WASHINGTON — Anyone who has followed politics studiously over
the years is aware that there are gifted politicians who for
whatever reason eventually find their campaigns haunted. I do not
mean haunted by accidental events or by a clod or two at campaign
headquarters. I mean haunted. I mean visited by the weird,
by supernatural pranksters, by what our Islamic friends call
djinni.
Clearly, after months of suave upward mobility, Senator Barack
Obama (D-Ill.) is now in this unfortunate condition. The bizarre is
his companion. The paranormal is a constant possibility. Though the
members of the press are too stuffy to mention it, recent setbacks
to his campaign are not normal.
The gifted young senator appears in San Francisco amongst his
fellow moral and intellectual colossi. For an instant he lets down
his guard. In this closed meeting he blurts out what he really
thinks, and somehow his remarks are taped. A “friendly” website
posts his remarks, and all hell breaks loose. Of a sudden every
politically alert American knows that in San Francisco (of all
places!) Obama explained that religion is the opiate of the gun
nuts, who have been out of work and living angrily in jerkwater for
“twenty-five years.”
How did that tape ever get out, and why would Obama’s friends at
that website not recognize its potential for ruin? Or consider a
more recent and even more bizarre interlude. Senator Obama is
having breakfast in Scranton, Pennsylvania. A reporter asks for his
reaction to former president Jimmy Carter’s meeting with the thugs
of Hamas, and Obama waffles. Perhaps, that is not so surprising,
for he has frequently waffled along the campaign trail. But now
comes the paranormal part. The wretch waffled while actually
eating a waffle—reportedly a Belgian waffle,
not even an American waffle. Weirder still, Obama acknowledged his
waffle, exclaiming to the reporter: “Why can’t I just eat my
waffle?” and “Just let me eat my waffle.”
After the Pennsylvania primary I suspect Obama’s odd occurrences
will multiply. There will be freakish moments as there have been
with other ill-starred leaders, reminiscent of Jimmy Carter being
attacked by an amphibious rabbit in 1979 or Richard Nixon
photographed while strolling along a sandy beach wearing wing-tip
shoes before impeachment was even contemplated. The media’s focus
of Obama’s campaign will change from their recent absorption with
his fabulously charismatic inanity to speculation on his next
calamitous occasion. When might he next bump his head on a waffle
or while exiting an airplane? Remember when President Gerald Ford
captured headlines by bumping his head? For Ford, it was the best
press he had gotten in months.
I do not anticipate that Senator Obama’s diabolical infestation
will receive the extensive media coverage that was accorded to
Carter, Ford, and Nixon. The journalists esteem him. They believe
he is different from the common politician they encounter. He says
he is, and they believe it. He is for “change,” for “community,”
for all Americans to “come together.” That does not sound very
different from anyone else who has sought the Democratic
presidential nomination, but the mainstream journalists forget
things. They also ignore indelicacies, for instance, the Obama
supporters now under indictment, at least one of whom has some
disturbing Middle Eastern financial sources. The journalists also
have paid little attention to the fact that in 2005 the newly
elected senator from Illinois bought a $1.65 million dollar house
for $300,000 under the asking price.
Actually, I dissent from my journalistic colleagues’ belief that
Obama is different. He has been a political hustler all his life,
much as the Clintons have and many other Democratic miracle workers
too. When he graduated from Columbia University he came to Chicago
and at 23 became a community organizer in a poor Chicago
neighborhood whose residents’ viewed him as a slick outsider, which
he was. Here, again, we see him as not unlike the left-wing
Clintons of the late 1960s or Jean-Francois Kerry or Al Gore. Soon
Obama returned east for a Harvard Law School degree, after which he
immediately entered Chicago politics. He has been in politics all
his adult life. How does that make him different from other top
Democrats?
Well, allow me to return to that Scranton, Pennsylvania waffle.
Certainly the Clintons, and probably most of the other erstwhile
Democratic presidential contenders, would have the good sense not
to mention it while waffling before the press. But then none of
these contemporary Democrats has Obama’s problem with the
paranormal. Perhaps this is a matter for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s
professional services.
