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My mom is a woman who knows no guile. She is the most honest, sincere and forthright person I’ve ever known. Those same traits have earned her the respect of those around her. At the VA hospital where she worked until she retired she earned the nickname ‘E. F. Hutton’, because ‘when E. F. Hutton speaks, people listen’. She was known throughout the hospital as the person to transfer a phone call to if a veteran was getting the runaround. They knew she’d fix it, even though she wasn’t an administrator.

One example of how she earned her nickname was the time her supervisor, rumored to be something of back-stabbing career-climber, dumped some work on my mom that was intended to make the supervisor look good to her superiors. When my mom objected her supervisor said, ‘oh well, [defecation] rolls down hill’. To that my mom responded, ‘yeah, but it also floats to the top’.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Mom and she asked me if I was following the primaries. She probably figured I was but was just being polite. She then went on to tell me how her and my step-dad were getting tired of it and had no idea who they’d vote for. It seems like they’ve been voting mostly Democrat for some years, maybe due to the fact that Mom was a civil servant and my step-dad watched a lot of TV. But they’ve always known where I stood, so when we were likely to disagree the subject seldom came up.

As she described why she was having trouble deciding who to vote for she made a comment that sent me into side-splitting laughter. She simply said, “Obama is just a cheerleader. He just stands in front of the crowd and gets them worked up. But he never talks about how he’ll do the things he promises.” The reason it was so funny to me is that when my mom says something negative about someone, there’s a lot more behind it than just the words, but you can be assured that the words express her thoughts accurately.

She went on to tell me something I didn’t know, which made it even funnier. She was a cheerleader in High School. She doesn’t seem like the cheerleader type. She said she did it to get out of chores on the farm where she grew up, and that because she wasn’t very good she only got to cheer for the ‘B’ team. I thought kids were supposed to surprise their parents with things they didn’t know.

She wanted to send her opinion to people on the Internet, but didn’t know how. So I offered to do it for her.

Then, out of nowhere comes some interesting news about Obama. Beyond the rhetoric from his opponent on the campaign trail (and her husband) came news stories that echoed Mom’s sentiment. Some examples:

• A collection from Orbusmax (he cycles stuff through so you might have to look in the archives to find the post):

******** CLIP COLLECTION: 710 KIRO DORI MONSON EXLUSIVE *********

UPDATE - 7TH CLIP SAID TO EXIST, FROM RALLY AT MADISON, WISCONSIN, 10/15/07…

UPDATE - NOW IT’S UP TO 6! 2 MORE CLIPS OF “FAINTING” WOMEN AT OBAMA RALLIES:
CLIPS FROM BARACK OBAMA RALLIES… EACH IS A WOMAN… EACH WOMAN STANDS DEAD CENTER, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE STAGE WHERE OBAMA IS STANDING AND SPEAKING… OBAMA SAYS “GIVE HER SPACE”, REFERENCES EMT, AND HANDS THE WATER BOTTLE EACH TIME!…

ANOTHER: Madison, Wis., Oct. 22, 2007…

******** JAMES TARANTO: Why do women keep fainting at Obama rallies *******

VIDEO: circa Feb. 24th, 2007 - Obama in Los Angeles…

VIDEO: Dec. 8th, 2007 — Obama in Iowa…

AUDIO: Feb. 8th, 2008 — Encounters fainter at Key Arena speech in Seattle…

VIDEO: Feb. 4th, 2008 — Obama in Hartford (START AT 6:05 MARK)…

VIDEO: Jan. 8th, 2008 — Obama in Hanover, NH…

VIDEO: Sep. 8th, 2007 — Obama in Santa Barbara, CA (START AT 6:29 MARK)…

• Why Obama’s mantra of change has a short half-life - By David Brewster, Crosscut Seattle

“The other reason for predicting a change in Obama’s basic appeal is that it can only conceal for so long that his message is a downer, an invitation to swallow castor oil. To his credit, Obama is laying the groundwork for tackling some very big problems, so big that they can’t be addressed without bipartisanship: withdrawal from Iraq, climate change, too much debt, universal health insurance, fixing Medicare and Social Security.” “But of course, all these neglected issues involve a lot of pain, sacrifices, new taxes, public anger.”

• Daniel Henninger [mentioned in the previous story], a conservative columnist for The Wall Streeet [sic] Journal, detects a kind of grimness underneath Obama’s uplifting rhetoric:

Unease about the economy is real, but Sen. Obama is selling more than that. He is selling deep grievance over the structure of American society. That’s the same message as John Edwards, or Dennis Kucinich for that matter. Hillary Clinton’s mistake may have been to think this is 2008, not 1938, with the solution lying in leveraging votes in a Democratic Congress. Instead of Hillary’s wonkish geniuses, Barack is selling the revolution — change “from the bottom up.” …

Whatever else, Barack Obama isn’t talking sunshine in America. He’s talking fast and furious. People not yet baptized into Obamamania may start to look past the dazzling theatrics to see a vision of the United States that is quite grim and could wear thin in the general election. [emphasis added]

My opinion of him is that he is a great orator. His speeches are inspiring to those who agree with his politics. However, I also have had the opinion of his politics that his speeches are vapid, empty of the substance that people are looking for from him. His climb to his current status is not one of a hard-working man who set himself toward greatness and overcame great obstacles, but rather a small-time politician who was in the right place at the right time.

His leap onto the national scene came out of Chicago’s dirty politics. I’ll let Christian Schneider at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute explain.

Yet despite running away with the primary, Obama still had a formidable challenge in Republican Jack Ryan. Ryan was an impressive candidate - attractive and wealthy, with law and business degrees from Harvard. After making a fortune at Goldman Sachs, Ryan left to teach in an inner city school.

Yet Ryan had a problem - during the campaign, he was going through a messy divorce from actress Jeri Ryan, of “Star Trek: Voyager” fame. Details of Jeri Ryan’s testimony contained lurid details about Ryan forcing his wife to go to sex clubs in Paris. These details were toxic to Jack Ryan’s campaign, and he saw his poll numbers plummet - eventually, Republican leaders pressed Ryan to quit the race, fearing he was toxic to the statewide ticket.

What isn’t pointed out is that a liberal judge allowed the divorce papers to be unsealed at the request of a local reporter. Obama really didn’t defeat his opponent, his opponent defeated himself with the help of liberal activists.

But regardless of the results of the primary and general elections, Barack Obama has done this nation a tremendous service. He has shown that race is no longer a major issue for most of America. Maybe along the way a few people had to come to terms with the issue, so he succeeded in that as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Campaign 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.