You no longer have to take our word for it, now that President
Obama has inadvertently declared the death of liberalism, and thus
of his candidacy. It was a major theme of his acceptance speech at
the Democratic convention. “The path we offer may be harder,” he
conceded a quarter of the way in, “but it leads to a better place.”
And in case anyone misheard, he repeated at the end, “Yes, our path
is harder, but it leads to a better place.” Mr. Obama, you’re
killing us. Normally when someone dies we console ourselves by
saying he’s gone to “a better place.” But Mr. Obama seems insistent
that the final reward for the wretchedness he champions is heaven
on earth. That’s not really how religion works—but tell that to
this Messiah.
Death took many forms at this president’s convention. God
Himself was declared dead, until Mr. Obama reportedly had Him
resurrected, in one of those olive branch gestures everyone not
named Osama bin Laden has come to expect from our commander in
chief. Abortion was defended at every turn, under many guises, as
in Mrs. Obama’s reference to “our own choices about our bodies and
our health care.” The lovely Ms. Sandra Fluke did her usual Vincent
Price imitation in prime time.
Then there was Mr. Obama’s speech itself. Everyone commented on
how Bill Clinton, the Democratic Mephistopheles, had saved the day
for his party, with an oration for the ages. His prepared remarks
came in at some 3,150 words. His actual presentation ran on and on
for more than 5,700 extemporized words. Compare those with the
remarks of the now soul-bereft Mr. Obama the following night.
Prepared text: 4,318 words. Delivered text: 4,455 words, the small
increase caused not by any sparks of life but by several
repetitions of phrase, a few “you knows,” an opening salvo of
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and—this is priceless—a sweet
reference to Joe Biden’s “being a strong and loyal friend.” (Of
course, this was before many pundits declared that Biden of all
people had delivered a better speech than Obama.) In short, a robot
is normally less scripted.
Are we being too hard on Mr. Obama? There are among us those who
still expect him to win. They regard Mitt Romney as too inadequate,
even in the company of Paul Ryan. Or they consider our culture
already too far gone to withstand the media and cultural
protections Mr. Obama enjoys as if they were his birthright. With
the economy as dead as it is, he should be behind by 10 points,
even some liberals say. Yet officially it’s a dead heat, if not a
race in which he’s slightly or maybe solidly ahead.
I’m not buying, but then I’m unable to join with those who will
settle for Mr. Obama’s re-election as an act of mercy. Could it be
that I’m troubled by something about his past? The small fact that
he received much of his formative political education at the hands
of an inveterate Stalinist? Paul Kengor knows the full story better
than anyone. (See p. 34.) Yet those who could look into it prefer
not to, all part of the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the
American people,” as one Hollywood patriot recently put it. Indeed,
it’s a national scandal, well on its way to becoming a national
tragedy. How can a culture of death, if triumphant, end
otherwise.
