Americans See China as World Economic Leader

Public opinion pollling in recent months has found Americans to be increasingly pessimistic on the direction of the country.

One of the most recent indicators of such sentiment is the new Gallup finding that a plurality of Americans sees China as the world's dominant country in global economic relations:

In a sharp turnaround from eight years ago, Americans no longer believe the United States is the world's leading economic power. They are now more likely to bestow that mantle on China.

According to Gallup's annual World Affairs survey, updated Feb. 11-14, 2008, 4 in 10 Americans consider China to be the world's leading economic power; only 33% choose the United States. By contrast, in May 2000, the United States dominated public perceptions on this question, with 65% saying it was No.1.

Nearly all of the movement away from the United States as the perceived leading economic power has gone toward China. The percentages today choosing Japan, the European Union, and India are about what they were in 2000.

The United States' drop on this measure is nearly as sharp as the decline in U.S. consumer confidence over the same period. In a May 2000 Gallup Poll, when the country was still riding the dot-com boom, 66% of Americans rated economic conditions in the country as "excellent" or "good." Today, with the country poised on the edge of recession, only 23% are positive about the economy.

Eight years ago, most Americans (55%) were confident the United States would retain its No. 1 economic positioning for at least the next two decades. Few believed China, Japan, or the EU would overtake the United States. Now, when asked to look ahead 20 years, more Americans predict China, rather than the United States, will be the world's leading economic power.

Notably, not many more Americans think China will advance to the economic superpower position in 20 years (44%) than think it is already there (40%). About a third believe the United States will be the top economic power, similar to the percentage naming it as the leading economic power today. Relatively few Americans expect Japan, the EU, India, or Russia to emerge as the top economic superpower.

Appropriately, the Gallup piece puts public opinion in perspective. The fact is the U.S. is not likely to be overtaken by China soon, nor has China's growth knocked other international peer competitors from the top ranks of the great powers:

When considered against the backdrop of China's enormous population, the story of China's explosive economic growth over the last few decades (averaging 9.6% annual growth in GDP since 1978) can seem formidable. According to a recent Newsweek article, "In 2007 China contributed more to global growth than the United States, the first time another country had done so since at least the 1930s."

Still, according to the most recent World Bank figures, the United States leads the world in economic output (as measured by GDP), and by a substantial margin over second-ranked Japan. China has been making impressive strides in climbing the rank order of national economies, rising from sixth in the world in 2000 to fourth in 2006, but still falls below the United States, Germany, and Japan.

Americans' misperceptions about the economic rank order of nations also overlook Japan's stature on the economic playing field, ranking second worldwide. Also, although few Americans mention the EU as an economic powerhouse, 5 of the EU's 27 member countries, including third-place Germany, rank in the top 10 of the world's largest economies.

Gallup notes simply that Americans are in a funk, which contributes to the likely findings that China's taken the lead in the global economy.

See also Daniel Drezner's recent piece, "The Eagle Still Soars: Reports of America's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated."

The General Election Begins

It's been clear this last couple of weeks that Barak Obama's got ineluctable momentum. Things became pretty certain after the Illinois Senator swept the Potomac primaries, and a sense of Obama inevitability was confirmed with his win in Wisconsin the following week.

Michael Barone discusses the shift in focus away from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, and how we're increasingly seeing in essence a general election matchup between Obama and John McCain. It's fairly clear by now that Clinton's not likely to make a comeback (despite her claims she's not conceding the race):

She could win the nomination only with the votes of super-delegates or by counting the results in Florida and Michigan, where the national party commanded candidates not to compete.

Either move will strike many Obama enthusiasts -- and others -- as profoundly unfair. The way Clinton has run her campaign -- like the way she ran health care reform in 1993-94 -- undercuts her claim to be ready for the presidency from day one. In both cases, she had no fallback strategy, no Plan B, in case her best-case scenario failed to come to pass. She started campaigning in Wisconsin only last Saturday and had to cancel her events because of a snowstorm. Didn't anyone check weather.com?

If you look at the numbers, if the general election were held today, Barack Obama would beat John McCain by a solid margin. (McCain would beat Clinton -- another reason the super-delegates are unlikely to foist her on the party.) But the performances of the candidates on primary night -- and the performances of their wives on Monday and Tuesday -- suggests that may not always be the case.

Obama's cut-and-paste job does respond to the complaint that he is without substance. But it's hard to mix poetry and prose and come up with an appealing product. Particularly when, as columnist Robert Samuelson points out, there's not much that's interesting about the substance.

Then there are the wives. In Milwaukee on Monday, Michelle Obama, who has spoken frequently in the campaign, said: "Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change."

For the first time in her life? Coming from the realm in which Michelle Obama has lived her adult life -- Princeton, Harvard Law, a top law firm, a $342,000-a year job doing community relations for the University of Chicago hospital system -- this may not sound out of the ordinary. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out, people in this stratum tend to have transnational attitudes -- all nations are morally equal, except maybe for ours, which is worse.

This is not, to say the least, the view of most Americans, including very many who regularly vote Democratic. And it undercuts Barack Obama's most appealing rhetoric, which emphasizes what Americans have in common.

Cindy McCain, who ordinarily doesn't speak in public, picked up on this immediately. On Tuesday, she made a point of saying, several times, that she has always been proud of America. On election night, John McCain said he was "proud, proud of the privilege" of being an American.

I remember the electric feeling in the hall, at the first Republican National Convention I attended, in 1984, when Lee Greenwood belted out his country hit, "I'm proud to be an American." I don't believe that I've heard it at any Democratic National Convention, and I'm pretty sure that some nontrivial number of the delegates would find it off-putting, even obnoxious.

Barack Obama has explained that his wife was just saying that she was proud for the first time of her country's politics. But that's not what she said, and said with considerable emphasis. Tuesday night seemed to be the beginning of the general election campaign. But what was said on Monday may prove to be just as important.

I've made a similar point here. While some commenters have suggested that it's hasty or unproductive to focus on Michelle Obama's statements, I see them as part and parcel to the larger Obama message.

Barack's last few victory speeches have been considerably dour, for example, calling for unconditional surrender in Iraq.

McCain's message - muddled as it's been by recent media controversy - is likely to resonate with that great majority of Americans who love their country and want strong, seasoned leadership in the White House.

If the Obamas keep playing things the way they have, the Democratic Party can forget about reversing the GOP advantage in the conservative states of the Electoral College.

New York Times Hit Piece Pumps McCain Rally

The New York Times' wacky smear against GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain has boomeranged to the Arizona Sentator's advantage:

Senator John McCain declared the battle over on Friday morning, but by then his lieutenants believed he had already won the war.

Conservative radio talk show hosts who had long reviled Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential candidate from Arizona, had rallied to his defense. Bloggers on the right said that this could be the start of a new relationship. Most telling, Mr. McCain’s campaign announced Friday afternoon that it had just recorded its single-best 24 hours in online fund-raising, although it declined to provide numbers.

Both sides traced the senator’s sudden fortunes to an unusual source, The New York Times, which on Wednesday night published on its Web site an article about Mr. McCain’s close ties to a female lobbyist who did business before the senator’s committee. That evening, two of the senator’s top advisers, Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt, flew to an emergency strategy session in Toledo, Ohio, where Mr. McCain was campaigning.

By Thursday morning, when the article appeared in the print editions of The Times, the McCain campaign had begun an aggressive attack against the newspaper, calling the article a smear campaign worthy of The National Enquirer. It was a symphony to the ears of Mr. McCain’s conservative critics.

Operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, many conservatives who had long distrusted Mr. McCain on a variety of issues, including his peculiar fondness for talking to reporters for hours on end, rallied to see him at war with a newspaper they revile as a voice of the left. (In fact, Mr. McCain said only that he was “disappointed” with the newspaper, and left the incendiary attacks to his surrogates.)

“This is the most despicable act of liberal bias that I have seen in my life,” Sean Hannity, the conservative talk show host, said Thursday about the Times article. “They wanted you to come to a conclusion, and that is that Senator McCain had some kind of relationship with a female lobbyist and did special favors for her. It is beyond disgusting and despicable.”

Charles Black, a senior McCain adviser who had taken heat from conservative friends after the editorial board of The Times endorsed Mr. McCain in the Feb. 5 New York primary, was pleased. Thursday, Mr. Black said, “was the first day in the campaign that McCain won the day on conservative talk radio.”

Later that afternoon, the McCain campaign began using The Times in an fund-raising appeal sent by e-mail to supporters. “Well, here we go,” the letter from Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, began, then outlined what it characterized as the newspaper’s smear campaign. Mr. Davis quickly got to the point: “We need your help to counteract the liberal establishment and fight back against The New York Times by making an immediate contribution today.”

By Friday, the campaign was tracing its jump in fund-raising directly to the article in The Times. “Thank you,” Mr. Schmidt said to a Times reporter on Mr. McCain’s campaign plane as it headed back to Washington from Indianapolis. Then he added to a group of reporters, “There was a lot of outrage across the country on the story, and the campaign has raised a lot of money in the last 24 hours.”

Even those conservatives who did not rush to embrace Mr. McCain said his campaign’s condemnations of The Times might have given him an indirect boost, although some were not yet ready to support Mr. McCain’s campaign.

Even those who didn't rush to embrace McCain? You mean the ones who couldn't say "I told you so" fast enough as they sought to attack two opponents with one stone?

See also, "McCain Turns Tables on Times."

Photo Credit: New York Times

The Audacity of Victory

Disaster, quagmire, catastrophe, failure. Like witches cackling about a bubbly cauldron, critics and critiques enchant and re enchant a totally cursed cacophony. A pox on Pax Americana, defeat, retreat and repeat.

Such inappropiate (and boring) wickedness summoned something more than shades, spectres and hissing dissing daemoneocon denounciations.

It also requires a retarded redux more see through than Lindsay's see through Marilyn redux.

Decorated ex Combat historian and all around America Rocks y'all! PHD Bevin Alexander prophesied that chairborne handwringers, ex and future (maybe?) policy makers, are either educated doofuses, in heat with defeat or (even worse) - academic deceivers

"Many critics of American foreign policy - both at home and abroad - assert
that the United States has overextended herself unnecessarily in other
nations affairs. Some liberal critcs even chastise the United States for
becoming an "Imperial Power."

These criticisms are completely off the mark. Those who worry about America's projection of power are overlooking how America got to the position she occupies at this moment in history: the world's dominant political and military, the only nation that will actually go into the world and strike down evil."

This is significant. For Great Satan, "National Interest" is not a 'geo mapi - graphical' phrase (well maybe for trade and enviro regulating) it is global. Tiny and small nations might appropiately feel that their nat'l interest begin and end at the border. Natch, their foreign policy would most likely be defensive only.

A larger nation has more extensive interests - by design. Like Soviet Union time Russia and Great Satan today - collective ID is ideological, big boys have ideological interests in addition to purely materialistic concerns.

Sans something weird and unheard of, Great Satan will always feel bound and obliged to defend any democracy under the gun from unfree, unhinged and undemocratic threats - external or internal.

*********

Read the rest at Great Satan's Girlfriend.

Women's Studies is History?

Diplomatic and military historians may be getting the last word on the culture wars in academe. Women's studies may be on the way out:

Women's studies is about to disappear as an undergraduate degree in the UK. But is it because it is no longer relevant or because it has done its job by putting the issues in the mainstream? Esther Oxford weighs up the arguments.

It is all a far cry from the heyday for women's studies in the late Eighties and early Nineties. In the past two decades, departments across Britain have been forced to integrate into other departments or to close outright. Only MAs and PhDs appear to be surviving the cull.

One problem has been the sustained attack on women's studies as a "soft" subject appealing to fringe elements and perpetuating old-fashioned, irrelevant debates. Women and society have moved on, say critics, but women's studies remains framed by the politics of a particular time, namely the feminist movement of the Seventies.

"The work of women's studies classes is very sophisticated," counters Mary Evans, professor of women's studies at the University of Kent and also a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. "There has been a great deal of openingup of ideas that weren't previously discussed and a lot of diverse conclusions as a result of the pedagogy of women's studies."

Jackie Stacey, who was director of the now-defunct Institute of Women's Studies at the University of Lancaster, says women's studies courses are "far from being confessional or intellectually sloppy" and that universities lose out by closing women's studies programmes. "I would say to vice-chancellors: you clearly misunderstand the centrality of feminism and its relevance in global debates such as the West versus Islam and world security."

But women's studies has many detractors, including some high-powered female critics. Christina Hoff Summers is former professor of philosophy at Clark University in the US and author of Who Stole Feminism? She argues that women's studies encourages "paranoid theories about patriarchy" and "gets its power from false statistics on how bad things are for women".

Far from coming up with new, invigorating ideas, women's studies professors tend to be "a little intellectually cohesive clique that has never recovered from the Seventies, when that rhetoric of oppression - women as subordinate class - was fashionable," Hoff Summers said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review.

Hoff Summers argues that women's studies appeals to a person who is "hypersensitive and chronically offended" and who wants to view women as a "subordinate class" and men as "oppressors". As a result of this rhetoric, she suggests, students have come to associate feminism with women who are intellectually stilted and angry with men. Feminism has lost its force as a mainstream political movement.

Karen Lehrman, a US author of a book on post-ideological feminism, has also been a pointed critic of some approaches to women's studies. She attended classes at institutions in the US, including Dartmouth College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Smith College, and was disappointed at the "confessional" nature of a "therapeutic pedagogy" that valued students' feelings and experiences "as much as the texts themselves".

That's an interesting development.

Now, if we could just get more conservatives academe!

Michelle Obama's Thesis on the Racial Divide

Michelle Obama's senior thesis at Princeton University has been taken out of circulation by university librarians until November 5. The decision's not unusual during a presidential campaign, although speculation's mounted as to what potentially titilating extracts the manuscript might contain.

Well it turns out that the Politico's obtained a copy, as Jeffrey Ressner explains (via Memeorandum):

Michelle Obama's senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain "on the periphery." Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4."

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

The thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" and written under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in 1985, has been the subject of much conjecture on the blogosphere and elsewhere in recent weeks, as it has been "temporarily withdrawn" from Princeton's library until after this year's presidential election in November. Some of the material has been written about previously, however, including a story last year in the Newark Star Ledger.

As you can see, the Politico's posted links to the online manuscript. I haven't read it, although I'm intrigued by Ressner's final two paragraphs in his story:

To research her thesis, the future Mrs. Obama sent an 18-question survey to a sampling of 400 black Princeton graduates, requesting the respondents define the amount of time and "comfort" level spent interacting with blacks and whites before they attended the school, as well as during and after their University years. Other questions dealt with their individual religious beliefs, living arrangements, careers, role models, economic status, and thoughts about lower class blacks. In addition, those surveyed were asked to choose whether they were more in line with a "separationist and/or pluralist" viewpoint or an "integrationist and/or assimilationist" ideology.

Just under 90 alums responded to the questionnaires (for a response rate of approximately 22 percent) and the conclusions were not what she expected. "I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility."

In other words, the hypothesis of increased feelings of racial alienation as students moved through their college experience at Princeton - an institutional bastion of the white power structure - was not confirmed. One might expect that research showing an acceptable level of integration among college students at prestigious university might be cause for celebration, despite the limited sample and marginal generalizability.

Of course, Michelle Obama's a 44 year-old woman today, and one shouldn't make too much of the youthful racial/philosophical ideas of a 20-something college senior.

Still, it's an interesting question as to why a black student at one of the nation's premier universities - in a higher-educational system that by 1985 had begun to bend over backwards in expanding opportunities for previously disadvantaged groups - felt so compelled to confirm research suggesting increasing racial alienation.

But even more intriguing is that Michelle Obama's essentially rejected her own findings on acceptable levels of integration in adopting the left's stereotypical hardcore anti-American ideology. That is, Obama's moved more toward an oppositional ideological position as she's become even more successful in a system her own research showed to be reasonably tolerant.

As I've noted in a number of posts (see here and here), the Obamas are among the nation's black elite. They've enjoyed the fruits of the American dream, only to turn around to denounce the very system that has placed them on the verge of ultimate political power.

Only in America!

See also, "Looking for Substance in a Dangerous Left-Winger," on the myth of Barack's empty platform.

Looking for Substance in a Dangerous Left-Winger

Gerard Baker at the Times of London gets right down to the nitty-gritty on the Obama campaign's anti-Americanism. Is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger?

For most ordinary Americans, those not encumbered with an expensive education or infected by prolonged exposure to cosmopolitan heterodoxy, patriotism is a consequence of birth.

Their chests swell with pride every time they hear the national anthem at sporting events. They fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Foreigners don't have to like America - and they've certainly exercised that freedom in the past few years. But most Americans can distinguish between the transience of policy failure and the permanence of the national ideal.

And surely even critics of the US could scarcely deny that there have been real causes for American pride in the past 25 years....

But not, apparently, Michelle Obama, wife of the man who is now the putative Democratic candidate for US president, and at this point favourite to succeed to that job. In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season, Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack's campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.

It was not a gaffe, Baker reminds us, and there are lessons to be learned in Mrs. Obama's words:

First, it reinforced the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate's campaign. There's always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama's rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.

Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is. Mrs Obama is surely not alone in thinking not very much about what America has been or done in the past quarter century or more. In fact, it is a trope of the left wing of the Democratic party that America has been a pretty wretched sort of place.

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

Though Mr Obama has done a good job, as all recent serious Democrats have done, of emphasising his belief in American virtues, his record and his programme suggest he is firmly in line with this wing of his party.

This, I think, not his inexperience in public office, is the principal threat to Mr Obama's campaign. His increasingly desperate opponent, Hillary Clinton, keeps hammering away that his message is all talk and no substance - and she was joined this week by Mr Obama's likely Republican opponent in the November general election, John McCain.

But if you listen to Mr Obama's speeches, it is not the lack of substance but the quality of it that ought to worry Americans. His victory speech after his latest primary win in Wisconsin this week was a case in point.

You know, it's really gratifying to read these words, as I've been making essentially the same case on this blog for the last week or two.

Look at what Obama says. Far from bereft, there's real substance to his talk of American failure at home and abroad.

See my entries, "Barack Obama's Extraordinary Detail," and "Obama's Substance."

Considering Hillary Clinton nearly conceded in her debate summation last night, an increased focus on Obama's substantive positions is all the more vital.

The Case of the Vanishing Reuters Headline

Abe Greenwald, over at Commentary, sheds some light on Reuters' shady practice of pumping up apparent setbacks in Iraq - a classic hardline retreatist news angle - then burying the story once contradictory information surfaces:

Reuters, the news agency with a policy forbidding the word “terrorist” from their stories and a penchant for printing doctored photos as evidence of Israeli aggression, has done it again.

Yesterday, Reuters posted a story entitled “Sadr Expected to End Truce”, implying it was likely that Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr would end his Mahdi Army’s six-month ceasefire in Iraq. I can’t offer the URL of that story because once their cynical prediction was proved immediately wrong (today, Sadr announced that he’d be extending the ceasefire another six months) the link started bringing me to a new Reuters story entitled (surprise, surprise) “Iraqi Cleric Sadr Extends Militia Ceasefire.” Soon after that, the original headline disappeared from internet searches altogether. The only place on the web I’ve been able to find the old headline (which links to the new story) is way down in the comments section of the firedoglake blog.

For Reuters, flesh-and-blood events of global importance seem to be no more than malleable bits of code. Stories are offered, embellished, and pulled at their discretion. Moreover, this lack of regard for a news-hungry public reveals a consistent bias: deception is okay when expressing opposition to the hopes and aims of the U.S.

The "global importance" Greenwald mentions is exacty the kind of strategic reality the far-left can't face.

One thing I noticed here is how Greenwald's obviously's been spending some time reviewing Firedoglake's nihilist comments section.

I thought I was just about the only neocon willing to wade into the lion's den!!

Unwavering Commitment: Democrats Dug In on Iraq Retreat

There's no progress in Iraq that will satisfy the antiwar left.

Just this morning, Michael Kinsley, for example, argues the "Surge Doesn't Equal Success." Meanwhile, last night's Democratic debate showcased Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gasping for a breath in their race to see which candidate will surrender faster.

Charles Krauthammer offers his take on this, "Democrats Dug In For Retreat":

"No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. . . . If the U.S. provides sustained support to the Iraqi government -- in security, governance, and development -- there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."

-- Anthony Cordesman,

"The Situation in Iraq: A Briefing From the Battlefield," Feb. 13, 2008

This from a man who was a severe critic of the postwar occupation of Iraq and who, as author Peter Wehner points out, is no wide-eyed optimist. In fact, in May 2006 Cordesman had written that "no one can argue that the prospects for stability in Iraq are good." Now, however, there is simply no denying the remarkable improvements in Iraq since the surge began a year ago.

Unless you're a Democrat. As Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) put it, "Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq." Their Senate leader, Harry Reid, declares the war already lost. Their presidential candidates (eight of them at the time) unanimously oppose the surge. Then the evidence begins trickling in.

We get news of the Anbar Awakening, which has now spread to other Sunni areas and Baghdad. The sectarian civil strife that the Democrats insisted was the reason for us to leave dwindles to the point of near disappearance. Much of Baghdad is returning to normal. There are 90,000 neighborhood volunteers -- ordinary citizens who act as auxiliary police and vital informants on terrorist activity -- starkly symbolizing the insurgency's loss of popular support. Captured letters of al-Qaeda leaders reveal despair as they are driven -- mostly by Iraqi Sunnis, their own Arab co-religionists -- to flight and into hiding.

After agonizing years of searching for the right strategy and the right general, we are winning. How do Democrats react? From Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama, the talking point is the same: Sure, there is military progress. We could have predicted that. (They in fact had predicted the opposite, but no matter.) But it's all pointless unless you get national reconciliation.

"National" is a way to ignore what is taking place at the local and provincial level, such as Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim, scion of the family that dominates the largest Shiite party in Iraq, traveling last October to Anbar in an unprecedented gesture of reconciliation with the Sunni sheiks.

Doesn't count, you see. Democrats demand nothing less than federal-level reconciliation, and it has to be expressed in actual legislation....

Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our "very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

The answer is yes, obviously.

Throughout 2007, top Democrats - on the campaign trail and in Congress - repeatedly denounced Iraq as a failure and declared the surge a diversion from the priority of an immediate surrender.

The Democratic denunciations and denials continued last night in Texas. Hillary Clinton spun the surge as a be-all-end-all prod to instantaneous Iraqi political reconciliation:

The rationale of the surge was to create the space and time for the Iraqi government to make the decisions that only it can make....

But the fact is that the purpose of it has not been fulfilled. The Iraqi government has slowly inched toward making a few of the decisions in a less than complete way, but it hasn't taken advantage of the sacrifice and the losses of life and billions of dollars that have occurred since the surge began.

And here's Obama, with an even bigger attack on America's democratization project in Iraq:

I think it is indisputable that we've seen violence reduced in Iraq....

But this is a tactical victory imposed upon a huge strategic blunder.

Actually, experts note Iraq's turning out to be a huge strategic victory.

Not for the antiwar types.

As I've noted, it's becoming clearer by the day that Democratic Party claims of support for the troops are hollow: The leading contenders for the nomination can't beat it fast enough for the ignominous exit of strategic retreat.

So much for the costs and sacrifices Americans have paid for the overthrow of tyranny and the consolidation of democracy in a region filled with autocrats and monarchs.

Obama Associated With Known Terrorists

I've recently highlighted the disastrous implications of an Obama presidency for American politics and national security (see here and here).

More fuel for that claim is out today at the Politico, which reports that Obama had known ties with domestic terrorists in the 1990s:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from the Hyde Park left to a man closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president....

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home—part of a campaign courtship—reflects more extensive interaction than has previously reported....

The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.

It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features – while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best – provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present—not least the Ayers connection—is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.

A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb – designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But – unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

Failed bombers who became academics? Oh, that's reassuring.

The Obama campaign needs to make a national campaign address disavowing his past ties to domestic radicals, as well as his campaign's recent controversy surrounding the displays of Che Guevara paraphernalia within the Obama organization.

This is not likely to happen, as the Obama campaign, amid a hot primary, doesn't want to anger the antiwar base, a constituency perfectly in tune with the Obama organization's anti-American proclivities.

See more at Memeorandum.

The Obama Cult

Even lefties are having some problems with Barack Obama. Margery Eagan over at the Boston Herald is picking up on the cult of Obama that's building for the Illinois Senator:

I’m an Obama girl and my man throttled Hillary Clinton, again, Tuesday night.

Suddenly, the impossible is real.

Suddenly, I’m nervous. Very nervous, actually....

I’m nervous about the “O’Bambi” factor. Will the terrorists move in next door when Obama’s in the White House?

I’m nervous because Michelle Obama, about whom I just wrote a fawning puff piece, now says that until her husband’s stunning ascendancy, she’s never before been proud of America. Huh?

Barack now claims she didn’t mean it. Oh, yes she did. We all know the insufferable, holier-than-thou, Blame-America-First types who lecture the unwashed from the rarefied air of Cambridge and Brookline.

If I wanted lecturing, I’d be with Hillary.

I’m nervous because too many Obama-philes sound like Moonies, or Hare Krishnas, or the Hale-Bopp-Is-Coming-To-Get-Me nuts.

These true believers “Obama-ize” everything. They speak Obama-ese. Knit for Obama. Run for Obama. Gamble - Hold ’Em Barack! - for Obama. They make Obama cakes, underwear, jewelry. They send Valentine cards reading, “I want to Barack your world!”

At campaign rallies people scream, cry, even faint as Obama calmly calls for the EMTs. When supporters pant en masse, “I love you!” (like The Beatles, circa 1964), Barack says, “I love you back” with that deliciously charming, almost cocky smile.

Oh - I’m nervous because it’s all gone to his head and he hasn’t even won yet.

I’m nervous because it’s gone to a lot of other people’s heads as well. Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings introduced Obama last week in Baltimore and said, “This is not a campaign for president of the United States, this is a movement to change the world.”

“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” says George Clooney.

“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” says actress Halle Berry. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

I’m nervous because nobody’s quite sure what Obama stands for, even his supporters. (“I can’t wait to see,” said actress/activist Susan Sarandon, declaring full support nonetheless).

I’m nervous because even his biggest fans can’t name Obama’s accomplishments, including Texas state Sen. Kirk Watson, an Obama-man who humiliated himself when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked him about five times to name something, anything, Obama’s done. Watson hemmed. Watson hawed. Watson gave up.

I’m nervous because John McCain says Obama’s is “an eloquent but empty call for change” and in the wee, wee hours, a nagging voice whispers, suppose McCain’s right, too? Then what?

Jules Crittenden, who's a colleague of Eagan, relates a perfect story on this:

I have another lefty colleague who, when confronted with Obama’s lack of experience, always points to George Bush, says he didn’t have any either. I find that a little odd, given how lefties feel about the Bush years. So I asked him why he would want to try inexperience again. Awaiting answer.

See also my earier post, "Do the Obamas Get It?

More at Memeorandum.

Do the Obamas Get It?

Peggy Noonan's got some questions on the political difficulties of Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. Basically, do they "get" their country?

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

The more I think about it, the less comfortable I am with the idea of a First Lady Michelle Obama.

As the Los Angeles Times reported today, Mrs. Obama's possessed with the demons of destructive negativity - she's riding the wild downer of the left's subway of anti-Americanism. The message? The U.S. as irredeemable monstrosity, the impossibility of upward mobility, the undifferentiated disaster of American public education, etc.:

"The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn't matter who was in the White House. . . . So if you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!"

You know, I don't think most Americans expect life to be "easy." Maybe economic entitlement and the leisure of the unpropertied classes is an unrealized economic right that an Obama administration will unlock, after "decades" of unrequited hardship and American suffering.

This isn't the United States I know - not the politics, not the economics, not the demographics - which brings me back one of Noonan's initial queries: "Do the Obamas understand America?"

I don't think so, at least not the hard-working, individualistic, patriotic, down-home (yet not-always-perfect) country of kindness, goodness, and unrelenting democratic progress.

My ideal First Lady recognizes - indeed embodies - just these elements: This is what it means to be American.

I don't think Michelle Obama quite gets it.

The Return of Stagflation?

Today's Wall Street Journal looks at the possible return of "stagflation" to the U.S. economy, an economic malaise that combines recessionary unemployment with rampant inflation:

The U.S. faces an unwelcome combination of looming recession and persistent inflation that is reviving angst about stagflation, a condition not seen since the 1970s.

Inflation is rising. Yesterday the Labor Department said consumer prices in the U.S. jumped 0.4% in January and are up 4.3% over the past 12 months, near a 16-year high. Even stripping out sharply rising food and energy costs, prices rose 0.3% in January, driven by education, medical care, clothing and hotels. They are up by 2.5% from the previous year, a 10-month high.

The same day brought a reminder of possible recession. The Federal Reserve disclosed that its policy makers lowered their forecast for economic growth this year to between 1.3% and 2%, half a percentage point below the level of their previous forecast, in October....

A simultaneous rise in unemployment and inflation poses a dilemma for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. When the Fed wants to fight unemployment, it lowers interest rates. When it wants to damp inflation, it raises them. It's impossible to do both at the same time.

Stagflation, a term coined in the United Kingdom in 1965, defined the years from 1970 to 1981 in the U.S. Inflation rose to almost 15%. The economy went through three recessions. Unemployment reached 9%. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker finally conquered inflation, but only by dramatically boosting interest rates, causing a severe recession in 1981-82.

Today's circumstances are far from that. Inflation is lower. Unemployment has risen, but only to 4.9%.

Yet there are similarities. As in the 1970s, surging commodity prices are leading the way. Crude oil rose to $100.74 a barrel yesterday, a new nominal high and close to its 1980 inflation-adjusted high. Wheat prices have hit a record. And, as in the 1970s, the rate at which the U.S. economy can grow without generating inflation has fallen, because of slower growth in both the labor force and in productivity, or output per hour of work.

The biggest difference is that in the 1970s, the Fed was unwilling, or thought itself unable, to bring inflation down. The Fed today sees achieving low inflation as its primary mission.

I also think we have much more flexible labor markets in the U.S. today, and we've not faced the same type of cost-push price increases associated the inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s.

That said, recent actions of the Federal Reserve have looked increasingly desperate in trying provide some liquidity to the financial system.

I've been bullish on the economy since the beginning of the subprime collapse. Unemployment still at historically low levels, for example, although housing's still freefalling to some extent, so it remains to be seen if this year dodges the bullet on a full-blown economic collapse.

Will Obama End the War on Terror?

If elected, will Barack Obama end the global war on terror? Michael Hirsh offer his analysis:

Using bold rhetoric that often makes his followers rapturous, Barack Obama has declared over and over that he will be the president of "change." But is Obama brave enough to bring about a really radical change? Will he end the permanent "war" George W. Bush has left us with? Will a candidate or a President Obama be willing to go so far as to question whether "the war on terror"—the framework for nearly every discussion of U.S. foreign policy today—is truly the pre-eminent challenge of our time?

Obama has come close. He has repeatedly called the war in Iraq a needless distraction, and he has accused Bush of "lumping" all sorts of enemies together. "It is time to turn the page," Obama declared last August in a defining speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won." But Obama's rhetoric still suggests that he too will be spending his term as a war president. And his "comprehensive strategy" for that war, while it calls for "getting out of Iraq and onto the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan," still implies that the Illinois senator believes the war on terror should be the overarching framework for his foreign policy.

Let's think about this for a moment. A small group of ragged America-haters, who had one lucky day of mass murder nearly seven years ago, will continue to define the foreign policy of the lone superpower for years, possibly decades to come. There's something wrong with this picture. Yes, we can all agree that 9/11 was one of the worst moments in American history. And we can certainly agree that Al Qaeda must be completely eliminated. But the group has never come close to duplicating 9/11; even the train bombings in London and Madrid that were attributed to Al Qaeda-inspired cells were minor by comparison. Are Al Qaeda and its ilk still really our number one challenge? What about global warming? What about the emergence of China, the resurrection of Russia, the decline of the dollar, the slackening of free trade, the spread of debt and disease, and the persistence of ethnic cleansing? What about the virus of "ethnonationalism"....

None of these broad trends has made it into the headlines of the campaign yet. As E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post has pointed out, John McCain has fully embraced, even expanded, Bush's concept of a broad-gauge war on terror, declaring that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical extremism." But McCain has not said why he thinks that is, and Obama has not questioned this premise. Perhaps, like most Democrats, Obama suffers an insecurity complex about his national security credentials—especially going up against a Republican lion and war hero such as John McCain. Some Obama aides admit that he could put himself in political peril if he backs away from the "war on terror" construct. One top adviser to Obama conceded to me this week that "we have not as a party had this debate [about the war on terror]. We had an opportunity to have it in 2002, but it lasted about a day." Why? Because the Dems didn't want to look softer than Bush on terror.

It is a debate that only Obama can start. McCain won't bring it up. Nor will Hillary Clinton. Apart from being on the verge of oblivion politically, she is too fully vested in the war on terror, having voted in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq as part of it. And if that debate doesn't start, we as a country will be effectively doomed to a "war" that has no prospect of ending....

The rational policy would be to replace the overblown "war on terror" with what we should have been engaged in every day since 9/11: a war of annihilation against Al Qaeda, an all-out effort to rid the earth completely of the small, lunatic group that attacked us on that day....

Ironically, only if the next president downgrades the war on terror to a far more focused military and policing effort to destroy Al Qaeda completely—winning back all the natural global allies we've lost, placing groups like Hamas and Hezbollah in another category entirely—can he finally achieve the goal of making sure another 9/11 doesn't happen. But to do that we need to rethink the war on terror entirely. Is Barack Obama up to it?

While Hirsch is playing into the left's anti-administration "forever war" meme, he's got a point, although more thoughtful commentators have previously raised the question.

James Fallows suggested in 2006 that it was time to "declare victory" in the war on terror, moving on to a less epochal approach to combatting the remaining but not insignificant global challenge of coldblooded Islamic fundamentalism:

The U.S. military has been responsible for the most dramatic recent improvement in American standing in the Islamic world. Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, the proportion of Indonesians with a favorable view of the United States had fallen to 15 percent, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. After American troops brought ships, cargo planes, and helicopters loaded with supplies for tsunami victims, the overall Indonesian attitude toward the United States was still negative, but some 79 percent of Indonesians said that their opinion of America had improved because of the relief effort. There was a similar turnaround in Pakistan after U.S. troops helped feed and rescue villagers affected by a major earthquake. But in most of the Muslim world, the image of American troops is that of soldiers or marines manning counterinsurgency patrols, not delivering food and water. “The diplomatic component of the war on terror has been neglected so long, it’s practically vestigial,” a Marine officer told me. “It needs to be regrown.” But in time of war, the balance is harder to correct.

Perhaps worst of all, an open-ended war is an open-ended invitation to defeat. Sometime there will be more bombings, shootings, poisonings, and other disruptions in the United States. They will happen in the future because they have happened in the past (Oklahoma City; the Unabomber; the Tylenol poisonings; the Washington, D.C.-area snipers; the still-unsolved anthrax mailings; the countless shootings at schools; and so on). These previous episodes were not caused by Islamic extremists; future ones may well be. In all cases they represent a failure of the government to protect its people. But if they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy “victories,” not misfortunes of the sort that great nations suffer. They are also powerful provocations to another round of hasty reactions.

War implies emergency, and the upshot of most of what I heard was that the United States needs to shift its operations to a long-term, nonemergency basis. “De-escalation of the rhetoric is the first step,” John Robb told me. “It is hard for insurgents to handle de-escalation.” War encourages a simple classification of the world into ally or enemy. This polarization gives dispersed terrorist groups a unity they might not have on their own. Last year, in a widely circulated paper for the Journal of Strategic Studies, David Kilcullen argued that Islamic extremists from around the world yearn to constitute themselves as a global jihad. Therefore, he said, Western countries should do everything possible to treat terrorist groups individually, rather than “lumping together all terrorism, all rogue or failed states, and all strategic competitors who might potentially oppose U.S. objectives.” The friend-or-foe categorization of war makes lumping together more likely.

The United States can declare victory by saying that what is controllable has been controlled: Al-Qaeda Central has been broken up. Then the country can move to its real work. It will happen on three levels: domestic protection, worldwide harassment and pursuit of al-Qaeda, and an all-fronts diplomatic campaign....

Americans still face dangers, as they always have. They have recently lacked leaders to help keep the dangers in perspective. Shaping public awareness—what we mean by “leading"—is what we most remember in our strong presidents: Lincoln’s tone as the Civil War came on and as it neared its end; Theodore Roosevelt taking the first real steps toward environmental conservation and coming to terms with new industrial organizations; Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression and the Second World War; Eisenhower managing the showdown with the Soviet Union, but also overseeing the steady expansion of America’s transportation, scientific, and educational systems; Kennedy with the race to the moon; and on up to George W. Bush, with his calm focus in the months immediately after 9/11. One of the signals Bush sent in those first days may have had the greatest strategic importance in the long run. That was his immediate insistence that America’s Muslims were not the enemy, that they should not be singled out, that they should be seen as part of the nation’s solution rather than part of its problem. It is easy to imagine that a different tone would have had damaging repercussions.

Now we could use a leader to help us understand victory and its consequences....

The question now is whether a President Obama is capable of providing this leadership.

He may indeed be called to the task, and with dangers clear and present, his performance will be measured by record of American history.

Democratic Debate in Texas

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debated tonight in Austin, Texas. CNN has the details:

Sen. Barack Obama said while he and Sen. Hillary Clinton share a lot of policy positions, "there's a fundamental difference between us in terms of how change comes about."

The Democratic presidential candidates are facing off in Texas in their last debate before the state's March 4 primary.

"If we don't bring the country together, stop the endless bickering, actually focus on solutions and reduce that special interests that have dominated Washington ... we will not get anything done," Obama said.

Obama was responding to Clinton's reference to a recent interview with an Obama surrogate who could not name any of his accomplishments.

Clinton said she and Obama offer different records of accomplishment.

"Obama responded effectively -- he defended his achievements, and characterized Clinton as suggesting his supporters are delusional for supporting him. The line played well," said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider.

Clinton, who has been marketing herself as the candidate in the "solutions business," said, "I do think that words are important and words matter, but actions speak louder than words, and I offer that."

The more I watch the Democratic debates, the more intense is my distrust of these two candidates. On healthcare, Iraq, and fiscal policy, I can't imagine a more left-wing discourse from any major candidate in presidential elections in the last 50 years (and I'm not forgetting Michael Dukakis and George McGovern).

With a Democratic administration next year we'll certainly see an attempted far left-wing makeover of American public policy and national security.

So far the public's favorable to such trends and ideas, although I think the general election campaign will help to refocus the country on more traditional interests, policies, and values.

(Personality-wise, I can't help noticing Hillary Clinton's resemblance to a coiled rattlesnake readying a deadly strike as she contemplates - with supreme contumely and smugness - the debating points of Obama, whose frontrunner status now obviously and deeply pains the New York Senator).

The Democratic Advantage in Partisan Identification

Trends in partisan idenfication are trending significantly toward the Democratic Party, although the picture's not so rosy when we move away from generic party preferences to specific would-be electoral matchups.

Here's more, from Gallup:

Forty percent of Americans in the Feb. 11-14 Gallup Poll -- in response to the question, "In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?" -- said they identified with the Democratic Party, while 26% identified with the Republican Party and 34% with neither (most of these considered themselves independents).

The 40% Democratic identification figure is unusually high. The last time 40% of Americans identified as Democrats was August 2000. Before that, there have been just a handful of Gallup Poll telephone surveys -- going back to 1985 -- in which 40% or more of Americans identified as Democrats. The highest Democratic identification in a Gallup telephone poll was 42% in July 1987.

The gap between Democratic and Republican identification -- now at 14 percentage points -- is also almost a record high. The gap was higher only in December 1998 -- immediately after President Bill Clinton had been impeached by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives -- when 41% of Americans identified as Democrats and only 20% as Republicans.

The highest level of identification with the Republican Party, 39%, has been reached at three points: in May 1991 (a few months after the first Persian Gulf War), December 2003 (in a poll in the field at the time of Saddam Hussein's capture), and September 2004 (after a successful Republican convention at which George W. Bush was nominated for a second term in office).

Last year, as often happens in a year in which there is no national election, Americans were increasingly likely to identify as independents. This year, as presidential election voting has begun in primaries and caucuses, the Democrats have been the beneficiary as Americans have become more likely to express identification with a party. As 2007 ended, an average of two Gallup Polls conducted in December showed 32.5% of Americans identifying as Democrats, 37.5% as independents, and 28.5% as Republicans. Now, the shift is evident. Identification with the Republican Party and with no party have slipped slightly, while identification with the Democratic Party has gained.

I think the sense of change, particulary captured with the Barack Obama campaign, is being reflected in the surge of left-wing identification.

But as I've noted repeatedly, in head-to-head matchups, the Democrats roughly tie John McCain in general election viability. Gallup concludes:

The data reviewed here underscore the strong position of the Democratic Party at this point in the election year. A near-record number of Americans indicate that they currently identify as Democrats; the image of Democratic Party is much more favorable than that of the Republican Party; and Americans say the Democratic Party is better positioned to bring about change and is more likely to be able to manage the government effectively.

These things can change, of course, between now and Election Day. In addition, recent polling has shown that John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, does relatively well when pitted against the two leading Democratic candidates, suggesting that the Republican Party's image troubles don't necessarily transfer directly to specific candidates.

And that's the key to understanding this data. Naturally, after nearly eight years of GOP governance, we're bound to see some Bush-fatigue, captured in slogans of hope and change among the Democratic candidates.

But as the data indicate, there's no slam dunk for the Democrats in the fall (see here, here, and here). It's going to be a close-run, hard-fought, vigorously contested campaign.

Michelle Obama: No Pride in Personification of the Dream

I've previously commented on Michelle Obama's "pride" remarks, here and here.

I think it's a big story, although the old-line media's a little behind the curve. Here's the Los Angeles Times' story on the Michelle Obama's bleak view of the United States:

Unwittingly, Michelle Obama became the story...this week, telling an audience in Wisconsin on Monday that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."

It may have been nothing more than a little hyperbole in a season that has seen plenty. But as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has narrowed to Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the spotlight is shining much brighter now on Michelle Obama, a 44-year-old hospital administrator.

While Clinton's husband, the former president, has been in hot water regularly for his verbal jabs at Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, whose tongue can be as barbed as Bill Clinton's, has received less scrutiny. With her husband's increasing success, that has changed. And with so much at stake, even minor gaffes are being blown into full-fledged campaign issues.

On Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, she clarified her Monday remarks in an interview with a Rhode Island TV station. "What I was clearly talking about was that I'm proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process," she said. "For the first time in my lifetime, I'm seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven't seen and really trying to figure this out -- and that's the source of pride that I was talking about."

Still, her comment was in keeping with the generally bleak view of the country that is the heart of her stump speech, a departure from the usual chauvinism of the campaign trail....

Like her husband, Michelle Obama is a masterful public speaker who can easily talk for an hour without notes. But unlike her husband, she tends to dwell on the negative. America, in her telling, is a place where "regular folks," meaning the working class, can't get ahead because, as she said at Ohio State University, "folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar -- sometimes you surpass the bar -- and then they move the bar!"

Americans, she says, have become "cynical" and "mean" and have "broken souls." For regular folks, life is bad and getting worse.

People can't raise a family on one salary anymore, she says. They can't afford to get sick even if they have insurance because of deductibles, premiums and the high cost of medication. They can't confidently send their kids to neighborhood public schools because so many of them are so bad. Young people can't afford to attend college to become teachers or nurses or journalists because those jobs don't pay enough to repay college loans.

"We don't need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers," she told a crowd in a Baptist church in Cheraw, S.C., last month. "But see, that's the only way you can pay back your educational debt!

"The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn't matter who was in the White House. . . . So if you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!"

Her rhetoric is jarring given that the Obamas themselves are a stunning embodiment of the American dream. Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, the men's basketball coach at Brown University, attended Princeton University. Barack and Michelle Obama both earned law degrees from Harvard, another of the nation's most prestigious schools, and are facing the possibility of raising their two daughters in the White House.

The couple's combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return. In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties. The family lives in a $1.6-million home in Chicago.

Well, the country club liberals are back, by the look of that income!

And to think, Barack Obama, for all his success and considerable income, is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.

The Obamas personify the American Dream, as do many others on the radical left who relentlessly attack this great nation.

Flailing Brand: New York Times Descends to Tabloidism

While Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have used the New York Times' hit piece on John McCain to pump up their own ratings and (hoped for) relevance, Thomas Lifson offers a principled criticism of the Times' flailing journalistic practices:

The decline and fall of the New York Times accelerates, with today's anonymously-sourced hit piece on John McCain. I will leave to others like Rick Moran and Ed Morrissey the debunking of the story itself. What concerns me is the manner in which the CEO of the organization has jettisoned standards that once would have ruled out publication of such material.

"A fish rots from the head" goes an old Chinese saying. If it is true, as reported, that the story was controversial within the Times, and only ran because the paper feared that The New Republic would publicize the office politics at the Times over publication of the story, the Sulzberger's responsibility is all the greater. His inability to set clear guidelines, hire capable editors, and maintain newsroom harmony and discipline was about to be exposed to the public. To protect his hind quarters, he went with a disastrously bad story.

The proper response to TNR would be a statement that the Times does not rush into print with anonymously sourced accusations against the presumptive nominee of either party. And do it with a straight face.

Such an approach might have begun to undo the damage of Jayson Blair, a man promoted and retained despite obvious signs of trouble. Such an approach would be consistent with the Times' previous practice of seriously downplaying similar and much worse stories about Bill Clinton's sexual behavior. Such an approach might have begun to undo some of the damage to the institution of the Times inflicted by Pinch Sulzberger's management.

The corporation he heads is in the fight of its life, with the News Corporation-owned Wall Street Journal preparing to challenge it as a national general interest newspaper, while disgruntled shareholders search for a way to reform management, despite a dual class shareholder system which enables the Sulzberger family to elect a majority of shareholders despite owning only around 10% of the company's equity.

In the face of these challenges, The Times descends a full notch or two, resorting to partisan gossip that is inadequately sourced. This is not a way to enhance the value of the brand, nor to ensure the survival of the firm.

Lifson makes a good case.

I would note that for all of the Times' liberal politics, bloggers, commentators, and pundits from all sides of the spectrum are equally quick to jump on a story from the Old Gray Lady if it suits their ideological program.

Certainly, the paper's reputation has been in decline, but so far the Times remains the country's "unofficial newspaper of record."

Frankly, I wildly prefer the Wall Street Journal, not just for its editorial slant but for the rigor of its front-page news journalism. I think WSJ is hard to beat, and I'm hoping that it really does become the country's main national daily, toppling NYT from its perch.

Now, we debate issues with the media we have, and thank goodness for the tremendous news resources at the command of the American news industry. Could things be better? Naturally. The media's hardly a watchdog for the people much these days, serving as a fourth branch and checking the power of one governmental faction or the other. The news media are not only increasing partisan actors, but they're increasing the "news."

Perhaps NYT will boost its revenues a bit. I don't think they're going to hurt McCain all that much, although Rush Limbaugh may get some good mileage out of this.

We've still got a good ways to go until the November election. I doubt the fundamental dynamics of the race will change much, nor will this be last of such underhanded tabloidism.

Far Right Allies With NYT to Attack McCain

The Politico's story on the far-right's defense of John McCain, who's attacked in a hit piece at today's New York Times, is entitled: "Rush, Right Rally to McCain."

It should really read, "Rush, Right Ally with NYT Against McCain."

This is the moment Rush-bots have been waiting for: While the Politico's piece argues for a conservative rally to McCain amid a clear left-wing media smear against the Arizona Senator, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have exploited the attack in a classic and juicy "I told you so moment":

Ironically, a potentially damaging article about McCain may help bond him to conservatives, who are relishing the fact that now he needs them.

"Is he going to learn the right lesson from this?” Limbaugh asked. “The lesson is that liberals are to be defeated."

Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico: “The story is not the story. The story is the drive-by media turning on its favorite maverick and trying to take him out. The media picked the GOP's candidate, the NYT endorsed him while they sat on this story, and is now, with utter predictability, trying to destroy him.”

Limbaugh added: “This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. I'm not surprised in the least that the NYT would try to take out John McCain. Predicted this, in fact, way back in the early 2000s. Sen. McCain courted the media, cultivated them, even bragged that the media was his ‘base.’ I cringed when I heard it because the media turning on McCain was as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.”

Limbaugh was one of several influential conservatives who, to the delight and relief of the McCain campaign, immediately decided that the behavior of the Times — not the senator — should be the issue.

Ingraham began her show this morning with a brief dig at McCain's years of cozying up to the mainstream media, but then declared: “You wait until it’s pretty much beyond a doubt that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, and then you let it drop — drop some acid in the pool, contaminate the whole pool. That’s what The New York Times thinks.”

Ingraham was deriding the front-page article suggesting McCain had a romantic relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist in 1999, when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Ingraham was among the conservatives who endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney before he dropped out of the nomination race, and she has been among the high-profile talk show hosts who have been very critical of McCain.

McCain has been jokingly called “the senator from ‘Meet the Press’" because of his cozy relations with the elite media.

Ingraham said triumphantly, “I ask the McCain campaign this question: Do you think you need talk radio now? Do you think that talk radio’s important to set the record straight, or do you think a press conference, where the media is shouting question after question at you — do you think that's going to put an end to all of this?"....

Ingraham read from the article with a mocking tone — even adding “comma” at one point — noting what she considered omissions and fallacies.

“I’m reading through this piece and I’m thinking, Did McCain think that having all these people on the Straight Talk Express — and getting Jonathan Alter and all these guys to sit down with him and laugh and chat — do you think that was going to inoculate him from this kind of absurd attack?” Ingraham mused. “Of course it wasn’t going to.”

Ingraham called it “one of the more ridiculous pieces I have read in some time,” and specifically took up for McCain by pointing out that he had voted against the interests of the lobbyist’s client.

Reminding her listeners why she had once bashed McCain, she needled him this morning for “intimacy of the sort that no one had ever seen between a Republican and a member of the media.”

“John McCain stands before all of these reporters that he has been yukking it up with over the years,” Ingraham said. “And I think he is stunned, frankly. I think he’s stunned that all his old friends would turn on him.”

I noted in my post this morning that the media's increased attention on McCain's potential lobbying infidelities - wholly unsubstantied as they are - would work to focus on McCain's long tenure in Congress, reminding voters of McCain's power well before the Clinton's came to office, painting him as a tired, old GOP warhorse.

But the whole episode forms a case of "Political Manipulation 101." Here's the right-wing talk radio commentariat steaming at NYT's attack on the one hand, while using the smear to bolster the conservative case for leadership of the GOP for '08 on the other.

Michelle Malkin's apparently holding fire, and Allahpundit at Hot Air's going with the Politico's meme that the far-right's rallying to McCain's defense.

Still, a Rush rally? Well, with (rallying) allies like that, who needs enemies?!!

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