANOIA...:

Captain McCain (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 7/29/2008, American Spectator)

Recently an Obama adviser told the New York Review of Books' Elizabeth Drew that "[h]is being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign," whereupon Drew enthuses that this piece of 1960s nonsense is "a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern." Note she is not talking about governing a Chicago slum but rather the United States of America. At times I wonder about Miss Drew's inability to slap her thigh and let out a hearty belly laugh. Something is wrong here.

It is in Obama's origins as a "community organizer" that we see how truly passe he is. He may be 14 years Hillary's junior, but his roots in radicalism are surprisingly similar to hers as an acolyte of Alinsky and a defender of Black Panthers both at the Yale Law School and at a left-wing (viz. Communist!) law firm. Spectator readers have been aware of Hillary's 1960s radicalism since the magazine's earliest reports in 1992. Now even mainstream journalists are reporting it (see the May 19, 2008 Washington Post) upon detecting hypocrisy in her attack on Obama's friendship with Bill Ayers. In the heady days of the 1960s Revolution That Never Came, Ayers was bombing government buildings, among them the Pentagon. Years later in Chicago, while serving with Obama in foundation work, Ayers was brazenly unrepentant. In fact, immediately after 9/11 he announced, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Hillary at least respects her supporters' intelligence enough to lie about her origins. Obama is sufficiently vain to think he can dupe his supporters by presenting his radical origins as progressive, not "the status quo in Washington." Well, he has hoodwinked Miss Drew. Perhaps mainstream media will be as slow in catching on to Obama as they were to catching on to Hillary.

OBVIOUSLY TO the keen political eye, Obama is a standard-issue left-liberal Democrat, with a resume very similar to the Clintons', albeit without the shattered integrity. Last year in The Clinton Crack-Up I predicted that the younger generation of Democrats would challenge Hillary's nomination and that 2008 would be the last battle between the left wing and the right wing of the historic 1960s generation. Ironically, though the younger generation has whipped Clinton, my prediction is being vindicated. The younger generation's 46-year-old candidate with the rants of the Rev. Wright and other antique radicals whistling in his ears is going to give the left-wing youth of the 1960s one more run against their right-wing rivals.

McCain, as the New York Times's Sam Tanenhaus recently observed, is a member of the 1950s generation but with a rebellious streak. Toughened and matured by Vietnam, he returned to America and, as we shall see, took on the Carter administration's neglect of the military. While doing so he fell in with senior movement conservatives such as Sen. John Tower and with young 1960s movement conservatives such as Dick Allen, later Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, Ed Feulner, later the head of the Heritage Foundation, and John Lehman, President Reagan's secretary of the navy. All support him today. With some anomalies, McCain's platform will be an amalgam of their work. My prediction that the 2008 presidential race will be the last great battle between the 1960s left and the 1960s right is holding up, though the standard-bearer from the left is by 1960s demographics wet behind the ears and the standard-bearer from the right is long in the tooth.

...about how Senator Obama is a victim of racism and Islamophobia, the actual critique from conservatives is that he's a standard issue liberal, indistinguishable from a Stevenson, Dukakis, Kerry or Hillary.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2008 9:08 AM