Observations

Are the Wheels Wobbling on the Obama Campaign?

There’s trouble in paradise. Michelle Obama, the wife of Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama, told a campaign crowd recently that only now is she proud of her country. Ms. Obama, age 44, has been around since the mid 60s, and since then some pretty spectacular things have happened involving America, the Berlin Wall coming down, the actions of the first responders following the 9-11 attacks, the United States’ best-in-the-world record of helping other nations after natural disasters, to name just three. And yet none of those things, or other things of similar magnitude, have made her proud. All of which begs the question: Has Michelle Obama actually been ashamed of her country up until now, as so many liberals so often state?

But maybe there is something else at work here. Are people overreacting to Ms. Obama, reading more (or less) into her comments than they should? Is she just a careless talker who says things she hasn’t thought through?

Although most of us can point to some things about America that we aren’t proud of, the fact is that most Americans are proud of many things about their country. And it is true that we are not electing a First Lady. However, a candidate’s wife who is either ashamed of her country, or who cannot or will not point to things that have occurred in her adult life that she considers good things, other than that her husband is running an effective campaign and has a shot at being elected president, reflects negatively on hubby.

And speaking of hubby … A guy whose success to this point is due entirely to his skill with words and his inspirational speeches, carelessly/thoughtlessly/arrogantly uses a someone else’s effective words verbatim at a campaign appearance. What’s up with that? My first reaction was that it was a tempest in a teapot. And then I saw a video of Barack Obama side by side with a video of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, whose words Sen. Obama misappropriated. If you are a responsible, thoughtful human being you do one of two things when you want to use someone else’s ideas: you attribute them to their originator, or you take the person’s general ideas and rework them or rephrase them. Sen. Obama did neither

I said early on in the campaign when it became obvious that Sen. Obama had offered nothing more than a litany of hopeful statements about “hope” and “change” that if he won the nomination, during the general election campaign he would have to actually deal in details if he hoped to win, and the details of his ultra-liberal agenda, when he actually provided some, would sink him. It looks as if I was wrong: Sen. Obama is falling apart already.

Technorati Tags: America, Democrats, Politics, Barack Obama