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The Magician
 Senator Barack Obama is a real louse.
Just
thought I’d say that to shake you up a little, because it’s a
sentence I’m sure you haven’t read anywhere else, and I dislike
saying what everyone else is already
saying.  That’s
not what I’m paid for.
Actually,
the young Illinois Democrat himself is startling enough. He manages to excite
liberals enormously, especially those in the press, without much offending
conservatives. And he appeals powerfully to “moderates,” or
people of no particular political philosophy. At the moment he is
approximately as popular as the Beatles once were.
Yet he
takes positions definite enough that you can’t accuse him of dodging
issues. He has a generally liberal voting record, and he has been an outspoken
opponent of the Iraq war from Day One. It is not too early to say that he is a
master of tone, an essential skill in politics.
Obama
seems to take everything into account before he takes a stand, and he is
articulate and charming. He is slicker than Slick Willie, yet one doesn’t
really think of him as “slick.” I find myself using the word
reluctantly. He is the most disarming politician I’ve ever seen, and
maybe the most adroit. He seems to make passionate friends without making
a single enemy.
Observing him is like watching a brilliant magician and wondering
how he does it. Do our eyes deceive us? Did he actually do what we just
thought we saw him do? But that’s impossible! Isn’t it? Have we
all been hypnotized?
Even
apparent political handicaps don’t slow him down. He is
“black” (though he talks “white” and his mother is
white), and his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, sounds like that of a Third
World terrorist. (A week after the 9/11 attacks, he might not have been
allowed to board an airplane.) No doubt he has had to acquire extraordinary
tact in order to survive in politics at all.
President Bush used to say, “I’m a uniter, not a
divider.” It hasn’t worked out quite that way. He should have
taken lessons from this guy. Bush too has tried to straddle the
liberal-conservative divide, but he has wound up doing for the image of
conservatism roughly what the movie Deliverance did for the
image of Southern hospitality. (I just watched the film again and kept
thinking, “This is a real Red state!”)
![[Breaker quote for The Magician: How long can Obama keep this up?]](2006breakers/061214.gif) Young
as he is, Obama is already poised to snatch the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination from
Hillary Clinton. Maybe his magic was actually a successful gamble. He is
almost her opposite. She can’t help enraging conservatives, while her
support for the war has badly damaged her appeal to her party’s
liberal base. His unequivocal opposition to the war endears him to that base,
and yet he avoids antagonizing conservatives; in fact, many of them now
admit that the war has been a disaster, so his position looks like a very
smart move.
Was this
just beginner’s luck? Or was Obama shrewd enough to foresee that
the war would go so badly that lots of conservatives would turn against it? I
don’t know, but as they say, fortune favors the bold. Fortune also
favors those who have kept a safe distance from the man Hillary is married
to. She has kept her old implacable enemies, while this new kid has quietly
stolen many of her old friends. I’ll bet she thinks he’s a real
louse.
As a
friend of mine once said of Ronald Reagan, when a man is this lucky, it
isn’t just luck. In crucial respects Obama is the opposite of not only
Hillary, but also Bush — and just at the right time, too.
His
greatest strength vis-à-vis Hillary is that he is even more different
from Bush than she is, which makes him more electable than she is. Bush has
been a worse calamity for the country than 9/11 itself. The 2008 election,
like this year’s, will be a repudiation of the worst president, by far, in
most Americans’ memory.
Right
now things are going almost too perfectly Obama’s way. Time will of
course force him to make definite and therefore costly choices, even if
some unforeseeable disaster doesn’t befall him. Or maybe —
cruel fate! — he’ll turn himself into a joke. A single televised
gaffe could do it!
As
always, time is the mysterious stranger who will have the last word. But for
the moment, as long as he is neither Bush nor Hillary, Obama looks mighty
electable.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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