The past few months as the campaign unfolded, I listened for Mr. Obama to speak thoughtfully about the life issues, including abortion. Our last Democratic president knew what that issue was, and knew by nature how to speak of it. Bill Clinton famously said, over and over, that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare." The "rare" mattered. It set a tone, as presidents do, and made an important concession: You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn't good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals' minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so . . . abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. "That's above my pay grade." Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that. ~ Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal article Obama and the Runaway Train
George F. Will, Ken Adelman, Frank Fukuyama, David Brooks--these are just a few names on the list of eminent experts who have declared that Sarah Palin is what's wrong with the Republican Party. Even if we were to add all their prestigious names to the list, however, it wouldn't be nearly as long as the line of people who stood in the cold wind of Pennsylvania to see Mrs. Palin last week.
What Mr. Brooks and the others are saying is that these people who spend hours in the cold October wind for a chance to see Sarah Palin are too stupid to know what's good for them. "Listen to us," say the political experts.
Yes, the experts always know best. In September 2002, Mr. Will advocated "preemptive" war with Iraq, with a nuclear "mushroom cloud" as the alternative. Now, he denounces as "carelessness" the war he once urged, lumping Mrs. Palin into the same category of Republican error. Mr. Fukuyama agitated for war with Iraq much earlier, signing onto the Project for the New American Century's 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for "a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Brooks warned that "the fog of peace" was blinding critics to the "menace" of Saddam. Among the advocates of invasion, Mr. Adelman took the cake, so to speak, by predicting a "cakewalk" in Iraq."Cakewalk Ken" and Mr. Fukuyama have now declared their support for Barack Obama, citing Mrs. Palin prominently among their reasons.
Among the facts the experts ignore is that the Republican Party was in deep political trouble long before John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. The total popular vote in the Democratic primaries (36 million) was 70% larger than in the GOP primaries (21 million), and McCain's 9.9 million primary votes represented just 47% of the Republican total. On Aug. 29, when Mrs. Palin was announced in Columbus, Ohio, the Gallup daily tracking poll showed Obama with an eight-point lead. Twelve days later, the GOP ticket had surged ahead by five points.
...
The experts don't believe in miracles, but they do believe in polls, and they were no doubt struck dumb Thursday when an NBC poll showed Mr. Obama's lead in Pennsylvania to be exactly equal to the survey's four-point margin of error...Republicans would be wise to pay more attention to the people, and less to the experts.
~ the WSJ article "Stickin' With the Hockey Mom", first published in The American Spectator.
When Obama's lies, mistakes, omissions, 15-plus flip-flops and character-damning choice of associates and mentors (yes, he did say Wright had been a mentor, before he said he wasn't), and Joe Biden's stupid mistakes, gaffes, false-lunchbucket-Joe mantle, drunken embarrassments and repeat stupidity of multiple plagiarisms get as much media and public-citizen attention as anything Sarah Palin or John McCain has said or done wrong, then maybe, just maybe, you can count us out of McCain's and Palin's camp.
Those putting down Palin, when you have so much garbage in your own home and choose to remain ignorant of it, represent the amusing epitome of sanctimonious, self-righteous audacity.
As a wise, skeptic friend recently said, "YOU GET THE GOVERNMENT YOU DESERVE." And for those voting Obama-Biden, you will get the government you deserve. It will not be what you think it is.
Also if you own any stocks or mutual funds, I suggest you sell off today or early tomorrow.
If Obama wins, the stock market will be in the toilet Wednesday even bigger than it has been in recent months.
POSTSCRIPT/UPDATE, POST-ELECTION, NOV. 5, 2008: "Stocks Plunge as Investors Ponder Obama Presidency"
