Hillary Clinton is wrong on most issues, but she is right about Barack Obama. Obama is an empty dashiki; he has no experience in any job remotely resembling the presidency of the United States. Two terms in the Illinois legislature just won't do; and a few years in the US Senate, running for President, is no experience at all.
When he departs from that magnificent speech on Hope, he tends to fumble the ball. Ideologically Senator Obama is boringly predictable. He seems smart enough to develop his thinking, but he just hasn't spent the necesssary years doing it. As a result, Senator Obama is superficial on foreign and domestic policy.
He's kootchey-koo on foreign policy in the face of fanatical opponents like Ahmadi-Nejad, Kim Jong Il, and an Al Qaida that has now found safe haven to regroup in Waziristan; Obama does the standard class envy demagogy on economics, stomping on NAFTA right alongside Hillary. Instead of HillaryCare he will bestow ObamaCare on a grateful America, and push taxation over that crucial 50% mark that locks in socialist politics for good. That is why he must run a content-free stealth campaign.
It's true that Obama has done the country a huge favor by finally busting the Bubba Bubble. All over the US outraged liberals are now sounding exactly like conservatives did ten years ago. In 1996 Bob Dole asked "where's the outrage?" Well, the Left has just discovered the outrage, a decade too late. They've just grokked that the Dubious Duo of Bill and Hillary are ruthless, manipulative and totally selfish. Welcome to reality, folks!
But now the Dems, who never, ever learn, are intent on installing a new First Couple in the Presidency, with astonishing similarities to the Clintons: Obama is a great Pied Piper for millions of love-hungry worshippers, just like Bill Clinton was in 1992; and Mrs. Obama has all the Republicans on her enemies' list. Bottom line: The Obamas are just the Clintons all over again.
By all accounts Senator Obama is a well-meaning person. But that fits the stereotype of the well-meaning liberal who just ends up sowing destruction and chaos. Jimmy Carter anybody? The Left always begins from false premises -- about human nature, and about the enemies of civilization --- and robotically comes to the same false conclusions.
Mrs. Obama, as it turns out, doesn't like capitalism. She contrasts the "money-making industries" with the "helping industries." Even after going to super-wealthy, super-high-tuition institutions like Princeton and Harvard Law, she hasn't gotten the simple fact that the "money makers" are the very same folks who create an economy powerful enough to subsidize the "helpers" -- and that the "helpers" themselves are amazingly interested in making a ton of money: Viz., the Clintons, the Kerrys, the Gores, and yes, even the rich Obamas. We don't need a wishful thinker in the presidency. We need somebody who can be trusted to do the toughest and most important job in the world, and to do it supremely well. In any other job search we look at past performance to predict future actions. It's the only reliable predictor. But if there is no past performance, we have nothing but Hope.
About half the voters are going to vote for Hope. It's just their mentality. They live in Hope, and as Samuel Johnson remarked, in their case Hope always triumphs over Experience.
Vladimir Lenin said it, and it bears repeating. "'The West are wishful thinkers. We will give them what they want to think.'' Of course he meant the Western Left. That's how fat Western pilgrims to the starving Soviet Union were constantly bamboozled over seventy years. The Left still hasn't figured out what went wrong. Lenin's insight is still the standard playbook for politicians of the Left to bamboozle their followers. Nothing has changed. Obama = Clinton = Kerry = Gore = Mondale = Dukakis = the New York Times Editorial Board. Most human beings cannot tolerate too much reality, and the coming election, as always, is about reality versus fantasy.
There are no conservatives and there are no liberals. There are only tough-minded and tender-minded folk, as William James divided up humanity. The tender-minded, wishful-dreaming, cotton-headed liberals must not be allowed to steer the ship of state in very, very dangerous times.
It's as simple as that.