The Case against Obama

Ted Everett

debate presentation 10/30/08

I am going to present the case against Barack Obama for President. It pains me to do so. Most of my friends, colleagues, and students seem to hold Obama in the highest regard, and to respond to McCain and Palin, as to Republicans generally, with something like an instinctive disgust. Indeed, I think that many would agree with the popular writer David Sedaris, who last week in the New Yorker magazine compared the voter's choice between Obama and McCain to a diner's choice between "the chicken" and "the platter of shit with broken glass in it", respectively. My remarks about Obama will not be that harsh, but they will be harsh.

Obama is a handsome man, an elegant, inspiring speaker, a potentially historic first black president, and he stands loftily for things like "hope and change", and justice, and peace, and racial reconciliation. So I can understand the strong temptation, on just these superficial grounds, to feel inspired, and to want to participate in making civil rights history, and to want to place this interesting, vaguely progressive, Kennedyesque figure into the White House, and see what happens. If you vote for Obama it says something about you, too, that you are a forward-looking, racially tolerant, intellectual sort of person, and maybe also that you don’t like rednecks. But responsible voting is not about expressing one's virtues and feelings and social attitudes. What matters in voting, in my view just about the only thing that matters, is what is likely to happen to the country as a whole, and to the world, if your side wins.

I see a lot of bad things happening if Obama wins, partly because of circumstances, and partly because of evidence, and also lack of evidence, about the kind of person he is and what he’ll do as President. First, assuming that Obama is what he appears to most people to be, a liberal Democrat, we have to take seriously the prospect of an undivided Democratic Party government. One of the astonishing facts of this election is that the least popular Congress is history is so widely believed to be part of a Republican government, when in fact the House of Representatives has been in the hands of Democrats for the past two years, and the Senate off and on throughout the Bush Administration. If Obama wins, the House, the Senate, and the White House will all sit all very firmly in the hands of one Party. It will be the leftmost whole government in American history. What is this likely to produce, in terms of laws and policies?

In social policy, there is an existing, well-known agenda on the left, and if Obama wins there will be total victory for this agenda. For one thing, the new government will extend the current, limited regime of racial and gender preferences throughout our institutional lives into the distant future. Obama claims to stand for racial reconciliation, but he has said nothing substantial, and has done nothing, and will do nothing, to end the systematic discrimination against whites, Asians, and men that enhances separatism and impedes genuine reconciliation, especially in colleges and universities. And a united Democratic party government will fill the judiciary with judges who define their own political opinions into the constitution.

In economic policy, the leftmost government in US history will certainly raise taxes during a recession, and will nationalize health care insurance one way or another. Both policies will lead to disaster for all of us, as Harry has explained. In foreign policy, the leftmost US government in history will endanger independent democratic countries throughout the world. There is nothing, either in the recent record of the Democratic Party, or in Obama's vaporous pronouncements on these questions, that will discourage the Russians from reconquering the inner circle of their previous empire in the "stans", the Caucasus, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine. There is nothing to discourage the Chinese from moving finally against Taiwan. There is nothing to discourage the Iranians from completing their nuclear weapons program, or from using these weapons against Israel. The patent ideological weakness of a Democratic party government led by Obama will be much more provocative than soothing to the feelings of our enemies, as experience has shown over and over again since the 1930s, and quite recently during the Carter and Clinton administrations. Obama's own running mate Joe Biden has recently said as much himself: that this untested guy is going to be tested by our enemies, and that Americans are not going to like the results.

The cloud of uncertainty that surrounds Obama’s personal history and inclinations adds to the risk of making him President. He is the least known person who has run for president in modern times, and quite deliberately so, and this really worries me. Broadly speaking, we know what we are getting with McCain – a cranky but moderate Republican with a long track record of bipartisan compromise, and unpopular with his party’s right wing. But we do not really know what we’re getting with Obama, and Obama wants it that way. He is running as a post-partisan moderate when he is not one – he is hiding much of his background and, I think, sincere commitment, as an immoderate and highly partisan leftist. He is, in the evaluation of the centrist National Journal, the furthest left member of US Senate, and that is saying quite a lot.

I know that it is tiresome and “swift-boaty” to mention Obama’s political allies in Chicago and elsewhere, but it does shed some kind of light on an otherwise shadowy figure. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and especially Jeremiah Wright, with whom Obama was very close, Rashid Khalidi, and so on: these people typify the extreme radical left in our society. They are not liberals in any sense of the word, but destructive, hateful people: anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Western, and anti-white, in some cases violently so. Obama asks us to ignore the 20 years of hateful black-nationalist sermons that he sat through from his acknowledged mentor and spiritual advisor Wright, and throws out some mush in a speech that is supposed to make us want to join him in transcending racial hatefulness in general. Moreover, Obama’s own statements, early and late, on many topics, betray an extreme conception of justice as entirely a matter of distribution, as he says, “spreading the wealth around”. This is what’s basic for him, with no consideration given to how wealth is actually produced, or to what happens in the long run when wealth is radically redistributed. I don’t know whether this qualifies Obama as a “socialist”, and I don’t care about the word, but it would be wonderful to hear him say what he believes is wrong with socialism if he says he isn’t one. Nobody asks him questions like that, and he doesn’t answer many questions anyway, so we don’t know.

The most awkward issues about Obama are the most personal ones, and here Obama is the most opaque and troubling. There are a lot of people, for example, who believe he is a Muslim, including a lot of people in the Middle East. I am not one of them, I don’t believe he is a Muslim, but I don’t think he helps the matter when he says that he was never a Muslim, when he quite plainly was a Muslim as a child by any ordinary definition. It’s no big deal in itself, but he should not be denying it when other voters might think it’s a relevant consideration. Obama won’t release all kinds of ordinary paperwork to clear up questions about about his background. Some people, including his African grandmother and some siblings, insist that he was born in Kenya, which would make him ineligible to be the President of the United States. I don’t think so myself, but bothers me that he refuses to release his original birth certificate to clear the matter up. He claims in his books that he visited Pakistan in 1981 by way of Indonesia, to visit a friend’s family, at a time when Americans were not permitted in the country, so people ask whether he used an Indonesian passport, since he was a citizen there for at least several years. But he won’t release his passport records either, or any documentation of his having renounced his Indonesian citizenship, to resolve these questions. He tells conflicting and implausible stories of how he paid for his extremely pricy education, and he won’t release any of his college records to resolve these conflicts either. He’s supposed to be a genius but he won’t release his transcripts or LSAT scores, or give any clear account of how he earned a place at Harvard Law School. He won’t release his health records, either, beyond a one-page statement from a doctor saying that he’s fine. Most people don’t even know that he smokes. He will not release his draft registration, or his schedules as Illinois State Senator, or many other ordinary records that we have from every other campaign. All of these questions and doubts and internet accusations can be cleared up immediately by Obama himself. It requires only a nod of his princely head. But he simply won’t do it, and the press won’t make him do it, and it is only rational, I think, to conclude that he is hiding something, or perhaps a lot of things.

Obama has run a campaign that is almost comically high-toned on the surface, but sleazy, creepy, and systematically dishonest underneath. Obama is the first presidential candidate to refuse public financing since Richard Nixon in 1972, after making an explicit, public promise to accept it along with McCain. Big promises matter, and Obama has broken the only one that he’s been tested on so far, and probably destroyed public financing for good. What’s worse is that he has accepted donations over the internet from anybody anywhere, including obviously fraudulent names and illegal or impossible addresses, as long as they are bundled in units of under $200, exploiting all possible loopholes. You cannot contribute to McCain as Adolph Hitler, Berlin Germany, zip code 00000, because McCain’s campaign has not disabled the default security settings on the credit card transaction software. Astonishingly, Obama’s campaign has, and there is no way of tracing before the election how much of the $300 million in Obama’s internet donations comes from overseas or exceeds the contribution limits. McCain’s campaign publishes all its donations, including those under $200, which is not strictly required. Obama’s campaign refuses. No public accounting, and no accountability, and they are getting away with it. This is unprecedented in American campaigns – it is destructive, and it is despicable. Meanwhile the campaign has given $800,000 to ACORN, an allegedly non-partisan organization, heavily funded by the US Congress, but which has been functioning essentially as an adjunct to the Obama campaign in charge of promoting voter fraud. People will go to jail for this, but it will be too late.

Perhaps the weirdest thing in an extremely troubling campaign has been the bursting forth occasionally of Obama’s messainic pretensions. Look up “Obama sing for change” on YouTube – it’s this syrupy hollywood video of children singing about how Obama will lead us into the future and so on, really worthy of the North Korean government. Look up “Obama fainting”, and you’ll see a long string of similar video clips of women allegedly fainting at his rallies, while Obama calms the crowd and makes sure the woman gets some water, which he happens to have ready in his podium. This kind of rock-star phony Jesus stuff is not what every politician does. I can’t imagine John McCain ever presenting himself this way. There is only one other American politician who has gotten away with this kind of cynical narcissistic display, and that is Bill Clinton.

For all of these reasons and more, I do not believe that we can trust this guy Obama to be our president. We do not know enough, and what we know, beyond the gauzy rhetoric, is not encouraging. We all want hope and change and peace and justice and other pleasant things. We all want to change the world. But some changes are good and some are bad. In reality, if not in sentiment, a vote for Obama is a vote to make the world not better, but, in all probability, a more barbaric and violent place than it already is, and to make America, in all probability, less free, less fair, less tolerant, less democratic, less united, less prosperous, and far less secure. If this is really what you want, or what you want to risk in exchange for a vague promise of niceness and reconciliation, then by all means vote for Obama. But you can't say that you haven't been warned.