The Ghost Confederacy

The Obama camp is jubilant over the health care 'triumph.' I suppose one has to allow them a moment of celebration; after all, it's been a long a difficult passage, a hard fight, not just in the House and Senate but across the country at large. It may lead, I'm sure they hope, to a Democrat bounce-back in the face of a steady Republican advance; it may lead to a renewal of the increasingly tired-looking Obama brand itself. Ah, but wait; let a little sobriety descend. The time is coming, and coming soon, to ask just exactly what kind of victory has been achieved. One battle has ended; other battles may be about to begin.

Ever since the United States was founded there has been a tension between local rights and federal authority. The issue was supposedly resolved after the Civil War, when the victory of the North over the South led to the formation of “a more perfect union", which seems to have meant a more centrally controlled Union, a Union directed from Washington. But the issue of States' rights never entirely went away. Now a new Civil War may be about to break out, though on a far lower and less intense level than that of the 1860s.

On 10 March Virginia, one of the greatest of the old Confederate bastions, the home of both Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, passed a law saying that citizens of the state can neither be required to have health insurance nor be penalised for not having it. The interesting thing is that the bill passed through both houses of the state legislature with considerable support from the Democrats. Idaho followed this lead a week later and the voters of Arizona will have the opportunity later this year to decide whither such protections should be written into the state's constitution. Seemingly similar measures are in process in no fewer than 35 other states, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which means that, if these measures are carried through, almost half the Union will have local legislation in direct conflict with federal law.

There should really be no contest here; for legislation passed by the national Congress takes priority over that passed by the states, the issue supposedly settled once and for all in the nineteenth century. Oh, if only it were so simple! Obama's legislation, so many believe, is in direct conflict with the constitution. As I have said states' rights have proved to be remarkably resilient. In Gonzales v Oregon, a case concerned with a local assisted-suicide law, the government argued that doctors who prescribed lethal doses of medication were violating federal law, an argument rejected by the Supreme Court, believing that it would constitute "a radical shift of authority from states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality." The Supreme Court has also recognised a right to medical self-determination.

But the strongest argument of all, as The Economist reported recently, concerns the power of the government to make the purchase of health-care insurance obligatory. The commerce clause in the constitution allows the federal government to regulate trade between the states but it has never before been used to require citizens to buy a good or service.

Still, even with these caveats and qualifications, it's difficult to see that the Supreme Court will do anything quite as drastic as invalidating the supremacy clause, as invalidating the mandate of Congress. State laws to the contrary are, on the balance of probability, likely to be set aside, something that happened repeatedly over the course of the last century. Even so, Obama might have been said to have conjured up a ghost Confederacy, an indication of deep national anxiety. The celebration may very well have been premature.

The Manchurian Candidate

It’s obvious to anyone with a smattering of political theory that there has to be some philosophy, some guiding principle behind Barack Obama’s drive towards social equality, based upon ever expanding government intervention. It’s possible, I suppose, to place this within a left-Democrat tradition, a tradition going back to FDR, architect of the New Deal, that blend of socialist and fascist economics.

But FDR was a no intellectual; his political programme was always based on a mixture of fashion, opportunism and instinct. Not so Obama; his programme is rooted in Marxism, the elements of which he embraced in college. I have this on excellent authority.

Dr John Drew, himself once a doctrinaire Marxist, and now a libertarian, met Obama in 1980 when was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He was part of a group engaging in the kind of things students have always done - hanging out and setting the world to rights by moonlight. Obama took a hard-line point of view, arguing for a socialist government in the United States. Drew says;

He was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, led by revolutionaries who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute wealth…The idea was basically that wealthy people were exploiting others. That this was the secret of their wealth, that they weren’t paying others enough for their work, and they were using and taking advantage of other people. He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.

The Newsmax report on this issue quite rightly highlights just how little we know about Obama’s background, a rather strange oversight in a country where even fairly minor runners for office often come under intense media scrutiny. Drew tried to raise this particular issue during the 2008 election but his voice was simply lost.

Drew also highlighted the close relationship at Occidental between Obama and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, his roommate from Pakistan, who was also present at this late-night impromptu seminar. When Chandoo, now a financial consultant, was questioned about his old friend’s opinions he said that he can’t remember him ever talking like that, ever expressing any interest in Marxism. But this is a man, I have to stress, who has a very selective memory. He also said that he had not seen Obama since before he became a senator, clearly a lie, as he is listed as a guest at a Ramadan dinner held in the White House last year.

There is other, more immediate evidence of Obama’s guiding ideology. His opinions seem to bear a very close resemblance to those of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his minister and mentor, whom he has described as his “sounding board” for twenty years. Wright advanced what he called a ‘Black Value System’, in which he denounces “our racist competitive society” and something he calls “middle-classness.” Despite his influence Wright is unlikely now to enjoy a White House junket. Why? That’s simple: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me”, as he told The Newport News last summer.

What an explosive mixture: Marxism, anti-middle class radicalism, hostility towards wealth creation and a racist anti-racist! What next, I wonder, what more is there to be discovered in Obama’s rather shadowy background? He himself is largely responsible for the endless speculation. Not only are his published memoirs highly selective in nature but he continues to refuse to release early documentation about his life, including his Harvard Law School transcripts and his senior thesis at Columbia.

Some of you, I’m sure, will know a movie called The Manchurian Candidate, either the original or the remake. Are we dealing, I wonder, with the most successful case of ‘entryism’ in all of human history? Please, please, if you are inclined to be humourless and literal-minded I would ask you to pause for a moment before rushing to the key board: I’m joking. Or, there again, am I? :-))

The Holy Fool

In the week that Super Obama delivered his State of the Union address I thought I'd say a word or two about his foreign policy.

For America to appear weak is a genuine danger to us all, a danger to the free world. Under the guidance of Obama and Hilary Clinton, his Secretary of State, America appears not just as weak but weak and indecisive to the point of absurdity. I sincerely hope that no challenge to the Monroe Doctrine emerges under the present administration. The Emperor Maximilian, sadly for him, was obviously born at the wrong time in history!

Take the case of China. Obama went there last year almost as a supplicant, not daring to raise the issue of Tibet, not even daring to meet the Dali Lama beforehand in case he ‘offended’ his hosts. All he could do was to make some vacuous noises about internet censorship before a hand-picked audience of communist cadres. One thing is sure, nobody is ever going to compose an opera to mark this less than historic occasion; perhaps a ditty or two might serve.

Then there is Iran, where the democratic opposition to the clerical tyranny cries to the world for some support and assistance, even if that support and assistance is only in the form of moral encouragement. There is no ‘evil empire’ rhetoric from Obama. Instead he holds out his hand to the likes of Ahmadinejad and Khameni, referring to the country as the Islamic Republic of Iran, as if it were the property of the ayatollahs, Nick Cohen rightly observed. And where did this appeasement get him? Nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Add to this his dithering over reinforcements for Afghanistan and the impression of weakness was compounded to a disastrous degree.

You see, this was all part of a bogus international charm offense. This was a president who really did think it was enough not to be George W. Bush; that not being George W. Bush, and mouthing windy platitudes, would be enough to open doors. He was seduced by his own myth, as indeed was the Noble Peace Committee in awarding what really should be rebranded as the Not the George W Bush Prize.

But the world is not made up of simple-minded and idealistic Scandinavians; the world is made up of cynics and realists like Vlad the Impaler Putin. They are well used to village idiots in Russia, a stock figure across so much of the national literature. But who would expect an American coming to offer himself in the part?

I’m mindful of Aneurin Bevan’s warning to the unilateralists in the British Labour Party that to abandon nuclear weapons would be to send a foreign secretary “naked into the conference chamber.” Obama did not even get as far as the conference chamber; he just knocked on Putin’s door, already naked, telling him that he was abandoning Bush’s missile defence programme, hoping that this, and a big smile, would result in something in return. What did he get? Yes, you already know the answer – nothing.

I do so hate repeating myself but it really is true that the world is not Wisconsin, a simple truth that Obama does not understand. The lofty visions and the empty rhetoric do not work on a stage where only realpolitik is effective and only students of Machiavelli know how to play the part. Obama must appear in so many capitals a little like the Holy Fool, as he did in Russia: too good for his own good; to good for the good of America; too good for the good of the free world.

Barack Obama-a Term Report

It’s not been a super year for Super Obama, that sheep in sheep’s clothing. The Sermon on the Mount rhetoric continues, but he is now beyond the stage where you can fool all of the people some of the time. Seemingly his approval rating is now lower at this stage in office, his first anniversary, than any president since Eisenhower.

Is there really any surprise in this? It was possible to predict this rather dismal outcome from those big, vacuous campaign speeches, promising all things to all people. There was never any lie; Obama genuinely believed in what he was saying, I would certainly give him that much, which makes the offence all the greater. Politics is not about ‘vision’; politics is about reality, and the self-deluding Obama was never more than a fantasist. Now reality kicks in. He promised a change when he was inaugurated last January. There has certainly been change, and all for the worst.

It’s a dismal picture. Unemployment is rising, house prices continue to fall, Guantanamo is still open and the war in Afghanistan is getting steadily more Vietnam-like and less popular by the day. It makes no difference if he wins peace prizes for no peace, the fairy-tale is over. The thing is America and the world, a good part of the world, was seduced by the Obama myth, the myth of the first black man in the White House. Here was Moses pointing a finger to the Promised Land; here was a man who would bring Americans together. But this was not Moses, it was not even Aaron; it was just, well, Barack Obama, just another Democrat, just another politician. He was deluded, America was deluded, the world was deluded.

Yes, the wind is still there, so, too, is big government and higher taxation, forms of creeping socialism that Obama does have to his credit. But as for bringing Americans together he has gone so far in the opposite direction that I cannot think of a chief executive who ever had a more divisive effect, and I’m not excluding George W. Bush! I read a report from one electoral county in Kentucky, a mining district, solidly blue collared; the sort of district that would elect Charles Manson before it would elect a Republican. Now, according to local people, even Charles Manson as a Republican could beat Barack Obama.

Year one has been bad; year two, I predict, will be even worse.