[Rhodes22-list] Politics - Mile High Message

[Brad Haslett]

Someone watch the speech for me tonight, I'm taking my daughter to see "Elmo
Grows Up" and will miss the message from "The Anointed One".  Mr. Will hit
one out of the ballpark with the attached observation (he'd like that
description given all the baseball books he's written).

Brad

------------------

August 28, 2008 The Devils in His Details*By* *George
Will*<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/george_will/>

DENVER -- When Barack Obama feeds rhetorical fishes and loaves to the
multitudes in the football stadium Thursday night, he should deliver a
message of sufficient particularity that it seems particularly suited to
Americans. One more inspirational oration, one general enough to please
Berliners or even his fellow "citizens of the world," will confirm Pascal's
point that "continuous eloquence wearies." That is so because it is not
really eloquent. If it is continuous, it is necessarily formulaic and
abstract, vague enough for any time and place, hence truly apposite for
none.

If Socrates had engaged in an interminable presidential campaign in a
media-drenched age, perhaps he, too, would have come to seem banal. But the
fact that Obama lost nine of the final 14 primaries might have something to
do with the fact that when he descends from the ether to practicalities, he
reprises liberalism's most shopworn nostrums.

Russia, a third-world nation with first-world missiles, is rampant; Iran is
developing a missile inventory capable of delivering nuclear weapons the
development of which will not be halted by Obama's promised "aggressive
personal diplomacy." Yet Obama has vowed to "cut investments in unproven
missile defense systems." Steamboats, railroads, airplanes and vaccines were
"unproven" until farsighted people made investments. Furthermore, as Reuel
Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute notes, Democrats will
eventually embrace missile defense in Europe because they "will have nowhere
else to go short of pre-emptive strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities."

Obama, who might be the last person to learn that schools' cognitive outputs
are not simply functions of financial inputs, promises more money for
teachers, who, as usual, are about 10 percent of the Democrats' convention
delegates and alternates. He waxes indignant about approximately 150,000
jobs sent overseas each year -- less than 1 percent of the number of jobs
normally lost and gained in the creative destruction of America's dynamic
economy. U.S. exports are fending off a recession while he complains about
free trade. He deplores NAFTA, although since it was implemented in 1994 the
U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies have grown 50 percent, 46 percent and
54 percent, respectively.

Recycling George McGovern's 1972 "Demogrant" notion, Obama promises a $1,000
check for every family, financed by a "windfall profits" tax on oil
companies. Obama is unintimidated by the rule against legislating about
subjects one cannot define.

Obama thinks government is not getting a "reasonable share" of oil
companies' profits, which in 2007 were, as a percentage of revenues (8.3
percent), below those of U.S. manufacturing generally (8.9 percent). Exxon
Mobil pays almost as much in corporate taxes to various governments as the
bottom 50 percent of American earners pay in income taxes. Exxon Mobil does
make $1,400 a second in profits -- hear the sharp intakes of breath from
liberals with pursed lips -- but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a
second in operating costs.

Obama's rhetorical extravagances are inversely proportional to his details,
as when he promises "nothing less than a complete transformation of our
economy" in order to "end the age of oil." The diminished enthusiasm of some
voters hitherto receptive to his appeals might have something to do with the
seepage of reality from his rhetoric. Voters understand that neither the
"transformation" nor the "end" will or should occur. His dreamy certitude
that "alternative" fuels will quickly become real alternatives is an energy
policy akin to an old vaudeville joke: "If we had some eggs, we could have
ham and eggs, if we had some ham."

When he speaks Thursday night in a venue consecrated to the faux combat of
football, the NATO alliance, which was 12 years old when he was born, may be
collapsing because of its unwillingness to help enough in Afghanistan and
its inability to respond seriously to Russia's combat in Georgia. It is
unfair to neither NATO nor Obama to note that the alliance is practicing
what he preaches: It is preaching to Vladimir Putin, who is unimpressed.
NATO, said Lord Ismay, speaking of Europe in 1949, was created to "keep the
Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out." That Germany's
appeasement reflex is part of NATO's weakness is perhaps progress, of sorts.

Journalism often must be preoccupied with matters barely remembered a week
later. But decades hence, historians will write about today's response to
Russia by the West, perhaps in obituaries for the idea of "the West." If
Obama does not speak to this crisis Thursday night, that will speak volumes.
georgewill at washpost.com <%20georgewill at washpost.com>