Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Presumptuous Candidate: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for”

Original Link: http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/07/30/the-presumptuous-candidate-this-is-the-moment-that-the-world-is-waiting-for/

By SusanUnPC

To whom did Mr. Obama utter those astonishing words?

Democratic members of the House of Representatives.

Imagine heavyweights like Reps. John Murtha and Norm Dicks hearing that from this lightweight candidate. Heavyweights like those two who wield enormous power — QUIETLY — through their committee positions. Dicks, for example, has reached the highest tiers of the Appropriations committee, and has served for years on the Intelligence committee.

ABC News caught the story in The Note:

The latest entry in the (bulging) Obama files: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” he told House Democrats Tuesday night, per The Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman. “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

(Read that sentence again, and try to imagine how it would look if it was said on camera.)

Obama may be right (and if he is, he wins) — but the first person singular is the most dangerous of tenses, particularly when the meme is being set. Toss in a jettisoned faux-presidential seal, a canceled visit with troops, maybe a sprinkling of broken promises, and you’ve got enough to weave an uncomfortable yet unforgettable suit.

With a public schedule that “would have made Dick Cheney envious,” this is Obama going from presumptive to presumptuous, Dana Milbank writes in his Washington Post column.

“Some say the supremely confident Obama — nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that ‘the odds of us winning are very good’ — has become a president-in-waiting,” Milbank writes. “But in truth, he doesn’t need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions.”

“Toss in a jettisoned faux-presidential seal, a canceled visit with troops, maybe a sprinkling of broken promises, and you’ve got enough to weave an uncomfortable yet unforgettable suit. …”

Add to that the faux outrage over Kotel. The Obama campaign designed the “outrage” for consumption by Israeli newspapers, which are widely read by Jews in the U.S. (and the Obama campaign knows this).

But, the Israeli newspapers followed through, and discovered that the Obama campaign purposely leaked Obama’s prayer note. As LisaB quoted yesterday:

What initially seemed to be a journalistic scoop of dubious moral propriety now seems to be a case of an Israeli paper being played by the Barack Obama campaign.

Mr. Obama, American Jews will read this story too. You’ve just lost more credibility with an important group of voters already skeptical because of your associations with those close to Louis Farrakhan.

The central point of the ABC News story is the presumptuousness that Mr. Obama parades.

Reality check: There remains a nomination to be secured, and an election to be won.

ACTION item: Obama gamed the primaries by exploiting the weaknesses in the caucuses. We can put a stop to that by taking this simple survey from IOwnMyVote.com. Why? Because the people behind this survey will ensure that our views get in the right hands.

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