The Real Danger to Obama’s Campaign

What the heck? Hillary has come to town. Obama’s coming to Corpus Christi today. And Bill is coming tonight and tomorrow.

Who would have thunk it a few months ago? Texas runs its primaries in March when all the presidential nomination races are long since over, of course. And we haven’t been a swing state in November since before Reagan. So us Texans, especially way down here in South Texas, are more likely to shoot a burglar than to see a presidential candidate.

This is a strange election year, is it not?

On a slightly more serious note, I’ve long thought the biggest danger to Obama’s campaign isn’t Hillary stealing delegates, it’s his own lefty ways. And it’s not just this gun-owning, lib’rul bashing Texan that thinks that, but Gerald Baker of the Times:

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.

Having been around lefties in two university towns and more, I know that Baker has leftists right. And he is on target on Obama as well.

The news media has largely given Obama a pass on his lefty ways. (Can you imagine them giving such a pass to a right-winger?) Unless the Republicans are stupid (which they are at times), they will give Obama’s liberal/leftism no such pass in the general election campaign. I suspect that will stop the Obama juggernaut in the end.

And by the way, in case you think Mr. Baker and I are exaggerating Obama’s lefty ways, I commend to you a Rolling Stone (!) article of exactly one year ago.