Lately, an awful lot of Republicans have been greeting each other like seasick passengers on a lurching vessel. The debate this week alas did nothing to quell the queasiness.
“How’re you holding up?” one will ask.
“Agh,” another will reply, “I can’t even look at the papers any more.”
“Did you watch the debate?”
And then there’s an exchange of winces, and maybe even a stomach-grab, as commiserating friends feel the stab at their vitals that comes from seeing drifting poll numbers for the War Hero and rising ones for Senator Cipher.
It is normal for people who follow politics to feel a bit of vertigo now and then. It’s reasonable to feel cheered when your guy seems to be winning, and gloomy when the other guy is ahead.
But this year something different is in the mix. It is not simply that the Republican is the underdog – or the top of the GOP ticket is a brave, seasoned man who seems unable to make a compelling case for himself.
The wobbly feeling this year is mixed with incredulity that America seems on the brink of electing a left-wing enigma. Barack Obama has a smooth, personable manner, two memoirs, and an impressive campaign operation. And?
Here we are, about to elect somebody about whom the country actually knows very little – and what we do know isn’t comforting.
Remember the conventions, and how alone Obama was on that stage? Here was a tall, cool stranger; a man whose improbable “journey” had brought him to national prominence.
Significantly, there was no encouraging cavalcade of people who could say they’d worked with him for decades, or could vouch for his character, as there was with John McCain.
This was not merely a function of age, or the length of either man’s career. It was an expression of the deep, persistent, and deliberate mystery at the core of the Democratic nominee. The people who could vouch for Obama over the long term seem not to be people with whom he can appear in public.
Who are they? Some we already know, such the Obama’s racist pastor Jeremiah Wright, who called white Americans the “U-S of KKK-A” and asked God to “damn America.”
Barack Obama spent 20 years in Wright’s church, regarded Wright as his mentor, and dropped him only when the minister proved politically embarrassing. They were close: Does Obama see the world Wright’s way?
We know that in 1995 Obama launched his political career from the Chicago living room of Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn, well-known, unrepentant, anti-American radicals who bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol in the 1960s.
Obama, who once claimed that Ayers was “some guy who lives in my neighborhood,” appears to have had extensive dealings with the grizzled leftist revolutionary.
From 1995-1999, Obama worked with Ayers on the Chicago Annenburg Challenge, helping to channel money to educational programs explicitly designed to raise political consciousness – that is, to inculcate hard-left attitudes — in Chicago schools.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times: “Ayers also served alongside Obama between December 1999 and December 2002 on the board of the not-for-profit Woods Fund of Chicago. That board met four times a year, and members would see each other at occasional dinners the group hosted.”
Ayers is “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis,” Obama has said. Of those they’ve exchanged irregularly, then, which views of Ayers’ does Obama share?
Obama’s name has now surfaced in old news reports about meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America, the American affiliate of the Socialists International.
Are you feeling queasy yet?
The junior senator from Illinois may be a marvelous fellow – and perhaps the seas will begin to fall and the healing will begin if he is elected.
But it is hard to escape the sense that he is being carried towards the White House on a wave of willful self-deception amongst many Democrats and a dangerously incurious national press.
“I’m feeling sick about the election,” Republicans are saying. It’s not just because the GOP might lose. It’s because “that one,” that mysterious, worrying one, might win.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
