What's the matter with Obama?

Or, specifically, this doozy (given at a San Francisco fundraiser, no less):

"[People in economically struggling small-town Pennsylvania] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Rich Lowry's got a good column here, taking what I'd consider the appropriate amount of umbrage. For me, it's not so much that Obama's some kind of closet Marxist (though I'm sure it's still in the water at Columbia and Harvard). It's not even that he's an "elitist" -- at least as the word should be defined. And yes, I know this kind of unthinking condescension should hardly surprise me. Still, what the hell?

Lowry hits it on the head: "Obama prides himself on his civility, but it has to go much deeper than dulcet rhetoric. A fundamental courtesy of political debate is to meet the other side on its own terms. If someone says he cares about gun rights, it’s rude to insist: 'No, you don’t. It’s the minimum wage that you really care about, and you’d know it if you were more self-aware.' "

In other words, what makes this kind of thing so interesting coming from Obama is that it reveals so strikingly the false promises of "hope" and "change" and "unity" so central to his campaign. (Harvey Mansfield, tangentially, has plenty to say about the kind of civility we really need in politics. Hint: It has nothing to do with "disagreeing without being disagreeable.")

Or think of it this way: What kind of hope does Obama really have in America if he thinks Americans' first reaction to economic hardship is to get "bitter"?

Barack's Papal Brigade

Douglas Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school and a former Romney adviser, thinks that Barack Obama is a closet Catholic. Or at least that Catholics are closet Obama voters. It's a confused piece on several levels (I'll get to those), but I can't say I haven't been noticing much the same thing.

First, my colleague Robert George notices something particularly "Catholic" in Obama's recent (and worth watching) speech at the Virginia Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner. (My response: Catholics can't preach that well.) Then my friend Paul Snatchko says nice things about the way Obama talks about faith in public discourse. Now Kmiec. That's three times in a week. And that's a pattern.

There are other datapoints as well: Several friends of mine just joined the "we really really wish Barack Obama was pro-life" facebook group. (Sorry, guys.) The wonderful JPII memoirist Peggy Noonan, as I've noted before, seems quite taken with the guy. And is it really a coincidence that the perpetual Obama buzzword "hope" just happens to be the subject of Pope Benedict's latest encyclical? (Move over, Deval Patrick!)

Okay, so what gives?

Kmiec's policy oddities (really: if Mitt Romney had any other anti-war, open-borders, global-warming-worried advisers, he didn't tell us about them) only serve to emphasize his broader point: It's all about the rhetoric.

There's no question that Obama's a brilliant speaker, and Kmiec hints at the interesting point that his community-organizing roots have steeped him in a kind of social-justice rhetoric that's friendly toward religion generally and resonates with Catholics specifically.

Plus, he says, Obama has a kind of Reaganesque optimism too him, the kind that "makes America feel good about itself" -- and the kind that attracted the largely Catholic "Reagan Democrats" in the first place.

And that's where I get off. Kmiec may be right about the short-term politics of it all, and Obama's speeches certainly have an inspiring aura to them -- but it's not Reagan. I don't want to speak beyond my competence on this one, but it strikes me that Reagan's and Obama's optimisms come from two very different places.

Just take a look at what Obama's optimistic about: "Yes, we can"; "We are the change that we seek"; "We can build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth"; (yes, he said that). This is a contingent optimism, a hope in the future success of (Obama-led) collective political action.

That hope may -- may -- be well-founded, and it can still be inspiring; one of the appealing things about Obama's rhetoric is its constant invocation of American history (albeit, mostly the parts where collective political movements for "change" have succeeded).

But as Michelle Obama is quickly proving, that kind of "hope" can have an ugly flipside. "This is the first time in my adult life I've been proud of my country," quoth she.

What?!?

I don't want to take this too far, but I think Mrs. Obama just distilled to its essence exactly what unsettles me about all this "change" stuff in the first place. My question is not so much, "change to what?" -- it's change from what? In other words, what does this cult of "change" ultimately say about the people who cluelessly let things get so bad in the first place?

Again, I'm dealing mostly in tendencies and temptations here, but it strikes me that Obama's brand of "hope" is a very different sort than Reagan's simple trust in the good sense of the American people -- which only needed to be unlocked by the kind of policies he was advocating, not beaten into them by an endless supply of lofty rhetoric.

Think of it another way: For all of Obama's rhetorical brilliance, could you really see him giving Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech? Could he speak so naturally of an America that already was and is, of ageless values that have little to do with changing our way of doing politics, as important as that sometimes is?

I haven't seen it.

UPDATE: Okay, looks like Peggy Noonan (author of the above speech, incidentally) isn't quite so enamored with Obama after all. And as one would expect, she makes my point far better than I ever could.

NY Post endorses...

Barack Obama!

No, no one hacked our website; and yes, it's just for the primary.

McCain and Obama

A none-too-daring prediction, and a pre-primary appetizer. Here's a really smart David Brooks piece on the pair. Brooks makes the important point that despite their common appeal to independent voters (and reputations for positiveness and honesty), they're really very different men in the kind of vision they offer -- and not just policy-wise.

My hope for an Obama-McCain general election (though that's still far to early to call; given this primary season, we could just as easily see Edwards-Thompson) would be that this precise dynamic -- similar general appeal, vastly different ideas -- could elevate the debate to a level we've been conditioned not to expect.

Especially on Iraq. If this election is going to be some kind of referendum on where we should go from here (it probably should be, though I'm far from convinced it actually will), what better two candidates than the guy who opposed the war from the beginning, and the guy who supported the surge three years before Bush did? Serious debate between likable guys, all at a distance from the visceral passions conjured by names like Clinton and Bush.

But we'll see. Pronouncements like this one still seem scandalously premature.

Friday thoughts

This is noteworthy: Dan Keating, the last surviving veteran of the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence died on Wednesday. By all appearences, he never really gave up the fight, going so far as to participate in a 1939-1940 IRA bombing campaign of London -- and never accepting old-age benefits from the "illegitimate" Republic of Ireland.

I might update this post with a few more thoughts later. The old "Irish question" was really what got me interested in my senior thesis topic, Churchill & empire, in the first place. It's a fascinating bit of history.

In other news: As I first suspected last Friday, Peggy Noonan has a crush on Barack Obama.