Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Obama Curve

Charles Murray on Obama:

  I understand how naïve it is to read a presidential candidate’s speech as if it were anything except political positioning, but that leads me to my final point: It’s about time that people who disagree with Obama’s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I’m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We’ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he’s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril. I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses.  Not bad. 

What should worry the GOP, I think, is that I suspect there are many people who vote Republican eight times in ten who will be prepared to ignore Obama’s liberalism this time around for precisely the reasons Murray identifies. Policy differences may not matter so much this time around. Indeed, it’s easy to picture a class of voters saying to themselves “I like John McCain and I’d certainly vote for him against Hillary Clinton, but, almost to my own surprise, I’m voting for the new guy this time.”

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