The Obama Paradox

"I'm so much smarter than you, that's why I hang out with really dumb people." That's how Barack Obama seems to view the world.

As Victor Davis Hanson puts it in his analysis of Obama's "It's not their fault white people are racist, Bible-thumping gun kooks" comments:

So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright.

For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “they”? Straight-talking or someone who evokes "context" to explain away the explicable?
Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.

And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won't give up?

I agree with Professor Hanson that Hillary is clearly the better choice for Democrats who want to win in November (and she's a lousy choice, too). But I still see no future for her. It's already obvious that Sen. Obama is damaged goods, a candidate who presents the real possibility of a 40-state loss to John McCain. Every smart Democrat already knows it.

But who in the Democratic Party has the guts to take the nomination away from him? Who is going to walk into the lion's den of the Left's race-obsessed identity politics and say "The black guy has more votes, but he can't win in November?"

Not. Gonna. Happen.

Here's the best part for the GOP: The vetting of Barack Obama is just getting started. There are more quotes yet to come, more ministers spewing hate on his behalf, more anti-American whining from his wife, more radical votes from the Illinois legislature to discuss.

Since the Rev. Wright story began, Sen. Obama has been successful in keeping the campaign narrative mostly about race. This has benefited him, appealing as it does to two key Democratic primary voting blocs: Black voters, and guilty white liberals.

But Sen. Obama and his wife keep giving the press new reasons to look beyond race and at the candidate himself. Every time they do, every time another story like Obama's comments to San Fran libs breaks, more general election voters discover they don't like this guy.

And he, apparently, doesn't think much of them either.