A Hope for America

Peggy Noonan

The nation's mood is marked by a sense that our great institutions are faltering and our leaders have gone astray. Author Peggy Noonan on heightened anxiety, the rough election and what the country needs now.

Where is America?
America is on line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proven innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention.

America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don't you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks, but does not say.

And, as always America thinks: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and embarrassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would even admit privately that all this harassment is only the government's way of showing that it is "fair," of demonstrating that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.

All the frisking, beeping, and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that politics has lessened everything, including human dignity. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone else, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the cellphone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate silk blouse beneath the removed jacket, praying that nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.

America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency about the latest polls. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willy Lomans, dragging our wheelies through acres of airport, walking through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product.

No one in crowded Gate 14 looks up to see what happened with the poll. No one. Wolf talks to the air.

Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races and ages, brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called. Our town appears, the plane is boarded, the town disappears. An hour passes, a new town begins. This is the way of modern life. We live in magic and are curiously unillusioned.

Gate 14 doesn't think any of the candidates is going to make their lives better. But Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grown-ups of America and must play the role and do the job.

But here's something they notice, we notice. Our leaders are now removed from all this, removed from life as we live it each day.

There is as I write broad resentment toward President Bush, and here is one reason: a fine and bitter sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where Grandma's hip replacement is setting off the beeper over here and the child is crying over there. And of course as a former president, with the entourage and the private jets, he never will.

Nor will Bill Clinton, nor the senators and leaders who fly by private jet.

I bet a lot of Americans, most Americans, don't like it. I'm certain Gate 14 doesn't.

All this is part of the mood of the moment. It is marked in part by a sense that our great institutions are faltering, that they've forgotten the mission; that the old America in which we were raised is receding, and something new and quite unknown is taking its place; that our leaders have gone astray. There is even a feeling, a faint sense sometimes that we have been relegated to the role of walk-on in someone else's drama, that as citizens we are crucial and yet somehow...extraneous.

But we are Americans, and mean to make it better. We long to put the past few years behind us, move on, and write something good on the page we sense turning.

In all this I am not saying, as Rodney King did, Why can't we all just get along? We can't because we're human: something's wrong with us. But we can do better.

I don't mean "we must outlaw politics," or "splitting the difference is always best." Politics is a great fight and must be a fight; that is its purpose. We are a great democratic republic, and we struggle with great questions. But we can approach things in a new way, see in a new way, speak in a new way. We can fight honorably and in good faith, while -- and this is the hard one -- both summoning and assuming good faith on the other side.

To me it is not quite a matter of "rising above partisanship," though that can be a very good thing. It's more a matter of remembering our responsibilities and reaffirming what it is to be an American.

If nothing else, this means we must now have our fights over big issues, issues of real consequence that are pertinent to the moment we're in. We shouldn't be fighting and hitting each other over the head over little things, stupid things, needlessly chafing ones. When I would think of this the past few years I'd always return to one thing, a prime example of the old way of doing politics. This was the movement, now quiescent, to alter the Constitution of the United States to outlaw...flag burning. Imagine changing that great document for such a stupid thing. As if it meant anything if an idiot burned a flag; as if a lot of idiots were even burning flags -- which they weren't, and aren't. I called it a movement, but of course it wasn't: it was a political game played by one team in order to embarrass the other. "He doesn't love our flag -- he won't even protect it!" Boo! goes the crowd.

And yet the oddest thing is...the crowd knows it's being played. They know their buttons are being pushed. And this doesn't leave them feeling more inspired by, more trusting in, the system. So much of our silliness is, in the end, destructive.

And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace -- a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.

So where are we now? I yank this into the present to look at the landscape on which a rise to the challenge is possible, but not, I'm afraid, very likely.

It is autumn, and America is picking a president. It has been exciting. The whole year was confounding, putting the professional political class in its place, leaving the experts scratching their heads, and giving us all the feeling -- so precious, so rare -- that the people are in charge. They make the decisions, not pollsters. And you never knew what they'd do next. John McCain was over and done a year ago, out of money and out of luck. And then: he wins the nomination. Barack Obama was unknown and outmatched a year ago, sure to be a victim of someone else's inevitability. Well. Nothing is inevitable. And he wins the nomination.

A year of marvels. And now two men, McCain and Obama, each worthy in his way of admiration, battle it out. Neither seems by nature inclined toward brute, gut-player politics. One, McCain, had been hurt by it in the past, his presidential prospects in part done in by it in the Republican primaries of 2000. He has a temper, and at some point he'll have shown it, but the ugly road, I think, embarrasses his pride. The other, Obama, seems temperamentally not inclined to be a killer, to encourage the dark side of politics. It's not his history: he took down a machine without raising his voice.

However.

Something tells me that the election will show itself to be rough indeed, if not because of the candidates themselves then very much because of their surrogates or would-be surrogates -- a million freelancers and operatives, YouTube Fellinis, and political action committees.

Two huge teams are in a massive public brawl in an era in which the Internet has liberated everyone in the country from the old restrictions, the old establishment, the old, encrusted media monopoly.

YouTube has yielded, this year, the most moving and wittiest advertisements about each of the candidates. Professional political consultants with their piece of the buy didn't produce them, artists did. For Obama, it was the video by will.i.am, with the Obama speech and the snatches of song made from his words. More than anything else this year, it captured the feeling behind his movement. The McCain video, alas, was anti-McCain, and keyed off the will.i.am video. It featured young people and artists taking snatches of McCain speeches, turning them into song, and then starting to...freak out as they listened to the words. It made you laugh out loud. Anyway, one of the untold stories of the year is the failure of the political professionals to compete with the art and brightness of the nonprofessionals.

All of this will be part of the background music of the 2008 campaign. So: it's probably gotten mean out there.

And of course it is not only the result of technology, and partisanship, and human mischief. Some of it has been the result of the past seven years, that trying time with which we have not fully come to grips. Some of the personalities and circumstances that shaped the era are about to ease off the stage. In some way we're about to turn the page. Maybe John McCain or Barack Obama can help us write something good on it.

Yet the economic crisis brings a new question, only recently being articulated, and I know because when I mention it, people go off like rockets. It is: Do you worry that neither candidate is up to it? Up to the job in general? Is either McCain or Obama actually up to getting us through this and other challenges? I haven't heard a single person say, "Yes, my guy is the answer." A lot of shrugging is going on out there. The big shrug is a read not only on the men but on the moment.

The overarching political question: In a time of heightened anxiety, will people inevitably lean toward the older congressional vet, the guy who's been around forever? Why take a chance on the new, young man at a time of crisis? Wouldn't that be akin to injecting an unstable element into an unstable environment? There's a lot at stake.

Or will people have the opposite reaction? I've had it, the system has been allowed to corrode and collapse under seven years of Republican stewardship. Throw the bums out. We need change. Obama may not be experienced, but that may help him cut through. He's not compromised.

The election, still close, still unknowable, may well hinge on whether people conclude A or B.

—Adapted from "Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now," by Peggy Noonan. Copyright 2008 by Peggy Noonan. Published by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Peggy Noonan is the author of seven books. This is adapted from her next book, "Patriotic Grace," which will be published next week.

Beware of Bailout

Mark Skousen

“It's a terrible idea. It's undemocratic. It's bad economic policy, and it's bad social policy. And it has a very little chance of solving the problem in a meaningful way.” -- Allan Meltzer, Carnegie-Mellon University

Beware of politicians or business leaders who say, “I’m a firm believer in the free market, but…”

“But” thinkers have come out of the woodwork during this financial crisis: Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett proposes tax increases…..Patrick Byrne, the new CEO of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation who calls himself a “classical liberal,” demands that Congress impose a transactions tax on every stock market transaction to stem speculation. (This so-called “Tobin Tax,” named after Yale economist James Tobin, would reduce liquidity and make buying and selling stock more difficult.)

Then, of course, there’s Secretary Hank Paulson himself. A former CEO of Goldman Sachs, he professes to be a strong free-marketeer. "But we must act or face disaster," he warns. Then he proposes the largest power grab in history. Have you seen Section 8 of the bailout plan? It states: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

If this stands, it is giving incredible and unprecedented dictatorial power to the Secretary of the Treasury.

Fortunately, there are a few sane voices out there. I was delighted to see that Allan Meltzer, a famous monetary expert from Carnegie-Mellon, lambasted the $700 billion bailout in a PBS interview yesterday.

Meltzer is writing a multi-volume history of the Federal Reserve. He drew upon his extensive background as a monetary historian to criticize Secretary Paulson’s handling of the credit crisis. “I've listened to governments tell me for 40 years that there was a crisis and the world was going to fall apart if we didn't do this or that,” he said. “But there have been a few cases where they weren't able to do that. One was the commercial paper crisis in 1970. There have been several others. The world did not fall apart. Last week, we had Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. Within three days, most of the assets were sold.”

AIG had three offers to buy the company before the government took over and offered a better deal. Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America when it ran into trouble. Last night it was announced that JP Morgan bought Washington Mutual’s deposits.

Meltzer concludes, “We need to get the government's hand out of this, and let's see whether we can't get a market solution.”

Given that monetarists often favor intervention during a crisis, it's great to see Meltzer taking a strong laissez faire stance.

Where's J. P. Morgan When We Need Him?

I too am a historian of finance, and one of my favorite stories is the Panic of 1907. It has some similarity to the current situation, because in 1907 there were some runs on the banks and the credit markets froze up. J. P. Morgan, the quasi central banker, invited all the major bankers in New York to his library, locked the doors, and said he wouldn't let anyone out until they had raised the funds to end the credit crunch. It worked.

Secretary Paulson and chairman Bernanke should do the same and not depend on Congress. They should invite all the major bankers to a meeting in New York, and raise capital to solve the liquidity crunch. They might invite Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan to help out. Meltzer suggests the Treasury might help in lending funds if necessary: “If they're going to do something, then what they ought to do is make loans, which the financial institutions have to repay with interest. And if you think -- that's an idea which the Chileans have used in a bigger crisis than this for them in 1982, and it worked for them.” But it should not nationalize banks and mortgage companies, and get involved in the commercial banking business.

History is holding its breath. In the next couple of days, we will witness one of the greatest tests of American will, whether we will stand for economic freedom or doom ourselves to a new form of tyranny.

Mr. Skousen is a financial economist, author and university professor. He has been the editor of the financial advice newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, for 26 years. Two of his books highlight Milton Friedman's career: "The Making of Modern Economics" and "Vienna and Chicago, Friends or Foes?." Check out his latest book, "EconoPower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World." He is the producer of FreedomFest, the world's largest gathering of free minds, in Las Vegas every July.

The Audacity of Dopes

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Early in the afternoon of Friday 26th September of 2008 We The People are contemplating the sad evidence of the sheer incompetence of our government. Not long ago Sen. Obama chastised us all for not being able to speak French beyond "Mercy beaucoup." If Mr. Senator ever reads this humble page I would like to ask him: Le réalité et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n'est-ce pas?--I am sure our Harvard educated would-be "Monseiur le Président" will be able to respond in la belle langue française.

Sen. Obama tried to to show how regular Americans lack the kind of refinement required in the era of the global economy. Oh dear! What a sad spectacle we are! Yet, here's a little reflection for you all: What do you think the whole world thinks of our political class? Warren Buffet compared this economic debacle to Pearl Harbor. Can we really compare the response of our political class of 1941 to the circus we are forced to contemplate in our TV sets these days?

Who should be hanged on the deck of the Missouri for perpetrating this mess? Don't ask me for names. I have a list. Most of the people in that list are Freddie & Fannie beneficiaries who are now trying to make us pay for their own mistakes.

Are you afraid of an economic meltdown? I am not. I will have to go to work every day of my life anyway. May be if enough financial and insurance companies disappear we will get a fair deal from the survivors for a change.

Let the rascals fall. The American people will survive on ingenuity and hard work. We will figure out a way out of this mess without any "government" help. Enough of this. We had eight years of an incompetent presidency and an incompetent Congress.

It is time for change. Let us vote new blood, let us get involved. If Obama, Pelosi and the Democratic Party need to save the world economy they can go and ask France for money. They owe us big.

A tout a lair!

The Value of Service

Lt. Col. Mark Murphy USAF—354th Maintenance Group Deputy Commander

8/15/2008 - EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska—I learned a big lesson on service Aug. 4, 2008, when Eielson had the rare honor of hosting President Bush on a refueling stop as he traveled to Asia.

It was an event Eielson will never forget—a hangar full of Airmen and Soldiers getting to see the Commander in Chief up close, and perhaps even shaking his hand. An incredible amount of effort goes into presidential travel because of all of the logistics, security, protocol, etc ... so it was remarkable to see Air Force One land at Eielson on time at precisely 4:30 p.m.—however, when he left less than two hours later, the President was 15 minutes behind schedule.

That's a big slip for something so tightly choreographed, but very few people know why it happened. Here's why.

On Dec. 10, 2006, our son, Shawn, was a paratrooper deployed on the outskirts of Baghdad. He was supposed to spend the night in camp, but when a fellow soldier became ill Shawn volunteered to take his place on a nighttime patrol—in the convoy's most exposed position as turret gunner in the lead Humvee. He was killed instantly with two other soldiers when an IED ripped through their vehicle.

I was thinking about that as my family and I sat in the audience listening to the President's speech, looking at the turret on the up-armored Humvee the explosive ordnance disposal flight had put at the edge of the stage as a static display.

When the speech was over and the President was working the crowd line, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see a White House staff member. She asked me and my wife to come with her, because the President wanted to meet us.

Stunned, we grabbed our two sons that were with us and followed her back into a conference room. It was a shock to go from a crowded, noisy hangar, past all of those security people, to find ourselves suddenly alone in a quiet room.

The only thing we could hear was a cell phone vibrating, and noticed that it was coming from the jacket Senator Stevens left on a chair. We didn't answer.

A short time later, the Secret Service opened the door and President Bush walked in. I thought we might get to shake his hand as he went through. But instead, he walked up to my wife with his arms wide, pulled her in for a hug and a kiss, and said, 'I wish I could heal the hole in your heart.' He then grabbed me for a hug, as well as each of our sons. Then he turned and said, 'Everybody out.'

A few seconds later, the four of us were completely alone behind closed doors with the President of the United States and not a Secret Service agent in sight.

He said, 'Come on, let's sit down and talk.' He pulled up a chair at the side of the room, and we sat down next to him. He looked a little tired from his trip, and he noticed that his shoes were scuffed up from leaning over concrete barriers to shake hands and pose for photos. He slumped down the chair, completely relaxed, smiled, and suddenly was no longer the President - he was just a guy with a job, sitting around talking with us like a family member at a barbeque.

For the next 15 or 20 minutes, he talked with us about our son, Iraq, his family, faith, convictions, and shared his feelings about nearing the end of his presidency. He asked each of our teenaged sons what they wanted to do in life and counseled them to set goals, stick to their convictions, and not worry about being the 'cool' guy.

He said that he'd taken a lot of heat during his tenure and was under a lot of pressure to do what's politically expedient, but was proud to say that he never sold his soul. Sometimes he laughed, and at others he teared up. He said that what he'll miss most after leaving office will be his role as Commander in Chief.

One of the somber moments was when he thanked us for the opportunity to meet, because he feels a heavy responsibility knowing that our son died because of a decision he made. He was incredibly humble, full of warmth, and completely without pretense. We were seeing the man his family sees.

We couldn't believe how long he was talking to us, but he seemed to be in no hurry whatsoever. In the end, he thanked us again for the visit and for the opportunity to get off his feet for a few minutes. He then said, 'Let's get some pictures.' The doors flew open, Secret Service and the White House photographer came in, and suddenly he was the President again. We posed for individual pictures as he gave each of us one of his coins, and then he posed for family pictures. A few more thank yous, a few more hugs, and he was gone.

The remarkable thing about the whole event was that he didn't have to see us at all. If he wanted to do more, he could've just given a quick handshake and said, 'Thanks for your sacrifice.' But he didn't - he put everything and everyone in his life on hold to meet privately with the family of a Private First Class who gave his life in the service of his country.

What an incredible lesson on service. If the President of the United States is willing to drop everything on his plate to visit with a family, surely the rest of us can do it. No one is above serving another person, and no one is so lofty that he or she can't treat others with dignity and respect.

We often think of service in terms of sacrificing ourselves for someone in a position above us, but how often do we remember that serving someone below us can be much more important? If you're in a leadership capacity, take a good look at how you're treating your people, and remember that your role involves serving the people you rely on every day.

The Party's Over

Patrick Buchanan

What the Greatest Generation handed down to us -- the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away

The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people's wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another.

The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The "Omnipower" and "Indispensable Nation" we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history.

Seizing on the crisis, the left says we are witnessing the failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism.

This is nonsense. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Gordon Gecko ("Greed Is Good!") capitalism. What we are witnessing is what happens to a prodigal nation that ignores history, and forgets and abandons the philosophy and principles that made it great.

A true conservative cherishes prudence and believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a self-reliant republic. He believes in saving for retirement and a rainy day, in deferred gratification, in not buying on credit what you cannot afford, in living within your means.

Is that really what got Wall Street and us into this mess -- that we followed too religiously the gospel of Robert Taft and Russell Kirk?

"Government must save us!" cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government -- the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy?

For years, we Americans have spent more than we earned. We save nothing. Credit card debt, consumer debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt -- all are at record levels. And with pensions and savings being wiped out, much of that debt will never be repaid.

Our standard of living is inevitably going to fall. For foreigners will not forever buy our bonds or lend us more money if they rightly fear that they will be paid back, if at all, in cheaper dollars.

We are going to have to learn to live again without our means.

The party's over

Up through World War II, we followed the Hamiltonian idea that America must remain economically independent of the world in order to remain politically independent.

But this generation decided that was yesterday's bromide and we must march bravely forward into a Global Economy, where we all depend on one another. American companies morphed into "global companies" and moved plants and factories to Mexico, Asia, China and India, and we began buying more cheaply from abroad what we used to make at home: shoes, clothes, bikes, cars, radios, TVs, planes, computers.

As the trade deficits began inexorably to rise to 6 percent of GDP, we began vast borrowing from abroad to continue buying from abroad.

At home, propelled by tax cuts, war in Iraq and an explosion in social spending, surpluses vanished and deficits reappeared and began to rise. The dollar began to sink, and gold began to soar.

Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load.

John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or "bomb, bomb, bomb," with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere.

Who are we kidding?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end.

The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars.

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system.

Notice who is managing the crisis. Not our elected leaders. Nancy Pelosi says she had nothing to do with it. Congress is paralyzed and heading home. President Bush is nowhere to be seen.

Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.

An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. We are just spectators.

What the Greatest Generation handed down to us -- the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away.

Obama Is Stoking Racial Antagonism

Rush Limbaugh

I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.

Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.

Here's the relevant part of the Spanish-language television commercial Mr. Obama is running in Hispanic communities:

"They want us to forget the insults we've put up with . . . the intolerance . . . they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much."

Then the commercial flashes two quotes from me: ". . . stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and "You shut your mouth or you get out!"

And then a voice says, "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote . . . and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain . . . more of the same old Republican tricks."

Much of the media that is uninterested in Mr. Obama's connections to unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright have so far gone along with the attempt to tie me to Mr. McCain. But Mr. McCain and I have not agreed on how to address illegal immigration. While I am heartened by his willingness to start by securing the borders, it is no secret that we have fundamental differences on illegal immigration.

And more to the point, these sound bites are a deception, and Mr. Obama knows it. The first sound bite was extracted from a 1993 humorous monologue poking fun at the arguments against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Here's the context:

"If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine 'cause those are the kinds of jobs Nafta is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."

My point, which is obvious, was that the people who were criticizing Nafta were demeaning workers, particularly low-skilled workers. I was criticizing the mind-set of the protectionists who opposed the treaty. There was no racial connotation to it and no one thought there was at the time. I was demeaning the arguments of the opponents.

As for the second sound bite, I was mocking the Mexican government's double standard -- i.e., urging open borders in this country while imposing draconian immigration requirements within its own borders. Thus, I took the restrictions Mexico imposes on immigrants and appropriated them as my own suggestions for a new immigration law.

Here's the context for that sound bite: "And another thing: You don't have the right to protest. You're allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. You're a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you're going to jail."

At the time, I made abundantly clear that this was a parody on the Mexican government's hypocrisy and nobody took it otherwise.

The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.

We've made much racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency.

Will McCain Waste Palin?

Daniel Henninger

The media is turning the news into a presidential video game. "Hurricane Ike" or "Wall Street Meltdown" appears onscreen, and the media boots up Barack Obama and John McCain to see how well they talk the problem. Mostly they are speaking gobbledygook about things they barely understand. Whatever a credit default swap is, I'm against it. The public is left to wonder if they are voting for a commentator in chief or commander in chief.

The credit-market turmoil is serious, but no campaign has the information Treasury or the Fed are using to work the problem.

Rather than be dragged into the path of the financial storm, the McCain campaign especially needs to refocus on its postconvention momentum. It needs to worry about wasting the political capital Gov. Sarah Palin deposited in the Bank of McCain three weeks ago.

Once Mr. McCain picked Mrs. Palin as his running mate, he demoted "experience" and elevated a government "reform" message. It was the right thing to do. Presidential voters are ambivalent about Beltway-marinated senators like Mr. McCain and Joe Biden. John McCain's edge is his famous reputation as a reform maverick. So far, though, he is not casting his reform message in large enough terms.

Washington is arguably at its lowest ebb in the public mind since before World War II. Join that fact to Sarah Palin's personally gutsy and professionally strong reform credentials, and Mr. McCain has the chance to offer voters a reform presidency in historic terms.

Yes, the Obama campaign is trying to hang the Bush presidency around his neck. Mr. McCain knows -- and should give -- the answer to that: Voter disgust with Washington goes far beyond George W. Bush.

In the 2006 off-year election, voters threw out the Republican bums and turned over control of Congress to the Democrats. In an odd thank-you, the Democratic Congress earned the lowest approval ratings ever recorded in opinion polls.

This decline is not part of the normal ebb and flow of politics. The fall, the malfeasance, is deeper. It's bipartisan. It's endemic. The most acute comment on what Washington has become -- and what the American public knows it has become -- was a federal judge's Sept. 4 sentencing statement for convicted Beltway favor-meister Jack Abramoff.

Standing before federal Judge Ellen Huvelle, Abramoff said, "So much that happens in Washington stretches the envelope, skirts the spirit of the law and lives in loopholes." Agreed, said Judge Huvelle, who hammered Abramoff with an additional 48-month sentence, more than prosecutors had asked. She said simply: "The true victims are members of the public who lost their trust in government."

Forget the Tina Fey SNL mockery and all the marginalia being written about Sarah Palin now. She did four real things in Alaska that make her fit for anyone interested in a reform presidency.

She took on: her party's state chairman, her party's state attorney general, GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski's tainted gas pipeline project, and then she supported a GOP candidate who ran against Alaska's "untouchable" GOP congressional earmarker, Don Young.

One way or another, each episode involved severing the sleazy ties that bind public officials to grasping commercial interests, something even the Democratic left purports to favor.

It isn't just Washington and Juneau. You could open the nozzle on the same reform fire hose to wash the public-private slime out of the capital hallways of New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois and onward.

You say Sarah Palin doesn't have enough "experience" to run Washington? Washington is barely fit to be run.

The problem isn't standard political corruption. The problem is that the $2.8 trillion federal budget is a vast ocean of Beltway pilot fish feeding off scraps from the whale -- lawyers, lobbyists, ex-Members of Congress. No one runs the Sea of Washington. It's too big, too deep.

Barack Obama wants to dig a deeper hole. John McCain should ask the American people if they want this to go on, because it's nonsense to vote for government to do "more" and then whine when it doesn't work or degrades into sweetheart-deal hell.

Unfocused "reform" rhetoric from Mr. McCain isn't enough. The public has been there, heard that. Sen. McCain should talk about what he knows -- fat Fannie and Freddie, farm-bill bloat, the ethanol subsidy fiasco, the federal procurement mess. Show people Gov. Palin's 18 single-spaced pages of 2007 vetoes. Then identify Congress's bipartisan supporters of the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act and ask the voters' support. Appear with GOP congressman from Sarah's new generation who want to help -- Eric Cantor of Virginia, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Kevin McCarthy of California. There are others.

Promise to spend the first two years on this historic political reform effort, and if a Democratic Congress laughs, promise to barnstorm in 2010 for a Congress willing to act, from any party.

One hears talk of John McCain's temper. My guess is voters want someone to lose it with Washington, big time. Oh, and he should ask what's the difference between a reformist pit bull and a six-term senator. It isn't lipstick.

Selected from The Wall Street Journal

Cheap & easy

David Warren

Are we witnessing the final crisis of capitalism? (One utters the phrase out of nostalgia for the glory days of Marxism.) I doubt it. The meltdown in stock markets all over the world is painful and distressing, but it will pass. For it is not capitalism that is on trial, but rather the idea of cheap and easy credit.

The management of Lehman Brothers have got to be admired, if only in a backhanded way. Anyone who can run up more than $600 billion of debt, before the ghouls come calling, has skills we need not utterly despise. I have memories of a business -- a literary magazine -- which the ghouls would visit if I owed a few lousy thousands to a printer. Indeed, any reader with some experience of small business must raise his cap to the Wall Street titans.

Let me now tell an anecdote which, I think, bears directly on the market phenomena we are witnessing, and have witnessed so many times before in history.

My magazine was called The Idler, and in its early days, a quarter-century ago, I realized that we would have to buy some basic computer equipment. For this would enable us to perform some functions so much more efficiently, that the equipment would quickly pay for itself. I wasted a lot of time trying to demonstrate this on paper to an unsympathetic bank manager. I was impressed by the amount of time he invested in analyzing and then declining my request.

So I went to another table in the bank and asked for the same amount as a consumer loan. For all they knew, I could be buying a Stradivarius, while Rome burned. I wasn’t even asked, except conversationally, when I answered that I had my eye on one of those flashy new table-top word processors, and some other gear -- posing as an extravagant hobbyist. Loan approved in ten minutes; just sign a few forms. Equipment delivered the next day, and the loan was repaid ahead of schedule, to avoid an interest rate I found usurious.

To the ingenious masters of banking, this might all make sense. Small business loans must be carefully weighed against the viability and essential solvency of the business. Ditto, perhaps, for big business loans, but with broader criteria of judgement. Whether on the larger or smaller scale, it helps to know the manager, dress well, and speak his codes.

But consumer loans are generic. There is a formula, but it has finally nothing to do with the virtues of the individual borrower. It is instead a grand calculation from the broad market, which assumes a certain proportion of customers will fail to repay, and rigs up interest charges to account for them. (I am oversimplifying, but only slightly.) The people who form the assumptions, and then do the math, are hailed as mighty geniuses.

And it is a marvelous thing to watch, as we are now watching, when the calculations of these mighty geniuses are, as it were, “overtaken by events.” Those who live by confidence die by confidence, and we are reminded that our whole economy depends on avoiding the natural propensity to panic when we discover that the ladder we’ve been climbing is not, so to say, “secured.”

Lehman Brothers went down over the weekend, A.I.G. is falling as I write. Their assets get dumped, the value of other companies’ similar assets is reduced accordingly, and this in turn erodes the capital base under the entire banking system. The collapse of Lehman has, moreover, just kicked away the argument that some firms are, by nature, too tall to fall. And all because of a few million dicey consumer loans, that no one thought twice about at the time.

The problem must be solved, or so everyone says, by increasing government regulation. Am I perhaps alone in observing that this regulation is already as dense and complex as the industry, and that it might well make more sense to make the regulations not denser and more complex, but rather, simpler, more transparent and effective. For to my mind, we ought to have learned by now that the more complex a system grows, and the farther removed from the hard facts of nature, the more susceptible it becomes to catastrophic failure.

Over several generations we have rebuilt an economy that once rested on goods, services, and tangible assets. It now depends also on kiting, with wonderfully sophisticated credit instruments -- like a postmodern building, supported as much from above as below. In the longer view, it is well that gravity asserts itself the sooner, and we reacquire the benefit of a solid foundation.

In the meanwhile, consider Matthew 5:45. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. To which we might add, that it is usually the unjust who are whining.

Plenty of Palin?

Mac Johnson

John McCain’s pick of the young outsider Sarah Palin as his running mate has proven to be one of the most successful gambles in modern politics. It has brought tremendous energy to McCain’s campaign and millions of voters instinctively identify with Palin and her family-oriented, working class roots. Palin seems a wonderful return to the days of Harry Truman or even Andrew Jackson, when America’s anti-elitist electorate picked rough-hewn, plainspoken leaders from out of their own ranks and sent them to Washington to raise hell.

The pick makes believable McCain’s pledge to bring real change to Washington, and it has thus severely blunted the shallow appeal of philosophical featherweight Barack Obama -- who had little to offer America other than a lyrical mantra of unspecified change.

The recruitment of Palin by McCain was made particularly effective by it’s juxtaposition with Obama’s self-inflicted wound, Joe Biden (now he’s not just a client of the hair club for men, he’s also it’s vice president). In his first opportunity to establish change through his proto-administration, Obama went straight to the standard queue of ossified Washington insiders that he so needs to quickly make the most of his surprise appearance at the head of the ticket. This is the paradoxical price of choosing a neophyte as nominee -- without a nationwide organization of his own, Obama is especially beholden to his party’s machine. A babe in the woods needs help. Obama also cannot surround himself with inexperienced newcomers, lest he look like just one more.

McCain, by contrast, has experience and his own established reputation and networks. He doesn’t need to recruit gravitas. He can recruit fresh partners instead.

The initiative clearly rests with McCain, who has taken a lead in the polls, and sent Obama looking for a clue as to how to respond.

So now what? I believe that McCain should leverage his advantage before the Obama campaign and its marketing departments (CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times etc.) can regain their lost footing and work on falsely deconstructing Palin so as to restore order to their universe. McCain can do this by promising that Palin is just the first of an army of fresh, energetic party outsiders that he will appoint, if sent to Washington.

His message should be clear: Washington is a human swamp that must be drained and filled with clean new people, unbeholden to its back rooms, party lines, lobbyists, and incestuous press/advocate monolith. These picks should have a basically conservative slant, but since a cabinet is a committee and McCain wants to build a new coalition, there is room for different flavors of outsiders in addition to conservatives.

Joe Lieberman is an obvious non-conservative pick who should be explicitly mentioned, especially in Florida. Lieberman has been ostracized and exiled by the extremist liberal orthodoxy of the Democrat Party and thus owes the party nothing, despite still have quite an appeal with much of its rank and file members. As long as he is kept well away from domestic social issues, he is acceptable to most right of center McCain supporters on issues of foreign policy.

Other picks are less obvious but need to come from outside Washington and even outside politics. Military leaders and successful entrepreneurs should be considered and advertised – their eventual appointments will never occur if McCain loses, so they should and must be discussed loudly. Only a few well-vetted specific picks need be mentioned, but the amorphous idea needs to be sold now.

New faces as a campaign theme would further strip Obama of his only real weapon, a chorus of “change, details to follow.” Without the full use of this lever, Obama will find it very difficult to pry open the trust of non-leftist voters, who (I believe) are unsure of the smooth-talking Music Man that wants to be promoted directly from his fourth year on the job to be the Chief Executive of the world’s single superpower.

In addition to the election advantages of this strategy, it would (if McCain wins and follows through on his pledge) nearly assure McCain a place in history as one of the most influential President’s of his time, since he would bring onto the national stage an army of young, new political personalities. These appointees could form the core of multiple new political circles over the next generation.

Most importantly, McCain should make his campaign and administration a rallying point for talented outsiders simply because change cannot have just one face, it must have many. This is a obvious truth in a nation of 300 million people -- and it’s one that Obama, in selling himself as the one-man messiah of change, hasn’t got a clue on.

McCain should paint Obama as the naïve new front man of the same tired liberalism and promise that, if elected, he will unleash a swarm of anti-establishment outsiders upon Washington’s vested interests. Obama has nothing to offer but change, and with that argument taken away, Obama has nothing to offer.

The Democrats' Fannie Mayhem

Selected from The Wall Street Journal

As usual, Democratic Party initiatives end up achieving the opposite of what they are supposedly intended to do: 'War on Poverty' brings more poverty, minimum wages deplete real wages, equal opportunity brings about unequal quotas while protecting the mediocre and the unproductive... we can go on and on. The latest attempt to give everyone a house at any cost, has shaken the markets, left thousands unemployed and surely will multiply the slum neighborhoods across the nation. Take a look at Detroit, the result of half a century of pure Democratic administrations. If you want the whole United States to end up like Motown... vote Democratic. My two cents added to this short and revealing Wall Street Journal article—CCR

Barney Frank didn't like The Wall Street Journal recent editorial taking him to task for his longtime defense of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Congressional baron defends himself in his signature style here. We'd let him have his say without comment except that his "whole story" is, well, far from the whole truth.

Mr. Frank contends that he favored "very strong reform" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even before Democrats took over Congress after the 2006 elections. To adapt a famous phrase, this depends on what the meaning of "reform" is. Mr. Frank did support a bill that he and others on Capitol Hill described as reform. But on the threshold reform issue -- limiting the size of the portfolios of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that the two companies could hold -- Mr. Frank was a stalwart opponent.

In fact, Mr. Frank was publicly arguing for an increase in the size of their combined $1.4 trillion portfolios right up to the day they were bailed out. Even now, after he's been proven wrong about a taxpayer guarantee, he opposes Treasury's planned reduction in the size of the portfolios starting in 2010, according to a quote attributed to him in this newspaper last week. "Good luck on that," he reportedly said. Mr. Frank's spokeswoman hung up the phone when we sought confirmation Tuesday.

The MBS portfolios have long been both the chief source of the systemic risk posed by the two mortgage giants and of the profits that so handsomely enriched shareholders and officers alike for decades. Without the extreme leverage inherent in those portfolios -- which the companies borrowed heavily, at taxpayer-subsidized rates, to accumulate -- their federal takeover might never have become necessary.

For years, Mr. Frank and other friends of Fan and Fred opposed not only bills written to limit the size of their portfolios, but any bill that in their view gave an independent regulator too much discretion to order a reduction. This was true of the reform that his House committee passed last year. Only when the White House caved to Mr. Frank and dropped its earlier insistence that a reform bill rein in the portfolios did Mr. Frank move his bill.

In his letter, Mr. Frank also repeats his familiar claim that Fannie and Freddie are vital because they support "affordable housing." This is political smoke. The awful irony of Fan and Fred is that they have done very little to assist affordable housing. Most of the taxpayer subsidy has gone to enrich shareholders and Fannie managers, as a 2003 study by the Federal Reserve shows.

Mr. Frank says he favored the disclosure of Fannie and Freddie compensation -- which is nice, but beside the point. The source of the rich pay packages was the Fannie business model that Mr. Frank fought so hard to protect. Instead of helping the poor, Mr. Frank was enriching Jim Johnson, Frank Raines, Angelo Mozilo and Wall Street.

If Mr. Frank thinks his "affordable housing" goals are so popular, he can always ask Congress to appropriate money for any housing subsidy he desires. But he knows those votes are hard to come by. It's much easier to have Fannie and Freddie take inordinate risks, even at taxpayer expense, so they can pay a political dividend called an "affordable housing trust fund" that politicians will disperse. In opposing genuine reform of Fan and Fred, Mr. Frank wasn't acting like a principled liberal. He was protecting corporate giants while hiding their risks from taxpayers until the middle class got stuck with the bill.

Drill, baby, drill

Jed Babbin

Burn me for a heretic, but this year could be the best for Republicans since 1994. And Bill Clinton’s advice to Obama was right, but not for Obama.

The late Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House from 1977-1987, is best remembered for his “all politics is local” axiom. That was proved wrong in 1994 when -- six weeks before the mid-term elections – Newt Gingrich introduced the “Contract with America” and changed the election dynamic.

In the 1994 generic Congressional preference polls, the Democrats’ 8-10% lead vanished -- down to 3.5% on Election Day - when the Contract for America nationalized the issues. Republicans scored the biggest Congressional victory either party had achieved in almost fifty years because they realized that some times politics are national, not local.

By every forecast, even internal Republican analyses, this year is supposed to be as bad for Congressional Republicans as 1994 was for their Democratic counterparts. The economy is shaky, Bush is more unpopular than death or taxes, the world hates us, Americans are fed up, and nothing can save the Republicans.

In June, when Nevada Sen. John Ensign, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said that it would be a “good night” for Republicans if they only lost four Senate seats on November 4, doom and gloom became official Republican policy.

But what if all the Cassandras are wrong?

According to the Gallup polls, the generic Congressional preference polls supported the Republican disaster theory from the beginning of the year. In mid-February, the Democrats were ahead by 15 points. From mid-June through mid-August, the lead decreased only slightly, holding in double digits, 51%-40%. But suddenly, in mid-September, the Democratic lead has shrunk suddenly to three points, 48%-45%.

But even that data point doesn’t reveal what may be an enormous tidal shift: the poll also showed that in the generic Congressional polling, Republicans now lead by 5% among likely voters. Call me crazy, but if Republicans realize that Gingrich was right in 1994 and apply that lesson this year, they can prove the doomsayers wrong.

The engine driving the change in the polls is the usual attention shift in a presidential year. Before, only political activists and political junkies were paying a lot of attention. In the past month -- thanks to the party conventions, the candidate forums and the intense media coverage -- the election has gained the attention of the general election voter.

Two sources fueled the poll shift engine. First, examination of the Obama-Biden ticket is leaving a lot of Democrats and independents dissatisfied. Obama unintentionally gave voice to doubters’ fears when he said, in last week’s forum, that “And so part of my job, I think, as president, is to make government cool again.”

Voters see a candidate who -- according to the non-partisan National Journal -- is the most liberal of all US Senators, paired with another man who is just as devoted to liberal elitism. And they see the Republican ticket comprised of a war hero and one of the most solidly conservative pols you can find.

But that won’t be enough to turn this election into a rerun of 1994. Last week, Bill Clinton reportedly advised Barack Obama to campaign on issues, not only on his persona. Which is the best advice that the Republicans can take, because whatever gains are to be made by campaigning against the Illinois celebrity have already been achieved.

There are two other issues the Republicans can, if they choose to make the election national rather than local, use to propel themselves to significant gains: the Dems’ embargo of American oil and the craziness of the liberal media.

“Drill Nothing” Nancy is the perfect example of liberal elitism that Republicans have to campaign against. The Pelosicrats believe higher gasoline prices are good for us because it helps them “save the planet.” They don’t care, as Gingrich does, that the vast majority of Americans want to fuel their cars without having to take out a loan, don’t like flag burning and don’t like courts making gay marriage legal. These are national wedge issues just waiting to be seized by Republicans.

Just as it did in 1994, Republican recovery starts with Gingrich.

A few months ago, Gingrich energized the Republican base with his “Drill here, drill now, pay less” petition to Congress to end the bans on offshore drilling and development of other American energy sources. At last report, 1,476,899 Americans have signed it.

Over the August Congressional recess, House Republicans have made the “drill now” issue national. They have convinced Americans of a very simple fact: that the principal obstacle to reducing the price of gasoline is the Pelosi Embargo. Pelosi realizes this: she gave endangered Dems leave to vote against her new oil embargo bill.

As the crowd chanted at the Republican Convention, the clearest national issue is “Drill, baby, drill.” If Congressional Republicans make this their primary issue across the country -- taking advantage of a certain Alaska governor who can campaign with them on it -- they can not only stave off losses, but they can make significant gains, defeating many vulnerable Dems such as Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Just imagine the impact of sending Sarah Palin into the heart of Hillary country -- Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Obama is already in trouble -- to campaign on the Dems’ embargo of American oil. And if the McCain campaign lets her team up with Sen. Joe Lieberman to do some of this, they might just recapture those Reagan Democrats. Those voters are still there: but they have to be given a reason to vote Republican. Sarah and Joe can be the reason, and it will resonate in those crucial states.

There’s one other issue the Republicans need to nationalize: the crazy liberal media.

For more than two years, I’ve been writing that the politically active media -- CBS, NBC, ABC, New York Times and Washington Post -- need to be targeted by Republicans in parody and biting humor. The Republicans have ignored that advice. And I reluctantly admit that may have benefited them, but only because the activist media, unopposed, have gone so crazy that they are imploding.

It’s not just Keith Olbermann’s helium-filled head that is imploding. As former Clinton strategist Mark Penn told CBS last week, the mainstream media has lost credibility with American voters and that their credibility gap is growing. (Penn even used the example of the outrageous media attacks on Palin as one reason for the credibility loss.)

Republicans can use this as another wedge to separate voters from the Obama-media partnership. All they have to do is poke fun at the media -- naming names and media outlets in funny television commercials -- for the next five weeks. (Who is McCain running against? Obama-Biden or Obama-NBC?) The voters will do the rest.

This year doesn’t have to be a disaster for Republicans. With the right effort, they can set the Obama-Pelosi-Olbermann-MoveOn.org liberals back on their heels for the next decade. They can force the Democratic Party to remake itself in the image of the responsible moderates such as Scoop Jackson and Sam Nunn who used to form its core.

Government isn’t cool. And neither are the radical media liberals who pass off political ads as “news.” Drill, baby, drill.

A Hard Rain Falls on Wall Street

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Leviticus 26, 17-19 — I will set my face against you, and you shall be smitten before your enemies; those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. And if in spite of this you will not hearken to me, then I will chastise you again sevenfold for your sins, and I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like brass.

Ideas are the seed of history. The natural seeds are sown in the hope they will produce a new season of crops. These seeds are in themselves a sacrifice. The seeds are something we do not eat, so that we can have another harvest. They are also a treasure and a mystery. They hold in themselves all the harvests for generations to come. The mystery of their fruitfulness reminds us that we are here only for a while, we are the seed of many uncounted generations to come.

Once upon a time, an exceptional group of men—in whom God placed uncommon courage and wisdom—risked their lives, and everything they had so that future generations could live free. Those were the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Their wealth was risked for the common good. The happiness they pursued was guarded by their Christian consciences. The knowledge they held was subject to their character. The business they promoted, was subject to true morals. The science they fostered was meant to benefit mankind. They worship God in spirit and truth, sacrificing everyday in one way or another. They knew that they could only be a nation if they remained under God. They were certain that without God they could not last.

Their ideas were the seed of a free and prosperous nation. In time, that beacon of freedom attracted many men and women who shared those ideals. The seed fell in good soil and fructified.

Two centuries and some years later, the nation has produced a generation that is split in two groups. One half, like their founding fathers is trying to preserve the Union they received and the principles that made it great. The other half has come to believe that they are entitled to have businesses that greedily ignore the common good. The happiness they pursue is not guarded by any other principle than self-indulgence. Their knowledge is used simply to produce selfish gain. Their business is not limited by morals of any kind. Their science is full of deadly utopian ideals, lethal to the born and the unborn. They worship themselves and their liturgy is hedonism. They have grown inside the American society like a cancer and they want America to die with them. More than fifty million Americans—the seed of our future—have been sacrificed on their abortion clinics. Poverty, drugs and diseases have killed even more. No gods are more blood-thirsty than their false gods.

Do not be surprised if things keep getting worse. Be very grateful if things get better. More than anything, try to think what you can do to make your wealth serve the common good, your business to be a moral example, your science to benefit all, your worship to be true and pure, and your sacrifice be generous and unblemished.

2 Chronicles 7, 14 — If I close heaven so that there is no rain, if I command the locust to devour the land, if I send pestilence among my people, and if my people, upon whom My Name has been pronounced, humble themselves and pray, and seek my presence and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from heaven and pardon their sins and revive their land.

Ideas have consequences.

Last Chance—For Life

Pat Buchanan

Near the end of a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a woman arose to offer a passionate plea to Barack Obama to "stop these abortions."

Obama's response was cool, direct, unequivocal.

"Look, I got two daughters—9 years old and 6 years old. ... I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

"Punished with a baby."

Obama sees an unwanted pregnancy as a cruel and punitive sanction for a teenager who has made a mistake, and abortion as the way out, the road to absolution and redemption.

The contrast with Sarah Palin could not be more stark. At the birth of her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, Gov. Palin said: "We knew through early testing he would face special challenges, and we feel privileged that God would entrust us with this gift and allow us unspeakable joy as he entered our lives.

"We have faith that every baby is created for good purpose and has potential to make this world a better place. We are truly blessed."

Between the convictions and values of Palin and those of Barack, then, there is a world of difference. In the culture war that is rooted in religious faith, they are on opposite sides of the dividing line.

But more crucial than their conflicting beliefs is the political reality. This election is America's last hope to reverse Roe v. Wade. Upon its outcome will rest the life, or death, of millions of unborn children. The great social cause of the Catholic Church and the Knights of Columbus, of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, of the entire right-to-life movement, hangs today in the balance.

Why? It is not just that Obama is a pro-choice absolutist who defends the grisly procedure known as partial-birth abortion, who backs a Freedom of Choice Act to abolish every restriction in every state, who even opposed a born-alive infant protection act.

Nor is it because Joe Biden is a NARAL Catholic who has been admonished by bishops not to take communion because he has, through his career, supported a women's "right" to abortion, the exercise of which right has ended the lives of 45 million unborn.

Nor is it even because McCain professes to be pro-life, or Gov. Palin is a woman who not only talks the talk but walks the walk of life.

No. The reason this election is the last chance for life is the Supreme Court. For it alone—given the cowardice of a Congress that refuses to restrict its authority—has the power to reverse Roe, and because that court may be within a single vote of doing so.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts appear steeled to overturn Roe and return this most divisive issue since slavery to the states, where it resided until January 1973.

And John Paul Stevens, the oldest and perhaps most pro-choice justice at 88, is a likely retiree in the next four years. And there is a possibility Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 75, a survivor of cancer, could depart as did Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Thus, in the first term of the next president, there is a strong probability that one or two of the most pro-Roe justices will leave the bench. Replacement of even one of these two liberal activists with a jurist who has a Scalia-Roberts-Alito-Thomas record on the U.S. appellate court could initiate a challenge to Roe, and its rapid reversal.

Not only would that decision be a stunning perhaps irreversible victory for the pro-life cause, it would return the issue of abortion to Congress and the states, where numerous legislators are prepared to curtail if not outlaw abortion on demand in America.

Overturning Roe would re-energize the right-to-life movement in every state. In some, like California and New York, where it could not wholly prevail, some restrictions—i.e., no abortions after viability—might be imposed. Requirements such as for parental notification before a teenager has an abortion and that pregnant women be informed of what the procedure means and the trauma that often follows could be written into law.

If Roe goes, all things are possible. If Roe remains, all is lost.

Is there any certainty that John McCain, who set up the Gang of 14 to give Democrats veto over the most conservative of Bush judges, would nominate an Alito or a Roberts? No.

But there is a certainty that a President Obama would move swiftly to replace a Stevens or Ginsberg, or any other justice who steps downs or dies, with a pro-choice jurist. For support for Roe v. Wade is a litmus test in today's Democratic Party, where the right to an abortion has been elevated to the highest rank in the Constitution.

Bottom line. If Obama-Biden wins, Roe is forever. If McCain-Palin wins, Roe could be gone by the decade's end.

As Catholics are the swing voters who likely will decide this election, one awaits the moral counsel of the Catholic hierarchy.

Are White Catholics Obama's problem?

Tim Meagher

That Obama represents "top-bottom" politics proferred by an alliance of reforming white elites and minorities is a problem for working class Catholics. Having favored Hillary Clinton, Obama's rhetoric of change rings hollow to many Catholics

A puzzled Chris Matthews turned to the camera. He had just finished grilling two guests on his TV show, "Hardball," about voting patterns in the recent Pennsylvania primary. Yet the behavior of one group still seemed hard for both he and his experts to explain. Its members’ motives, Mathews sighed, were as inscrutable as "a tribe in New Guinea." The group whose behavior seemed so inexplicable? Matthews’s (Holy Cross College class of 1967 and Blessed Sacrament parish) own, white Catholics, whose support for Senator Hilary Clinton was as impressively large and consistent as almost any other definable demographic or cultural group in the voting public during the primary season.

The Clinton Catholic vote first emerged in New Hampshire, where in her unexpected comeback Clinton won 44% of the Catholic vote to 27% for Obama. That spread was noticeably higher than her support among Protestants or voters claiming no religion. Her high Catholic percentages continued in states she won, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and some she lost, such as Connecticut. She did not win the white Catholic vote everywhere, more or less breaking even or losing in Wisconsin, Missouri and Maryland (and probably Iowa, but exit polls did not record it).

A string started on the Clinton Catholic vote on the Catholic magazine Commonweal’s blog on February 6; the New York Times noticed the Clinton Catholic trend on February 8, "Catholic Vote is Harbinger of Success for Clinton"; and NPR, the New York Sun and the Pew Forum among others addressed it directly over the succeeding months. It also became a staple of broader analyses of the primaries in the Washington Post, Newsday and a host of other newspaper and magazine articles and political blogs.

Yet as Mathews found out, it has been easier to document the presence of this Catholic vote than to explain it. Scores of pundits, even some of the most secular of Democrats, have recently paid homage to the critical importance of religion in politics. A spate of books, E.J. Dionne, Amy Sullivan and others, and a blizzard of articles have lectured the Democrats on how to speak to religious groups. Yet the focus has been on what we think we learned from the last campaign: that the world is divided between believers (people who attend church regularly) and unbelievers (people who do not) and it really does not matter what it is that the believers believe. Catholics who go to church, according to this analysis, are not any different than Methodist churchgoers.

Confronted with this year’s stunning new Clinton Catholic phenomenon, some observers insisted on trying to parse out differences between Clinton and Obama on the "religious" issues like abortion or gay rights to explain it. Yet the differences between the positions of the two candidates on such issues were so slight that that effort seemed more a pavlovian instinct than the pursuit of a promising explanation (What would members of the Catholic hierarchy have said about Hilary Clinton as an embodiment of Catholic moral values?) We are so used to discussing religious voting in terms of those issues that we assume they must somehow have been at the root of this voting pattern too. But if differences over the "religious issues" don’t explain, what then has provoked the sudden appearance of this powerful Catholic Clinton bloc?

One explanation is that this was not a Catholic vote at all, but a blue collar one, and it just so happens that most of the white blue collar voters in the northeast and Midwest are Catholics. Yet was the Clinton primary vote a class vote? workers voting their class interests? Though the two Democratic party candidates would have objected heatedly, the differences between them on economic policies of interest to blue collar voters seemed, like those on "religious issues," minor. John Edwards might have argued that he had a stronger claim to be the champion of blue collar whites than either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama and he got knocked out in January. Senator Clinton had die-hard support among white women, but as some observers have suggested, it is not clear that she understood that Catholics or even blue collar whites were "her" voters before the primary campaign began. They seemed to find her in New Hampshire before she found them and her "voice."

Behind Senator Obama is the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The CCHD, since 1970, has poured millions of dollars into Alinskyian organizing and raising community organizers like Obama.

Unemployment: another crisis for the US?

Senator Obama exaggerated the rate of unemployment in the US for political gain. As it is, the US currently enjoys nearly full employment. There are other problems in thinking the Catholic vote was "really" just a blue collar vote. In some of the primary elections, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey for example, the percentage of the Catholic vote for Clinton actually exceeded her take of the blue collar or less well educated vote, and in other states, such as Pennsylvania, more refined statistics revealed that her Catholic vote topped her Protestant vote at every socioeconomic level.

More important, this isn’t the 1930s or 1950s or even the 1970s. If Catholic voters in these primaries really were clearly poorer than Protestants and non believers, than we have to rethink one of the principal themes in American Catholic history and the mountain of evidence that seems to prove it: that white Catholics’ social and economic progress has been extraordinarily rapid over the last half century and has brought them abreast or even ahead of white Protestants. Have Catholics really not slipped so easily into the American middle class and not yet "assimilated" as we all assumed?

Perhaps the simplest answer to why Catholics voted so strongly for Hilary Clinton is the race of her African American opponent, Barack Obama. This would not surprise historians. Irish Catholics’ embrace of "whiteness"—identification as white and support of white supremacy—has been a major theme in the writing of American history for more than two decades. So much so that, as one historian has said, it has become a "cliché." This year’s political observers and participants have picked up on the theme: The Washington Post reported, for example, on the burning of green Obama signs on St. Patrick’s day in Scranton. Even Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke darkly, if obliquely, about Irish American whiteness—"Hear that O’Malley, O’Reilly?"—in his speech at the National Press Club.

Yet historians have also documented a particularly fierce racist resistance to neighborhood integration by Catholics of all ethnic groups, not just the Irish, through the latter half of the twentieth century. That resistance, often vile in its rhetoric and violent in its practice, appeared to be stronger than among Protestants and Jews, because Catholics seemed more strongly rooted in their urban communities than others. So intense did such resistance become, David Leege has argued effectively, that race not "moral" or "social" issues appears to have been more important in creating the Catholic Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

Some have argued that white Clinton voters, including white Catholics, feel threatened by African Americans today as they did then. Matt Bai of the New York Times and others has suggested that Obama did best in primary states with large Black populations, where huge African American majorities carried him to victory, or in states with few Blacks, where whites had little fear of African Americans and thus of an African American presidential candidate. In the remaining states, Black populations seemed just large enough to provoke white fears and votes for Clinton. While this contention makes sense in theory, and may have applied to votes in some states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it did not fully explain the voting behavior of whites generally, and white Catholics in particular, during the Democratic primary. In Wisconsin white Catholics voted for Obama, but in Massachusetts they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, even though the percentage of African Americans is the same in both states. In Rhode Island, with an even smaller Black population than either Wisconsin or Massachusetts, white Catholics also gave Clinton heavy majorities. Lest we think white Catholics in New England are simply more conservative than those in Wisconsin, a recent Democracy Corps study concluded just the opposite.

As important, the issues that stoked Catholic and other whites’ hostility towards African Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, busing, affirmative, action, neighborhood integration, welfare "reform," and crime have had very little recent resonance. Few white Catholic neighborhoods even exist today, and those that do in the Northeast and Midwest, have suffered more recently from invasions by white brokers, bankers and advertising executives than from African Americans. SS. Peter and Paul Church in the Irish Catholic, once anti busing bastion of South Boston, for example, is now a luxury condominium and Charlestown, Boston’s other old Irish Catholic stronghold, boasts a thriving youth lacrosse program. One could argue that simply having a Black man at the top of the ticket is threat enough, but why then, in 2006, did a majority of white Catholics in Massachusetts vote for African American Deval Patrick for Governor, while white Protestants in the Bay State voted for Kerry Healey (born Murphy and with a degree from Trinity College, Dublin)? The difference between white Catholics and white Protestants in the Patrick – Healey election was nineteen percentage points.

The second major explanation for Clinton’s Catholic success versus Obama is Obama’s alleged elitism. During the primaries, numerous political commentators compared Obama to John Kerry, whose apparent timidity in the face of scurrilous attacks, fluency in French and taste for wind surfing marked him as a snotty wimp to some voters in the presidential campaign of 2004. Worse, perhaps, many political observers compared Obama to the alleged father of recent Democratic snobbery, Adlai Stevenson. Obama was thus seen in some quarters during the primary season, and still is seen among many, as distant, aloof, unconcerned, consumed by his own moral superiority, and not very manly to boot.

The senator from Illinois is puzzled by this and deservedly so, given his modest origins and current athletic skills (except in bowling), unmatched by almost any other presidential nominee in memory. Stevenson, on the other hand, really was something of an American aristocrat and couldn’t have taken anyone one on one on the basketball court.

Yet as sweet and soaring as Obama’s rhetoric has seemed to many, maybe to even most, Democratic voters, there is something in his speeches and manner that seemed to strike the wrong chord for many Democrats, particularly many Catholic Democrats. During the Democratic primary season, Catholics as diverse as the editor of Commonweal, Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, and Ohio blue collar workers and their wives expressed some discomfort with Obama’s talk. They wondered how realistic and tough he was: "Doesn’t he sound a little naïve. He stands up there so optimistic… preaching hope and change. It sounds great and everything, but come on." Worse he conjured up images of old Protestant moral reformers. Steinfels complained "there is something of the Protestant preacher [Baptist?] in Obama. Though it can inspire, there are times when my eyes glass over," and a woman in Ohio said much the same thing: "I just don’t like the preaching that he’s doing. He sounds like an old bible thumper to me. I like being talked to. I don’t like being yelled at."

Historians over the last few decades have paid less attention to the question of anti-elitism than to racism in American history. Though the class divide between Obama’s and Clinton’s vote seems obviously relevant to the question of Obama’s elitism, the historic Catholic - Protestant conflict is pertinent too. In the nineteenth century, politics in the northeast and middle west often pitted Catholic politicians, glorying in their plebeian origins, against Protestant patricians, confirmed in their righteousness. The secularization of reform and the growing importance of race changed but did not eliminate this fundamental divide.

For example, while most political scientists in the 1950s, and many historians since, assumed that Catholic votes against Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 reflected either the inevitable turn of upwardly mobile Catholics to the Republicans or the Catholic hard line on the Cold War, there was something in the way Stevenson talked and carried himself that was at work then too. When the then young political scientist Lawrence Fuchs went out to survey Boston Irish Catholic neighborhoods after Stevenson’s crushing defeats in 1956, he found that people there, rich and poor, seemed bothered as much by Stevenson’s effete preachiness as his policy positions. Robert and Jack Kennedy felt the same way about Stevenson, ridiculing him even as he worked for them as prissy and weak.

To their Catholic opponents in the Democratic Party, Adlai Stevenson and his "Amateur Democrats" thus seemed but another incarnation of these old elite moral reformers. John Kerry, war service or no, and practicing Catholic or not, seemed to be perceived in the same way, and fared very poorly among Catholics in his 2004 campaign for the presidency, even in his home state. After twenty years as a Massachusetts senator, Kerry barely won the state’s Catholic vote in 2004, 51% to 49%, though he won three-fifths of Massachusetts’ Protestant voters.

Robert Frost once famously urged John Kennedy to be more Irish than Harvard, but Obama may not find a solution to white perceptions of his elitism in his African American heritage. If emotional and stirring, the Protestant cadences of African American speech, for example, resonate with a kind of moral uplift that seems alien to some Catholics. The moral earnestness in Martin Luther King’s talk sometimes made Bobby Kennedy cringe, for example. Not just too academic and cold, then, Obama may also be too emotional and "hot," for Catholics who appreciate gritty ironies and earthy skepticism. Obama’s race may also complicate his ability to project an alternative masculinity to the charge of being the new effete Stevenson or Kerry. Racially charged controversies and conflicts over proper styles of masculinity have been principal points of contention in American popular culture since Muhammad Ali and Sylvester Stallone. Arguments pitting Black athlete’s alleged expressive exuberance against a white ethnic athletic ideal of silent stoicism have been staples of sports talk radio for a generation. It is no coincidence that Senator Clinton happily named herself the new Rocky Balboa.

In the end, Obama may suffer the double whammy of being an almost perfect embodiment of "top-bottom" coalition politics, the alliance between white reform elites and minorities that goes far back into American political history. In a unique way, because of his race and his manner and rhetoric, he seems representative of both the top and the bottom.

What then will all this mean for the Catholic vote in the general election? National polls conflict: Time magazine had McCain carrying Catholics by fourteen points early in the summer, but a Democracy Corps study from about the same time, suggested that Obama was doing "well enough" among white Catholics—running seven percentage points ahead of Kerry. A Pew poll in early August found Obama and McCain tied among white Catholics but a Quinnipiac poll a few weeks later reported that McCain led Obama by eight points among the same voters. State polls have not clarified this much. Obama has been running behind McCain among Catholics in Florida and Colorado, ahead in Wisconsin, ahead but barely in Minnesota, and about even in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but the state polls seem to change every day.

There may be another way to look at the Catholic vote in the current election cycle. It may not help us predict any better, but it may be more revealing.

Obama lost to Clinton by over thirteen points in eight states. In all of those states, blue collar voters were critical to her victories. Recent polls suggest that Obama is now also behind – in most cases far behind - McCain in five of those states: Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The Illinois senator is ahead in three of them: New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

New York was Clinton’s home state and the size of her victory there was understandable as is, given its New York’s longtime liberalism, the state’s current support for Obama in the general election.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts may be more interesting. Clinton had no home state advantage in them, but they, too, are among the most liberal states in the Union and by many measures—except for an occasional Republican governor—more Democratic than New York, indeed, perhaps the most Democratic states in the union, the bluest of the blue states. In Rhode Island Democrats outnumber Republicans 60 to 15 in the state legislature’s house and 33 to 5 in the State Senate. In Massachusetts, it is 141 to 19 in the House and 35 to 5 in the Senate. Obama’s success here should also be expected.

The volatility of the swing from the primary vote in the two states to current polls is, nonetheless, very interesting: in Massachusetts there have been spreads of as much as thirty five points from Clinton’s victory margin in the primary to Obama’s recent lead in some polls, and in Rhode Island a few spreads have been even larger. Such swings are especially impressive when matched against the other strong Clinton states, mainly in the southern border states, where McCain is thumping Obama about as badly as Clinton did.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts are the most Catholic states in the union. Indeed Catholics are a clear majority in Rhode Island and a near majority in Massachusetts. Catholics made up 43% of the voters for president in Massachusetts in 2004 and 57% of the voters in Rhode Island that year.

By contrast, voters in the five Clinton states where McCain is beating Obama are overwhelmingly Protestant. No one, of course, believes that Massachusetts and Rhode Island are so strongly Democratic simply because they are so heavily Catholic, much less, so liberal for that reason. Still consider this: replace white Catholic voters in Rhode Island and Massachusetts with white evangelical Protestants (or Irish Catholics with Scotch Irish Protestants) and think what their politics would be like.

So what can we say about the Catholic vote in 2008? Probably few predictions but some points.

First, Catholics remain a distinct people, not necessarily in all or even most elections, but in the right contexts. In the primaries they were distinctly different than Protestants and "secular" Democrats and critically important to Clinton’s victories in places like Massachusetts where high tech industries, high education levels and above average wealth seemed to create an electorate made for Senator Obama. If they were distinct from other Democrats in their own states such as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, they also now differ from Clinton Democrats in the South.

Second, what separates Catholics from other voters is not always their church’s doctrine. Religious issues were not important in the primaries, and in the general election, if they were the only issues, McCain would be running much better in the two most Catholic states in the union than he is now. This does not mean doctrine does not matter in Catholic politics; it does mean that Catholic voters (like other voters) are not just the sum of their church’s dogma – they are also products of their history’s experiences.

Those histories vary, in some cases significantly – they are not the same for Catholics in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as they are for Catholics in New Jersey or Pennsylvania – and they are complicated. For some reason, Catholics in Massachusetts and Rhode Island did not leave the Democratic Party, or at least not in the same numbers, as their co-religionists in the Middle Atlantic states did. Perhaps political observers need to start considering not why so many Catholics have left the Democratic Party, but why many, in some cases, very many, have stayed in it. After all, the Al Smith election was a long time ago.

Finally, among the most important historical legacies for America’s white Catholics are racial conflict and battles with reforming elites. These two experiences also vary significantly among Catholics by region or state, but they are also more or less present among them everywhere in the nation. That racism pushed some white Catholics to Clinton in the primaries and now is leading others to McCain is undoubtedly true. At the Pew Forum’s Biannual Faith Angle Conference in May, William Galston suggested "We can’t rule out the possibility that older Catholics are simply less comfortable with the idea and the possibility of an African American President than are older Protestants."

Yet Galston worried about this explanation, "Having said that I can’t quite tell a story that convinces me as to why that should be the case." With Catholic neighborhoods washed away and tangible racial "threats" to them like busing and housing integration reduced in any case, it is hard to see the persistence of any clear differences between white Catholics and white Protestants on this issue now. It has never been clear that white Catholics had any greater commitment to the ideology or ideal of white racial supremacy than white Protestants in the twentieth century. Indeed, in the mid twentieth century, even as white Catholics in northern cities violently attacked blacks who attempted to find homes in their neighborhoods or even simply seats in their churches, Catholic Democratic politicians routinely backed Civil Rights legislation in Congress, hoping to reap the benefits of northern Black votes. In 1937, for example, the anti-lynching bill introduced into Congress was known as the Gavagan bill, after the name of its sponsor, J. Joseph Gavagan of New York, proud member of the Knights of Columbus and a Democratic regular. Angry Southern Democratic opponents of the bill railed against Gavagan in the House debates over the bill, accusing him of trying "to make Harlem safe for Tammany Hall."

Galston suspected that rather than race some variation on reform versus the regulars was really at the heart of the differences between Catholics and others in the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s primary strengths and McCain’s surprising viability also seem to suggest that conflicts between reform elites and "regular guy" regulars may be at least as important as race in recent Catholic voting. Suspicion of elites is about economic class but not entirely; it is also about historic religious and ethnic resentments.

It thus can be about policy, issues and programs, but it can also be about the way people talk, their sense of humor, even gestures – the distinction as that woman in Ohio said between talking with or for and talking at. Barack Obama still needs to figure out how Hilary Clinton morphed from being a hectoring school marm’ to Rocky Balboa against him in the primaries, and how the McCain campaign, more recently, has so successfully transformed him, even if it was only for a few weeks, into a Hollywood prima donna, girlish, pretentious and self absorbed. This is not just his problem. It has been a Democratic problem since Stevenson and cost the party dearly in elections in 1988 and 2004. But it is his problem now.

Such anti-elitism is also not a specifically Catholic attitude, but Catholics, as noted, have long histories of battles between outside "goo-goo" reformers and inside resisting, tough guy, heroes. More important, white Catholics are strategically located. They form powerful blocs in states Obama needs and can win; those white Protestants who may be just as suspicious of reform elites are far more numerous in states where Obama has no chance.

Obama needs Catholics and seems to know it, part of the appeal, clearly of considering the scarcely known, first term, Catholic Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, or second term Catholic Governor Kathleen (Gilligan) Sibelius of Kansas as possible Vice Presidential candidates, before finally settling on Irish Catholic Senator Joseph, "Joey," Biden, once of Scranton, now of Delaware.

Yet if Obama knows the problem does he know the answer or have the solution? The Democratic Convention hinted that he might.

The Clintons, of course, buoyed him at the Convention, but the choice of Biden seemed to immediately pay off. At the very beginning of his acceptance speech, Senator Biden channeled his mother (ne Finnegan of Scranton) to enunciate the core of the American Catholic egalitarian political credo: "No one is better than you. You are everyone's equal, and everyone is equal to you." (Chris Mathews nearly wept —"I had a mother like that.")

Yet Obama himself seemed different that week. He may have learned that he does not have to mimic Catholic "regular guys" or others suspicious of elite reform – he doesn’t have to bowl. He appears to have learned that he needs only to be able to speak plainly and directly to them, and perhaps even more important, to be strong, tough, unafraid, without being arrogant. (He also told ESPN earlier in the week that he is a White Sox, not a Cubs fan, heartfelt for a Chicago Southsider probably, but also a sound choice of regular guy grittiness over effete enthusiasm.)

Nevertheless, it is still early, and if white Catholics still seem as inscrutable to Barack Obama and his campaign in November as they did to him as well as Chris Mathews in February, then...

Tim Meagher PhD is a professor at The Catholic University of America. He appears here courtesy of The History News Network.

The windmills of Obama's mind

Lisa Richards

As Nancy Pelosi prepares to save the world from people who drive cars, Barry Obama continues to dodge John McCain’s challenge to town hall debates for reasons more crucial than answering legit questions The Articulator can’t answer: Americans are paying too much at the pump because they refuse to inflate their tires, build windmills and homes like Al Gore’s.

After Barry Obama told Americans they could save energy and oil by “making sure your tires are properly inflated… and get regular tune-ups…” (this is something no American has ever heard of nor done), the ever changing Messiah told the people of Lansing, Michigan that if he is elected president all American cars will once again be made in Michigan. And the majority of those cars will be electric plug-in hybrid vehicles. Obama failed to explain to his beloved flock of sheep being slaughtered where that electricity gets its energy: it’s not nuclear power; its electrical power fueled by oil America is forbidden to drill.

Despite his insistence Michigan become the state of “green collar workers,” Barry O declared the 68 million acres of land leased by the federal government for Strategic Oil Reserves should be drilled on: Obama demanded he would make the government “use it [the land] or lose it.” Never once did Obama explain Strategic Oil Reserves are set up for national emergencies such as war.

Gas prices may be high, but high gas prices fail to stop Americans from driving and heating their homes despite Democrat’s desire for Americans to ride bikes and hitch buggies. No crisis exists that would depend upon oil reserves being open unless Obama is elected and Iran becomes sacred ground against Republicans and Israelis.

To use Strategic Reserves the U.S. would have to drill those 68 million acres of land. That’s acceptable with Obama and Nancy as long as the U.S. never drills near a polar bear or shark. If only we could get those nasty beasts to attack an Eskimo, we could declare a race-based war against indigenous people and drill in ANWR.

For added punishment Obama says he will force oil companies to drill on those “untapped acres” while adding a $15 billion a year tax hike on oil companies like Exxon that made $15,000 dollars per minute in its last quarter. Of course Obama neglected to tell the crowd that Exxon paid $35 billion dollars in taxes for 2007 (half their earnings) because they are the highest earning corporation in the U.S.

Exxon hands over half its earnings to the federal government who spend the taxed money on pork projects that raise the national debt. The more money made, the more taxes paid. That law was set up by Democrats who believe in punishing the wealthy for the audacity of earning money. Obama’s August 4, 2008 speech insinuated that Exxon, its executives and employees earn everything tax free.

Obama further declared that all “the oil drilled in the U.S. does not belong to America.” Well he’s right on that comment since we will be giving our Florida shores to China for drilling. Our southern oil will belong to China along with U.S. manufacturing jobs.It’s perfectly fine for China to invade Florida’s continental shelf and take the oil; it is destructive to the beaches if America implements such a Machiavellian plan.

Obama blamed America for high oil prices (gasoline is priced higher in Europe where cars are Diesel fueled); Obama blamed America for pollution despite the fact America has cleaned up the environment over the past 20 years while China creates chemical warfare on U.S. athletes; climate change is also America’s fault: the climate never changed throughout history until Republicans took over the House and Senate during the Clinton/Gore years. Obama insisted America should be more like France and Spain when it comes to saving energy. In that case America should be allowed to build nuclear plants Democrats don’t want built despite the fact France has proven nuclear energy is cheap, clean, efficient, and safe. But that might hurt Nancy Pelosi’s plan to save Al Gore’s planet Obama has returned to.

The savior of senselessness switched back and forth on his gospel by asserting the U.S. should not waste time drilling for oil when a new Manhattan Project would make the U.S. energy independent. In that case the United States should test a new Atomic Bomb on Saudi Arabia and then confiscate every ounce of Saudi oil after the evaporation is complete.

For a man who speaks so intellectually, Obama never says anything, nor gives an actual working plan. He declares a need for drilling while insisting drilling will not solve oil problems Democrats created by not letting Bush drill eight years ago. By now there would be U.S. oil on U.S. shores. Obama alleges the U.S. should go nuclear while claiming nuclear power will not solve any energy crisis. Obama’s plan is for a “Green Collar” sector: people who build those fabulous European-style bumper cars one must plug into a wall in one’s garage in order to drive. That is if one can actually fit into something built for children under five. Again, that electrical energy powering embarrassing cars must be powered by something.

No matter what Democrats insist America can not run completely oil-free. Democrats know this or they wouldn’t invest in oil companies making them fortunes while castigating the hand that makes them wealthy. But stating otherwise would stop the continuation of indebted people Democrats need to keep them in power while they let their Exxon stock roll over and grow. If the Messiah wins the election perhaps he will turn water into oil and save the planet from those awful Republican drillers who believe we should no longer keep the Saudi Royal family in luxury.

An immense maternal presence

Tina Beattie for The London Tablet

Today Pope Benedict XVI is visiting Lourdes, to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous. An academic who initially felt uncomfortable about visiting the shrine here writes about its extraordinary power

The Observer recently carried a front-page photograph of Ingrid Betancourt in Lourdes. After six years of captivity in Colombia, she had gone to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for her release, and to pray for the release of other hostages. The image must have bemused the newspaper's largely secular, liberal readership, this juxtaposition of a hero of modern democracy and a religious observance many would brand as superstitious ignorance.

The shrine at Lourdes can undoubtedly be a place of religious credulity, and during the last 150 years it has often served as a bastion of Catholic resistance to the modernisation of European politics and culture. But, in an era when the forces of rationalisation and competitive individualism increasingly dominate our Western societies, Lourdes also represents a different order of things. For the millions who go there, it is a place of hope where suffering takes on new meanings - not as an enemy to be conquered but as part of the mystery of life.

Lourdes is a place where the sick and the suffering take centre stage, and the rest of us are there as helpers and bystanders, or as pilgrims who know that a healthy body can still suffer psychological torments that cry out for healing and peace. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of ill health in the Western world. As our bodies benefit from ever more care and attention, it seems our spirits are withering from neglect.

Yet to romanticise Lourdes as a place of holiness and healing would be as simplistic as to write it off as a place of superstition and mumbo-jumbo, for it can be both and neither. The Catholic anthropologist Victor Turner developed the concept of "liminality" [1] to describe rituals and life-changing experiences that have a transformative effect on us. These are times when the rules that structure our daily lives are suspended, so that we are able to enter into states of consciousness, relationships and ways of expressing ourselves which are outside our expectations. I think the phenomenon of Lourdes can be at least partly explained by the fact that it is a place where there is a profound sense of liminality, a breaching of many of the boundaries that define us, so that the imagination is kindled into new ways of seeing and understanding.

I had to overcome considerable resistance to make my first visit to Lourdes. Despite having spent much of my academic life studying Marian theology, as a convert from Presbyterianism I was wary of what I used to see as the tackier, wackier side of Catholic devotion to Mary. However, in 2007 we decided at Roehampton University where I work to join the annual Pilgrimage Trust (HCPT) pilgrimage to Lourdes, and I agreed to go in the guise of a lecturer taking students on a field trip. This allowed me to take refuge in a certain critical objectivity if I needed to. After a couple of days, I began to experience that sense of liminality. As social boundaries between students and teachers dissolved (helped by the cocktails we shared in the evenings), I came to know some of their personal stories - each with its own narrative of struggle and hope. There had been no selection process, although one might have thought we'd hand-picked our group to ensure the widest possible representation of religion, age, ethnicity and lifestyle. The evangelicals were disturbed by the candlelit procession with Mary carried on an illuminated float, but from a Hindu perspective it was a familiar ritual.

The sense of liminality begins perhaps with Bernadette herself, a romantic myth even before she was dead. But the story of Bernadette Soubirous is one of almost unbearable poignancy. She was a sickly child from a desperately poor family - at the time of the apparitions, she was living with her parents and four surviving siblings in a disused prison cell. In February 1858, the 14-year-old girl went to gather firewood with her sisters at the grotto of Massabielle, where she had the first of 18 encounters with an apparition she referred to as "l'Aquero", roughly translated as "that thing", which she described as a small and beautiful young lady. During the sixteenth apparition, on the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), the lady identified herself, saying in the local dialect, "Qué soï era immaculado councepcioũ". Although the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had been promulgated four years earlier by Pope Pius IX, it was unlikely that an uneducated peasant girl would have known about it, so this was widely interpreted as affirmation of the doctrine. The story of Bernadette is a story of the forsaken and the outcast, a reminder that, even as Europe surged into the modern world, children starved and scavenged for firewood.

The sense of liminality also derives from the geographical positioning of Lourdes. It is a place of intense human activity - apart from Paris, it has the highest number of hotel rooms of any town in France, and it is notorious for its souvenir shops selling every kind of kitsch and tat. Yet it is cupped among the Pyrenees, washed around by a towering landscape of snow-covered peaks where all our human bustle is dwarfed by the majesty of creation. The liminal, then, also refers to that experience of standing among mountains and feeling one's humanity displaced or called into question by the mystery of the cosmos.

But perhaps liminality refers most directly to the spirituality of Lourdes, for that is the most enigmatic and compelling aspect of the shrine. According to Bernadette, the apparition asked for a church to be built, and today a vast basilica rises above the shrine, visible testimony to the wealth and power of the institutional Church. Yet the spiritual life of Lourdes is focused on the grotto and its surroundings beneath the basilica, and this topography acts as a metaphor for the relationship between the religious institution and the powerful undercurrent of faith that it can never fully control. The rocks around the grotto have been worn smooth by the touch of millions of hands, and there is a sense of something visceral, pagan even, about the way in which Catholic devotions and prayers melt and mingle with the noumenal mystery of a God both veiled and revealed in earth, wind and fire, in rocky wildernesses and the untameable persistence of nature in the face of all our civilising and controlling impulses. Surely, an incarnational faith is one which situates itself in such a space of encounter between the sublime and the ridiculous - between the inscrutable majesty of God, and the often foolish muddle of our human devotions.

The water that gurgles up from the spring is distributed through rows of standpipes where pilgrims fill plastic bottles emblazoned with blue Madonnas. Beyond the grotto, candles burn and drip through the night until, in the small hours, men come to clean out the stalls, like figures from Blake's dark satanic mills. All night, there are pilgrims at the grotto, their murmured prayers dissolving in the wax-scented air. And then there are the baths.

It was a stormy afternoon when I joined the queue for the baths on the women's side with some of my students. For two hours, I felt a growing sense of apprehension as we shuffled down the benches towards the front. Sitting beneath a concrete vault, with plastic curtains concealing what went on on the other side, a student put into words what I'd been afraid to articulate, even to myself: "This feels like a concentration camp," she said. The rain came down in a torrent, and I asked myself, if I was so keen to plunge into holy water, why not just run out and turn my face to the sky?

Eventually, our turn came. A woman held a blue cape around me as I undressed. I was led into the small cubicle with its sunken bath and supported between two women who wrapped a cold, wet sheet around me and guided me down the steps into the biting cold water to kiss the statue of Mary at the end. They murmured prayers and held my arms as I immersed myself in the water. Still wet, I wriggled back into my clothes, and it was over. I felt clean, new, tearful and grateful. What I had found behind the curtain was gentleness, a sense of an immense motherly presence. I find it hard to express why the comment about the concentration camp is so significant to that experience - it has something to do with the humanity we encounter when we step into the unknown and put ourselves at the mercy of others, and about the knowledge that that can be an experience of the most devastating betrayal, or of the most profound compassion.

This year, I worked as a volunteer for an afternoon at the baths. It felt like taking part in a carefully choreographed ballet, as we coordinated our movements to ensure that the woman going through the water was held and comforted, that her dignity was assured and her prayers were assisted. I had a sense of the world's women flowing through my hands, so much vulnerability, so much diversity, so much trust. I heard no prayers for miraculous healings. I just heard wave upon wave of prayers for support, for courage, for understanding, for loved ones, for children, for husbands, for hope. Again, I had that sense of an immense maternal presence, holding, consoling, being there for all of us.

Afterwards, as we were putting on our outdoor clothes, I spoke to the woman I'd been on duty with. I asked her what parish she came from in the UK. She smiled. "I don't have a parish. I'm a Muslim," she said. She had visited Lourdes when her son was ill, and she had been going back ever since. She explained that Mary is honoured by Muslims, and she had no difficulty taking part in the ritual of the baths. Liminality can create spaces of human encounter and recognition by which we see beyond the confines of our daily lives, and discover different ways of being together across the boundaries.

There is something miraculous about Lourdes, attributable not to the suspension of the laws of nature, but to something more intangible - the suspension of the laws of division, cynicism, expediency and exclusion which structure our modern world. To say this is not to say that Lourdes is perfect. It's not. It's human. Maybe that's what the advocates of ruthless scientific rationalism hate most of all - not the God bit, but the unruly muddle of the human condition with all its hopeful, prayerful affirmations of abundant, foolish, uncontrollable life.


References

[1] Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a "liminal state") and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers as Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In the anthropological theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.

a) of or relating to a sensory threshold
b) barely perceptible
c) of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between , transitional "in the liminal state between life and death"—Deborah Jowitt

You Can’t Fake Authenticity

Cal Thomas

What is it about Sarah Palin that has gotten the liberal media’s knickers in a twist? Why are they criticizing, even mocking, everything from her hair to her faith?

She is exactly what the feminists claim to want and admire in women: strong, self-assured, a working mom, a political leader. But wait, she is a conservative Republican and because of that they hate her for displaying all of the aforementioned characteristics.

They are appalled that she would keep a Down Syndrome child when she could have aborted him. They are outraged when she speaks of God as if she knows Him, when their only acquaintance with the name is as a curse word, followed by “damn.” They are even disgusted that she has five children, as they think one (or maybe two) is enough.

Sarah Palin is to the left what sunlight is to a vampire. Her high heels have knocked them back on the heels of their comfortable shoes.

She has galvanized and united the social and economic conservatives, when the left thought it saw an unbridgeable divide between the “oil and water” elements of the Republican Party.

The USA Today-Gallup Poll published Monday shows a ten point advantage for McCain-Palin among likely voters — the most important constituency. That is a remarkable turnaround when you consider Obama received an eight-point bounce from the Democratic Convention, which has now been wiped-out.

I think it has something to do with the fact that average people, who live in what the left thinks of as “flyover” country, identify with a woman who has an intact, yet imperfect family. They can visualize her pushing a grocery cart at the supermarket and shopping at Wal-Mart.

You can’t fake genuineness and if this trend continues, Obama and the entire Democratic Party — which thought it had this election in the bag — will be left to wonder over the next four years how they got their pockets picked by someone they arrogantly consider a yahoo from moose country.

The Legacy of Greatness

David W. Virtue

Solzhenitsyn: A voice crying in the wilderness

More than 30 years ago, I wrote my masters degree dissertation on the Idea of Man in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Little did I know that Solzhenitsyn would be one of the last great voices of Christian orthodoxy whose "idea of man" was specifically Christian and that determinist, feminist, pansexualist, and materialist theories of Man would seep into the warp and woof of western Christianity denying its very transcendence.

That he was deeply opposed to the materialism of Western culture with its insidious belief that the Kingdom of God could be established with an ever-expanding gross national product coupled with social amelioration shocked his cultured despisers. Modern Western civilization is based on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs, said Solzhenitsyn.

Had he stumbled across a new generation of health and wealth gospel hucksters parading their prosperity "gospel" on television, he would have flailed them in much the same way he flailed communist tyranny.

His recent death drove me once again to read his famous Harvard speech in which he lambasted those academics sitting before him as being partly responsible for the "rationalistic secularism" that is now all pervasive in Western culture.

Here are just a few prophetic lines from his speech "A world set apart". "The split in today's world is...often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.

Humanism and Its Consequences. "How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

"This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists."

Or this: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Solzhenitsyn shredded Socialism. He cited the well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, whose brilliant book, under the title Socialism, revealed a profound analysis showing that socialism, of any type and shade, leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

He concluded with these lines: "We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life."

Solzhenitsyn was hated and vilified for his words, but he was right. He returned to Russia after a long sojourn in the US, rarely coming into public view and never imbibing or indulging in American cultural attitudes or values. He did without television, I am told, and so, was mercifully spared having to watch Madonna's version of truth and reality play itself out in The Episcopal Church, USA.

One can only imagine his fierce Russian bearded countenance looking down at Bishop Gene Robinson while wagging a finger of dismissal at the little mitered sodomite as being a sexual aberration, who has managed, with much whining, to twist an entire Christian denomination into believing that his perverted sexuality had something to do with ushering in a new prophetic stance, a new take on the Kingdom of God for our time. What a You Tube moment that would make. The Episcopal Church would take decades to recover, if ever.

Or these words of Solzhenitsyn: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept."

The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer, said Solzhenitsyn.

Chuck Colson, in his brilliant commentary said Solzhenitsyn also foresaw the rise of political correctness: "Fashionable trends of thoughts and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable." He predicted this would lead to "strong mass prejudices" with people being "hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad."

Could even Solzhenitsyn have imagined that sexual rights would eventually triumph over free expression, that academia would impose rigid speech codes, or that churches would be threatened with loss of their tax-exempt status for opposing homosexual marriage?

What would Solzhenitsyn say to Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, or Gene Robinson, or even Rowan Williams about how the church has compromised itself over pansexual behavior, the right to abort the unborn which the Episcopal Church so lovingly affirms. It is decadence wrapped up in purple vestments and high sounding phrases like "inclusion" and "diversity", all of it in an attempt to accommodate the gospel to us and our needs, instead of we the church bowing the knee before a God who demands that we obey His laws and not our own "devices and desires." We have, said Solzhenitsyn, "tilted freedom in the direction of evil" and we are paying the price for doing so.

Since he uttered those words at Harvard, we as a nation have sunk into a "culture of death" warned about so descriptively by the late Pope John Paul II which he said, "threatened the world".

We have replaced God-centered living with self-centered living. We have sown to the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind.

The Real Community Organizer: Cindy

Lisa Richards

Barack Obama has spent two years telling America that his wife works for the community of south-side Chicago, making Americans think Mrs. Obama devotes her life to charity work. The opposite is true: Mrs. Obama sits on the board of University of Chicago Medical Center and is paid for her work. It’s been reported that a patient can only be treated at the hospital he or she has insurance, yet Michelle Obama claims she fights for those in need. Cindy McCain saves lives without receiving one dime; she has literally gotten down in the trenches with people less fortunate, never seeking praise or money.

The only thing Americans hear about Cindy McCain is she is the chairperson of her father’s Anhauser-Bush beer distributorship, Hensley & Company, and her personal net worth is 100 million dollars. Many do not realize Mrs. McCain’s father borrowed the money to start his business in 1955; one year after his daughter was born. Cindy McCain was not born to wealth. The media and press never tell her real accomplishments of service to those in need around the world.

The media has devoted two years to praising Mrs. Obama because she’s married to Barry Obama, but what has she essentially done that makes her First Lady material? Michelle Obama has no track record as a lawyer fighting for the community; her reputation of service is based on what she and her husband have invented for the media.

The wife of John McCain is a heroine, a fearless woman willing to lay her own life on the line to rescue others. The woman who introduced her husband on September 4, 2008 at the Republican National Convention was presented to the audience in a video narrated by Senator McCain. The beer heiress is the very definition of beauty, brains, and guts.

Cindy McCain is the first in her family to graduate from college? Cindy McCain graduated from the University of Southern California, not an Ivy League college, and went on to teach special needs children in the state of Arizona. Her life story is outstanding and that of a role model: the mother of four selflessly aids victims of land mines, birth defects, genocide, starvation, deprivation, and disease.

• 1988: Mrs. McCain founded the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVNT) and led 55 medical aid missions into war-zones over a seven year period.

• 1994: Mrs. McCain witnessed the Rwanda genocide first hand when her team risked their lives to help victims of gang rape, murder, hunger and disease. Mrs. McCain says she had to step over dead bodies to find those still alive.

• Mrs. McCain serves on the board of Operation Smile, a non-profit organization providing surgery to children born with cleft lips. 100,000 around the world children can smile because of Operation Smile.

• Mrs. McCain is a member of the Halo Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to removing land-mines. Halo has removed 7,000 land mines in 10 countries around the world.

• Mrs. McCain volunteered for missions to Morocco, Vietnam, and India. On one trip to India 17 years ago, Mother Teresa handed Mrs. McCain a newborn child born with a cleft lip -- surgery was the only thing that could save the baby’s life -- asking her to take the child to a hospital in the U.S. Mrs. McCain, who says she could not part with the baby when she reached the U.S., told Senator McCain: “meet your new daughter.” The beautiful young woman named Bridgette McCain stood beside her mother and siblings to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention.

In 2004, Mrs. McCain suffered a stroke from high blood pressure. Once fully recovered, she not only joined her husband’s campaign, Mrs. McCain went back to being an aid worker, joining mission’s teams around the world.

• She travels with the World Food Program: in 2008, Mrs. McCain joined WFP on a trip to Rwanda to deliver food and medicine to famine victims.

• 2008: On the trip to Rwanda Mrs. McCain met a group called Women For Women International, an organization helping female survivors of war get educations, jobs, start businesses, receive counseling, rights, food, water, shelter, and medicine.

Mrs. Obama is accused of helping to shut down a Colorado pickle factory in 2005, causing 150 Hispanic workers to lose their jobs.

• Mrs. McCain also works with Pour Un Sourire d’ Enfant (For a Smile of a Child) providing support and education to abused children in third world counties where the basics are not available without the help of volunteers like Cindy McCain who are willing to hike through the most unpleasant situations to help others.

Mrs. McCain is not just another pretty wife of a politician in designer clothes: Cindy McCain doesn’t just talk about lending a hand, she acts. Michelle Obama talks about bringing “change,” Cindy McCain has, in reality, gone out into the world and made a profound change in thousands of lives for the greater good of mankind.

The Republican Convention gave the world a look into the real life of the real Cindy McCain: she is the true definition of feminism. Between Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin women of America truly have two role models to look up to, admire, and aspire to be like.

Lisa Richards is a lifelong Reagan Conservative Republican from Connecticut who believes in America's constitutional founding as a Constitutional Republic. You can read more of her work at www.lisa-richards.com.

The American Dream must be earned

James Shott

The American Dream is not a government handout

The phrase “American Dream” comes to us from historian and writer James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of America, where he said: “The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” The phrase became a symbol of the opportunity America offered, and was reflected in great stories of personal triumph.

Adams complete definition is a broader statement, however, the rest of which explains that Americans are blessed “with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,” he writes, “but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
Adams tells us that the American Dream is, at its core, unbridled opportunity, and what we do with that opportunity, or what we fail to do with it, determines whether, and to what degree, we achieve the American Dream.

In the United States Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers told us that certain truths are self-evident, “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” This sentiment is the foundation of the American Dream. It expresses the founders’ vision of a great nation where men and women are free “to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” Inherent in that vision is that Americans have the will and determination to overcome the circumstances standing between them and their dream.

This is where the American Dream comes under attack. Forces now, and over the last four decades, are and have been hard at work tearing down the traditional American sense of rugged individualism, the sense of perseverance in search of a distant goal, the sense of personal responsibility, the innate understanding that life is not usually easy and that we will be the better for our contesting against adverse circumstances, and what seem to be overwhelming odds. One member of those forces is Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

When he tells us that America is the greatest nation on Earth and we must change it, the American Dream is one of the things he wants to change.

Senator Obama wants government to bestow the American Dream on every American who hasn’t yet achieved it, or at least make it difficult for them to fail to enjoy it.
But the American Dream is not a right, and it is not a government program. When you think about it, the American Dream is the antithesis of a government program.
Our government was set up to be of limited size and scope; it wasn’t designed to micromanage our lives or our economy. Government’s role is to support a system that allows every American a shot at the American Dream. That is very different from what Mr. Obama is suggesting. And, the fact is that the Obama plan will only make the situation worse, and will require more of what has put the American Dream out of the reach of so many Americans: Too much government interference in the lives of the people and too high taxes on the productive elements of our society.

Late last year in Iowa, Mr. Obama said the reason he’s running for president is to keep the American Dream alive. But his idea of keeping the dream alive includes government imposing mandates on employers, such as raising the minimum wage and mandating the number of sick days for all workers, and implementing expensive government programs, such as creating Promise Neighborhoods, implementing a series of tax credits for certain groups, and creating transportation programs for certain groups.

Putting these measures into effect will not be free, and the price will be paid through increased costs and higher taxes to businesses, which will increase consumer prices, and higher taxes for wealthier Americans, limiting how much money they have available to use as they see fit. That is another of the ideas of the founding fathers: citizens being able to keep the fruits of their labors.

Karl Marx wrote the now-famous phrase, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That concept is the cornerstone of socialist thought, and over the last 40 years socialist dogma has crept into our government and is the root of much of what our government does, and what a large number of politicians want to do.America grew and prospered for nearly 200 years without the heavy government interference we see today. The American Dream was a goal its citizens pursued and achieved without government help. Today, we are becoming more dependent upon government for our very survival. Karl Marx would be proud.

Obama, for real

Bill Steigerwald

National Review political reporter David Freddoso hasn’t thrown the first unfriendly book through the stained-glass windows of the Barack Obama crusade. And “The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate” (Regnery) is still mostly being ignored by the mainstream news media -- despite hitting No. 5 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. But Freddoso’s look into Sen. Obama’s political and ideological past has been billed as the first serious, factual and well-reasoned negative biography of the Illinois senator whose ascension to the White House no longer looks as predestined as it once did. I talked to Freddoso on Wednesday by phone from Denver, where the 31-year-old self-described conservative-libertarian was covering the Democratic National Convention for his magazine.

Q: Can you give us a quick synopsis of your book?

A: The idea that Sen. Obama is a reformer, an agent of positive change, is really a great lie that his entire record falsifies. He’s also someone who is not nearly as ideologically reasonable and flexible as he makes himself appear. And in his relationships, he’s shown very, very poor judgment repeatedly.

Q: How is Obama a fake?

A: Sen. Obama’s claims to stand for change are very well known. What’s less known is his record and the way that in Chicago he’s worked against bipartisan reform pretty much anytime he’s had an opportunity to do something either for or against it. In Chicago, there is a political tension between reform Democrats and machine Democrats. Sen. Obama has always aligned with the machine Democrats. All of his endorsements go to machine Democrats. When liberals and conservatives come together to defeat machine candidates -- as they did in 2006 with the Cook County board president election, which is one of the first examples I discuss in my book, because it’s so dramatic -- Sen. Obama works against them. The pattern throughout his life is very unmistakable: Sen. Obama’s pattern of working against bipartisan reform and accommodating himself to whatever political culture of corruption he finds himself in in any given environment -- it’s a very consistent and unmistakable record. It carries through Chicago, Springfield and Washington, as well.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

A: It struck me that there was almost no good information floating around about Sen. Obama, because the sources we had were himself, his books about himself and his own campaign. And then you had people who were out there trying to spread false rumors and innuendo on the Internet about him -- saying things like that he was a secret Muslim; that he was sworn in on the Quran; that he doesn’t salute the flag and he’s not really a U.S. citizen. All those things are false. But I just felt that the news media had done a really poor job of examining the man’s real record. The result was that all the information was falsehoods -- positive falsehoods about him and negative ones.

As someone who has covered Congress for seven years, I felt -- it grated against everything that I believed in to see people worship a politician this way. I see these guys all the time, and none of them deserves the kind of worship they are given, the kind of piety, the kind of adulation that they give Sen. Obama. I know a lot more about these guys than some people do, perhaps, and I never thought that politicians were that good from either party or that there were that many you could really honor as honest and upstanding people. So I thought a real examination of Sen. Obama’s record was appropriate and just hadn’t been done by anyone.

Q: Was it difficult to find out the details of Sen. Obama’s relationship with the Chicago political machine and the other less-than-saintly aspects of his politics and career?

A: There are quite a few new things in my book that people won’t have read anywhere else. But what I was really surprised by is how much the Chicago press had already produced that was being ignored by the Washington and New York media. It is amazing how that town works. All you have to do is start going through back issues of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. The national media has so ignored the Chicago press. … The Chicago press is replete with Obama knowledge and no one is bothering to read it. I wanted to give them their due and I really wanted to tell all the stories that they had told as part of the book. Their understanding of the politics of their town is very keen and very useful in understanding the real Obama.


Q: How has your book been received by the mainstream liberal media?

A: The first review that I received was from Politico (politico.com), who called my book a “serious” and “fact-based” account of Sen. Obama’s political career. Generally speaking, the mainstream media have ignored me -- although they have had to at least acknowledge that my book contains facts in it and isn’t a compilation of viral Internet smears (laughs). The Obama campaign has tried, without actually mentioning my book, to say it is cut from the same cloth as some of the other things out there, which I think is unfair. I wish they would mention me more often and do it by name, because I really want people to learn about Sen. Obama. I’m telling everyone who will listen about Sen. Obama everywhere I go. I really hope my book can start a national conversation that is not limited to people who already are going to vote against Sen. Obama.

Q: What’s the most important thing about Sen. Obama that you have learned that every voter should know by November?

A: Just because I’d like to see this fact in print, because I am surprised how many people don’t know it, I am willing to offer this as an answer: I want people to know that Sen. Obama won his first election by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot. It’s a story I cover in my first chapter, and it’s something that Sen. Obama is so embarrassed about that he wrote a completely fictitious account of his first election in 1996 in his (2006) book “The Audacity of Hope.”

Q: Do you think Sen. Obama will lose or win and what do you suspect will ultimately do him in if he loses?

A: I don’t know what the results are going to be, and it’s really too early to make predictions. But Sen. Obama has shown in the primaries a tendency to fade near the end of an election. As I explored his earlier elections, you don’t find any that were competitive. From his 1996 election, his 1998 election, the race he lost in 2000 and then the one he won in 2004, each either had special circumstances that helped him win or they were uncompetitive -- he knew he was going to win or in the case of the congressional one, he knew he was going to lose. Running his first serious competitive campaign, Sen. Obama faded at the end and let Hillary Clinton win all of the big primaries. He also seems, perhaps, in this election -- the general (presidential) election -- to have peaked early and is fading.
I will be very interested to see what kind of bounce he gets from the convention. If he’s not way ahead after this thing, I really think he is a goner right off the bat; he is underperforming his party in all the polls -- this is a Democrat year and Obama is not winning. And people are starting to talk about his real record -- for the first time, maybe. The more we hear about that -- the more human he becomes, the less messianic -- the more people are going to demand that he show them that there is anything sincere about what he says -- which I think he’ll have a very hard time doing.

Mr. Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Sarah Palin

David Warren

That she could wind up as President, inspires a gulp -- with a Down's syndrome kid in a playpen by the executive desk in the Oval Office. If God were to contrive a pro-life statement, it might look like that.

As everyone with access to the mainstream media (“MSM”) knows, the Alaskan 17-year-old, Bristol Palin, is pregnant by a high school hockey jock named Levi Johnston, and is going to have the baby and marry him.

The august, liberal New York Times carried three big frontpage “analyses” on this yesterday, in which their top correspondents Elisabeth Muller, Adam Nagourney, and Monica Davey, each had a go at performing journalistic “gotchas” on Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the Republican Party. They don’t need to find any example of wrongdoing or irregularity in Mrs Palin’s past. For their purpose is to reduce her candidacy to a soap opera, so that readers will not be tempted to listen to the woman, or form any judgement of their own about her qualifications to be on a presidential ticket.

One begins to understand why women other than Hillary Clinton are seldom considered for such positions. For the American liberal media grant themselves a free pass on all traditional principles of decency, and every feminist talking point besides, when they are confronted with a woman not in the feminist stereotype. Similarly, should a black man be put forward for an important office, who is not ideologically one of theirs, he will be received, journalistically, as Judge Clarence Thomas was -- i.e. publicly lynched -- back in 1991.

I cannot think of better illustrations of the way women and blacks are reduced to stereotype (and “marginalized”) by the American media, and all the other institutions of “political correctness.” We see the same thing up here in Canada, with respect to women and our “visible minorities.” They must not deviate from a script in which every female role model is a feminist and abortion enthusiast, every “visible” the heroic victim of oppression, demanding societal compensation. How better to cripple the individual aspirations of women and minorities?

But there is good news, which comes through Sarah Palin herself, who, from what I can see, is ready for the trial-by-ordeal. She is a woman in the old frontier American mould, whose spirit of independence is pre-feminist. And she is already connecting in a big way with the vast constituency of “Middle America” (or the “vast rightwing conspiracy,” if you prefer), which has almost as much contempt for the MSM, as the MSM has for it.

To the people who work hard for a living; who pay taxes instead of collecting food stamps and subsidies; who face the vagaries of life with gratitude for existence, and take their lumps and setbacks in their stride; who raise multiple children instead of perhaps one designer child; who go to church on Sunday, and believe on Jesus; who volunteer for civic tasks, donate money to real charities, help each other materially in distress; who otherwise mind their own private business and expect others to mind theirs; and who, among other quaint customs, love the fresh air, and indulge such pleasures as hunting and fishing, through which they acquire a sense of stewardship over the land -- Sarah Palin is the bee’s knees.

To them, the stark facts of Mrs Palin’s reaction to a Down’s syndrome pregnancy, and to her daughter’s unseasonable one, shines as day to night against Mr Obama’s, "If my daughter makes a mistake, I don't want her punished with a baby."

There is symbolism (or “personal narrative” as the other side calls it) in a prominent political candidacy, and I have yet to find a single instance, in Mrs Palin’s frontier background and extraordinary career -- rising in politics as an enemy of posturing and corruption -- of where she fails to be a symbol of America’s better angel.

But there is also the hard practical calculation, of how well this person will perform under the astounding personal pressures of high office. Once again, what we can know about her suggests she may be another Margaret Thatcher -- very unlikely to whine her way through the rest of the campaign, or a term in Washington.

The question of experience then presents itself. As one of my Canadian correspondents wrote, “It is like giving the job to someone who was the mayor of Strathroy two years ago.”

To which the reply is, had Barack Obama been mayor of Strathroy two years ago, he could begin to compete with Mrs Palin in management experience. So could McCain and Biden for that matter. She's the only one in that race who has ever run anything (except, McCain once turned around an undistinguished air force training squadron in Florida). Her decade of municipal experience in Wasilla put her intimately in touch with the impact of distant federal policies on actual people. And, given her 80-percent approval rating after a couple of years' running Alaska, I wouldn't write her off.

That she could wind up as President, inspires a gulp -- with a Down's syndrome kid in a playpen by the executive desk in the Oval Office. If God were to contrive a pro-life statement, it might look like that.

Read David's second article on Sarah Palin here

McCain's acceptance speech

John McCain

If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you’re disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

Thank you all very much. Tonight, I have a privilege given few Americans -- the privilege of accepting our party’s nomination for President of the United States. And I accept it with gratitude, humility and confidence.

In my life, no success has come without a good fight, and this nomination wasn’t any different. That’s a tribute to the candidates who opposed me and their supporters. They’re leaders of great ability, who love our country, and wished to lead it to better days. Their support is an honor I won’t forget.

I’m grateful to the President for leading us in those dark days following the worst attack on American soil in our history, and keeping us safe from another attack many thought was inevitable; and to the First Lady, Laura Bush, a model of grace and kindness in public and in private. And I’m grateful to the 41st President and his bride of 63 years, and for their outstanding example of honorable service to our country.

As always, I’m indebted to my wife, Cindy, and my seven children. The pleasures of family life can seem like a brief holiday from the crowded calendar of our nation’s business. But I have treasured them all the more, and can’t imagine a life without the happiness you give me. Cindy said a lot of nice things about me tonight. But, in truth, she’s more my inspiration than I am hers. Her concern for those less blessed than we are - victims of land mines, children born in poverty and with birth defects - shows the measure of her humanity. I know she will make a great First Lady.

When I was growing up, my father was often at sea, and the job of raising my brother, sister and me would fall to my mother alone. Roberta McCain gave us her love of life, her deep interest in the world, her strength, and her belief we are all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country. I wouldn’t be here tonight but for the strength of her character.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you, who helped me win this nomination, and stood by me when the odds were long. I won’t let you down. To Americans who have yet to decide who to vote for, thank you for your consideration and the opportunity to win your trust. I intend to earn it.

Finally, a word to Senator Obama and his supporters. We’ll go at it over the next two months. That’s the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We’re dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn’t be an American worthy of the name if I didn’t honor Senator Obama and his supporters for their achievement.

But let there be no doubt, my friends, we’re going to win this election. And after we’ve won, we’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.

These are tough times for many of you. You’re worried about keeping your job or finding a new one, and are struggling to put food on the table and stay in your home. All you ever asked of government is to stand on your side, not in your way. And that’s just what I intend to do: stand on your side and fight for your future.

And I’ve found just the right partner to help me shake up Washington, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. She has executive experience and a real record of accomplishment. She’s tackled tough problems like energy independence and corruption. She’s balanced a budget, cut taxes, and taken on the special interests. She’s reached across the aisle and asked Republicans, Democrats and Independents to serve in her administration. She’s the mother of five children. She’s helped run a small business, worked with her hands and knows what it’s like to worry about mortgage payments and health care and the cost of gasoline and groceries.

She knows where she comes from and she knows who she works for. She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down. I’m very proud to have introduced our next Vice President to the country. But I can’t wait until I introduce her to Washington. And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big spending, do nothing, me first, country second Washington crowd: change is coming.

I’m not in the habit of breaking promises to my country and neither is Governor Palin. And when we tell you we’re going to change Washington, and stop leaving our country’s problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count on it. We’ve got a record of doing just that, and the strength, experience, judgment and backbone to keep our word to you.

You know, I’ve been called a maverick; someone who marches to the beat of his own drum. Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.

I’ve fought corruption, and it didn’t matter if the culprits were Democrats or Republicans. They violated their public trust, and had to be held accountable. I’ve fought big spenders in both parties, who waste your money on things you neither need nor want, while you struggle to buy groceries, fill your gas tank and make your mortgage payment. I’ve fought to get million dollar checks out of our elections. I’ve fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes. I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon. I fought tobacco companies and trial lawyers, drug companies and union bosses.

I fought for the right strategy and more troops in Iraq, when it wasn’t a popular thing to do. And when the pundits said my campaign was finished, I said I’d rather lose an election than see my country lose a war.

Thanks to the leadership of a brilliant general, David Petraeus, and the brave men and women he has the honor to command, that strategy succeeded and rescued us from a defeat that would have demoralized our military, risked a wider war and threatened the security of all Americans.

I don’t mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I’ve had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way. In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.

I fight for Americans. I fight for you. I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market. Bill got a temporary job after he was out of work for seven months. Sue works three jobs to help pay the bills.

I fight for Jake and Toni Wimmer of Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Jake works on a loading dock; coaches Little League, and raises money for the mentally and physically disabled. Toni is a schoolteacher, working toward her Master’s Degree. They have two sons, the youngest, Luke, has been diagnosed with autism. Their lives should matter to the people they elect to office. They matter to me.

I fight for the family of Matthew Stanley of Wolfboro, New Hampshire, who died serving our country in Iraq. I wear his bracelet and think of him every day. I intend to honor their sacrifice by making sure the country their son loved so well and never returned to, remains safe from its enemies.

I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party. We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Senator Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles.

We’re going to change that. We’re going to recover the people’s trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.

We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential from the boy whose descendents arrived on the Mayflower to the Latina daughter of migrant workers. We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans.

We believe in low taxes; spending discipline, and open markets. We believe in rewarding hard work and risk takers and letting people keep the fruits of their labor.

We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench. We believe in the values of families, neighborhoods and communities.

We believe in a government that unleashes the creativity and initiative of Americans. Government that doesn’t make your choices for you, but works to make sure you have more choices to make for yourself.

I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can. My opponent will raise them. I will open new markets to our goods and services. My opponent will close them. I will cut government spending. He will increase it.

My tax cuts will create jobs. His tax increases will eliminate them. My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.

Keeping taxes low helps small businesses grow and create new jobs. Cutting the second highest business tax rate in the world will help American companies compete and keep jobs from moving overseas. Doubling the child tax exemption from $3500 to $7000 will improve the lives of millions of American families. Reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs will let you keep more of your own money to save, spend and invest as you see fit. Opening new markets and preparing workers to compete in the world economy is essential to our future prosperity.

I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn’t even noticed. Government assistance for unemployed workers was designed for the economy of the 1950s. That’s going to change on my watch. My opponent promises to bring back old jobs by wishing away the global economy. We’re going to help workers who’ve lost a job that won’t come back, find a new one that won’t go away.

We will prepare them for the jobs of today. We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities. For workers in industries that have been hard hit, we'll help make up part of the difference in wages between their old job and a temporary, lower paid one while they receive retraining that will help them find secure new employment at a decent wage.

Education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.

When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity.

Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies. I want schools to answer to parents and students. And when I’m President, they will.

My fellow Americans, when I’m President, we’re going to embark on the most ambitious national project in decades. We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much. We will attack the problem on every front. We will produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells offshore, and we’ll drill them now. We will build more nuclear power plants. We will develop clean coal technology. We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas. We will encourage the development and use of flex fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.

Senator Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that. We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and to restore the health of our planet. It’s an ambitious plan, but Americans are ambitious by nature, and we have faced greater challenges. It’s time for us to show the world again how Americans lead.

This great national cause will create millions of new jobs, many in industries that will be the engine of our future prosperity; jobs that will be there when your children enter the workforce.

Today, the prospect of a better world remains within our reach. But we must see the threats to peace and liberty in our time clearly and face them, as Americans before us did, with confidence, wisdom and resolve.

We have dealt a serious blow to al Qaeda in recent years. But they are not defeated, and they’ll strike us again if they can. Iran remains the chief state sponsor of terrorism and on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons. Russia’s leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world’s oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of reassembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and prayers. As President, I will work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War. But we can’t turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people.

We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I'm not afraid of them. I'm prepared for them. I know how the military works, what it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it. I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams of a freer, safer and more prosperous world, and how to stand up to those who don't. I know how to secure the peace.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house. A Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I rarely saw my father again for four years. My grandfather came home from that same war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day. In Vietnam, where I formed the closest friendships of my life, some of those friends never came home with me. I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination.

I’m running for President to keep the country I love safe, and prevent other families from risking their loved ones in war as my family has. I will draw on all my experience with the world and its leaders, and all the tools at our disposal - diplomatic, economic, military and the power of our ideals - to build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace.

In America, we change things that need to be changed. Each generation makes its contribution to our greatness. The work that is ours to do is plainly before us. We don’t need to search for it.

We need to change the way government does almost everything: from the way we protect our security to the way we compete in the world economy; from the way we respond to disasters to the way we fuel our transportation network; from the way we train our workers to the way we educate our children. All these functions of government were designed before the rise of the global economy, the information technology revolution and the end of the Cold War. We have to catch up to history, and we have to change the way we do business in Washington.

The constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving these problems isn’t a cause, it’s a symptom. It’s what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not you.

Again and again, I’ve worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed. That’s how I will govern as President. I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again. I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not.

Instead of rejecting good ideas because we didn’t think of them first, let’s use the best ideas from both sides. Instead of fighting over who gets the credit, let’s try sharing it. This amazing country can do anything we put our minds to. I will ask Democrats and Independents to serve with me. And my administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability.

We’re going to finally start getting things done for the people who are counting on us, and I won’t care who gets the credit.

I’ve been an imperfect servant of my country for many years. But I have been her servant first, last and always. And I’ve never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I didn’t thank God for the privilege.

Long ago, something unusual happened to me that taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I was blessed by misfortune. I mean that sincerely. I was blessed because I served in the company of heroes, and I witnessed a thousand acts of courage, compassion and love.

On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin, I prepared for my 23rd mission over North Vietnam. I hadn’t any worry I wouldn’t come back safe and sound. I thought I was tougher than anyone. I was pretty independent then, too. I liked to bend a few rules, and pick a few fights for the fun of it. But I did it for my own pleasure; my own pride. I didn’t think there was a cause more important than me.

Then I found myself falling toward the middle of a small lake in the city of Hanoi, with two broken arms, a broken leg, and an angry crowd waiting to greet me. I was dumped in a dark cell, and left to die. I didn’t feel so tough anymore. When they discovered my father was an admiral, they took me to a hospital. They couldn’t set my bones properly, so they just slapped a cast on me. When I didn’t get better, and was down to about a hundred pounds, they put me in a cell with two other Americans. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even feed myself. They did it for me. I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence. Those men saved my life.

I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me. I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners. Our Code said we could only go home in the order of our capture, and there were men who had been shot down before me. I thought about it, though. I wasn’t in great shape, and I missed everything about America. But I turned it down.

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I’d been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I’d been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn’t know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me. Through taps on a wall he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for our country and for the men I had the honor to serve with. Because every day they fought for me.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.

I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you’re disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

I’m going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach. Fight with me. Fight with me.

Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all. Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

Thank you, and God Bless you.

Johnny's Got a New Girl

Pat Buchanan
Taken from Human Events

The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.

McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.

The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver—Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.

As the Democrats were being rudely stepped on, however, Palin ignited an explosion of enthusiasm among conservatives, Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, gun owners and Right to Lifers not seen in decades.

By passing over his friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, and picking Palin, McCain has given himself a fighting chance of winning the White House that, before Friday morning, seemed to be slipping away. Indeed, the bristling reaction on the left testifies to Democratic fears that the choice of Palin could indeed be a game-changer in 2008.

Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.

None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

She has no foreign policy experience, we are told. And though Alaska's neighbors are Canada and Russia, the point is valid. But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense.

She will be up to speed in her first year.

And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.

Where Obama has poodled along with the Daley Machine, Palin routed the Republican establishment, challenging and ousting a sitting GOP governor before defeating a former Democratic governor to become the first female and youngest governor in state history.

For his boldness in choosing Palin, McCain deserves enormous credit. He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket. Rarely has this writer encountered such an outburst of enthusiasm on the right.

In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, Evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives—wholly independent of President McCain.

A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.

Indeed, if McCain defeats Barack, 2012 could see women on both national tickets, and given McCain's age and the possibility he intends to serve a single term, women at the top of both—Sarah vs. Hillary.

The arrival of Palin on the national scene, with her youth, charisma and vitality, probably also portends a changing of the guard in Washington.
With Republicans having zero chance of capturing either House, and but a slim chance of avoiding losses in both, a Vice President Palin, with her reputation as a rebel and reformer, would surely inspire similar revolts in the Republican caucuses.

As Thomas Jefferson said, from time to time, a little rebellion in the political world is as necessary as storms in the physical.

The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.

Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.

With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States—and much for the better.

Why Catholics Can't Vote for Obama

Fr. James Farfaglia

Many Catholics are concerned about the war in Iraq, the environment, the economy, capital punishment, poverty and immigration. These are important issues, but the question that divides many is this: can I vote for a candidate that supports my beliefs although that candidate supports abortion? Is it possible to consider abortion on the same level as any other issue?

The canonical penalties attributed to the sin of abortion and the continual teaching of the papal Magisterium on the subject demonstrates that abortion, in the mind of the Church, is not on the same level as other issues.

There have been more babies killed by abortion since Roe v. Wade than people killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and both Iraq wars combined. An average of 150 convicted murderers, proven guilty, are killed by the death penalty in Texas every year. 90,000 innocent babies are killed in Texas every year by abortion.

Since 1973 there have been over 48 million abortions in the U.S. alone. Consider the estimated population of some of our major U.S. cities: New York – 8,143,197; Los Angeles – 3,844,829; Chicago – 2,842,518; and Houston – 2,016,582. Are we not destroying our work force and the base for social security?

If we can kill an innocent child in the womb of a mother and that no longer shocks us as a nation, then we can justify anything such as unending wars, abuses in the use of capital punishment, violence, and social injustices. Moreover, abortion undermines civil order because it affirms that everyone is not equal under the law. Let us remember the haunting words of Mother Theresa: "Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion”.

When legalized abortion has ended, we can then move on to other pressing concerns. Therefore, in light of the gravity of the sin of abortion and its consequences on society, we cannot vote for any candidate that supports abortion even though that candidate may support other issues that concern us. We have a moral obligation to vote for the candidate that will do all that he can to end legalized abortion and appoint Supreme Court Justices that will protect innocent unborn life.

Note: Please see this article by Ed Koch on the importance of the abortion issue in the 2008 elections.

Workers needed: apply November 4

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

In our Main Street Cafe, having a conversation over a friendly cup of coffee, I often overhear friends at the next table talking about politics. Our fellows there are what we can call without a doubt "working class Americans," ordinary people in a small town in Southside Virginia, a solid Baptist bastion in what was once the proud tobacco belt. They are good, unpretentious, real American workers. I learn a lot just hearing them chat. What caught my attention in the past few weeks was not the varying themes of conversation, the opinions, or the political predictions. Nope, none of that. What really made me think was the almost unnoticeable tone. Something revealing that an election had already taken place among those working class men and women.

For all the hoopla and media attention that the Democratic primaries got, I say the result of that race was almost irrelevant to the American working class. The messages from Obama and Hillary were the usual Democratic "I, me, mine", that we have been hearing for decades. "I feel your pain" Bill the Great said. He did a lot of feeling, we all agree on that. The party of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and Tip O'Neill has changed over the decades into the party of the Kennedys, the Gores, the Clintons, the Obamas. The party of those who nearly never held a job to make ends meet.

Clearly since 1968 the Democratic Party has been veering more and more towards the elites of the leftist intelligentsia and away from those sweaty workers who refuse to have Frapuccinos and keep sticking to their guns, their religion and a simple cuppa joe.

The workers of America are now very aware that there is no one there to represent them. There was a time when the Democrats were the political brokers of the labor side of the economy, while the Republicans were the brokers of the capital side. They may not have agreed in much, but they needed each other in an America where there was a lot of work to be done, and a lot of money to be made. In those days the political forces were dealing with the challenges of keeping the social contract going in a country that was unleashing creative forces unknown until then in the history of the world.

But that was then.

In the late sixties the Democrats were facing defeat on the War on Poverty programs. Entire neighborhoods across the country had turned into slums. As taxation and welfare programs grew, so did poverty. The force and popular appeal of the Civil Rights movement attracted the Democrats' attention. They decided then to change their modus operandi and quickly jettisoned the workers' interests to invest their time in political causes that had a guaranteed pseudo-high moral ground. The great thing about this long march towards equality on everything was that success did not have to be measured in fiscal or economic terms. The Democrats only had to find "victims" and "fight" for their causes.

In time the party became the champion of feminism, the sex revolution, homosexualism, free abortion, environazism, and atheism. When those causes reached their natural positive limits, then they started to foster all the "anti" movements and the Democratic Party became what it is now: the anti-family, anti-life, anti-normality federation of loons. There is no room for any guy or gal in blue overalls in the files of the blue party. If he survives until he is born, he has to face the destructive power of the educational system. After that, if he still has his natural sexuality intact, has managed to reasonably avoid catching any STD's or addictions, the survivor may have to dodge the minefield of broken families, debt and the burden of taxes that weigh on the working class like ton of bricks. Fighting alone, the plain worker as such is represented by no one in the drawing of the American social contract of today: "a working class hero is something to be."

I think the conversations in the Main Street Cafe revealed to me that there is something very important going on in American politics now. The working class is awakening to the fact that the Republicans are closer to them in the values they hold, and they feel more comfortable with the GOP. The Republican Party is also feeling the effects of this shift. They are not used to deal with popular issues. The emergence of Ronald Reagan should have shown the way but the party brainiacs (mostly of the Bush persuasion) lost that train. Now McCain, Ron Paul and others like them have seized the concept instinctively. McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate shows a clear direction, away from the ways of the old leanings of the GOP and back to the principles of Reaganism. If McCain and Palin can articulate these issues to the working class, they may be putting the last nail on the Democratic Party coffin. A new political party may be in the making. If Palin and McCain embrace the American workers and give them a voice, they may succeed in internalizing the dialog of the social contract within the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats to represent only the foolish and the unnatural.

Having gone from Labor Omnia Vincit to Mors Omnia Vincit, the Party of Death may get a taste of its own medicine, namely being aborted from having any meaningful role in our political life and join Marxism-Leninism, into the ash-heap of history.