Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Cool on O'Bama   [John Derbyshire]

All this emoting over Barack Obama's wonderful, wonderful personality is starting to trigger my gag reflex.

What are we electing here, a faith healer? What is Obama's view of the executive power? How, exactly, does he propose to "bring us together"? Just by being half-black? What if I don't want to be "brought together" with radical socialists who want to jack up my taxes and shut down my freedoms of speech, property, and association? What will Obama do? Steve Sailer has been documenting the astonishing — for a guy with Obama's résumé — absence of any paper trail for Obama's thoughts, ideas, and opinions. There's just his autobiography, which is unreadable (I tried), and The Audacity of Hope which I guess (I didn't try — you can only ask so much of a guy) urges us all to be really audacious and hope a lot.

Is Obama just an empty suit, who never had a thought about anything, other than his own amazing wonderfulness, in his entire life? What, for example, does he think about conservatism? Modern American conservatism is a huge and various body of thought, with many mansions. Has Obama explored it? I'll lend him my Nash if he wants to make a start. Heck, I have read Kolakowski all the way through, all three volumes; has Obama read Hayek? Buckley? Kirk?

And then there is the matter of ethnic triumphalism, which is shifting and murmuring in the background of Obama's campaign. Be interesting to get Obama's opinion on, for example, Justice Thurgood Marshall's remark to his colleagues in the Bakke case, that, "You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn." (It's in Clint Bolick's book about affirmative action.) As a white guy with half-Asian kids, is there an ethnic downside to me and mine in voting for Obama? Is this an improper question? Why?

02/12 10:43 AMShare