QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:58 A.M. ET:  From Victor Davis Hanson's brilliant analysis of Barack Obama at NRO:

...over half the electorate sees only hypocrisy. Obama initially called for understanding and patience with the BP spill, in a way he had not when demagoguing Katrina. He suddenly found Guantanamo, renditions, military tribunals, Predator assassinations, and Iraq to be complex issues, after assuring us that they were open-and-shut cases of simple morality. Bush’s deficit misdemeanors suddenly became Obama’s felonies — after he ran on the theme that Bush had recklessly run up the debt. The 2008 campaign to highlight racial harmony by electing the symbolic postracial Obama has become a sort of nightmare in which the old, tired identity politics of the 1980s rage as never before, fanned by an unpopular president desperate to rev up his base.

COMMENT:  Well said.  What I think has shocked so many Americans is that Obama, far from being a modern, post-racial president, is very much a child of the sixties.  Indeed, in rhetoric, in tone, in style, this president and his Democratic followers seem to want to drive the country back almost half a century, as if there has been no racial progress, no women's progress, nothing except the need to re-visit old grudges.

And, like the modern "progressives" he champions, Obama solves no problems.  Indeed, actually solving a problem appears the furthest thing from his mind.  His first priority is to impose an ideology, a "correct" way of looking at the world.  The people in that world can be helped, of course, but only if that help is filtered through the proper ideology.  Indeed, the breathtaking insensitivity of Michelle Obama's queenly trip to Spain is all too typical of the kind of "progressive" we've seen in America since the 1960s, the kind who actually has contempt for the feelings of the very people he or she claims to be serving. 

During the campaign, Barack Obama himself was direct in expressing his contempt, ridiculing Americans who "cling to their guns and their religion."  In an act of supreme adolescence, many of those Americans voted for him anyway.

August 9, 2010