Barrack Obama
Americans last night got their closest look yet at Barrack Obama, the shooting star bidding to be our next President. His speech before 85,000 at Invesco Field was as much coronation as nomination. As we've often noted, the party has tended to nominate relative unknowns ever since its animating liberalism fell out of public favor in the 1970s. Now comes the most risky change agent of them all, a 47-year-old first term Senator not yet four years removed from the Illinois state legislature. His political and pompous gifts are frightening, as he showed during the primaries and last night. His campaign skills -- in fund-raising and staff organization -- deserve more than a nod for defeating the Clinton juggernaut in the primaries. We also count ourselves among those millions of Americans, of all races, who take pride in a man of African descent reaching these political heights. Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass would have viewed Mr. Obama's success as vindication both of their struggles and their faith in America's promise. So far his campaign, like his political persona, has been marked by contradiction. In his rhetoric, Mr. Obama is a centrist, stressing a theme of post-ideological, bipartisan political transformation. In his (two) autobiographies and convention presentation this week, he is a conciliator who brought unique skills to transcend old political disputes. Most conspicuously, he is proposing a steeper tax increase than any recent candidate, yet he is selling it as a net tax cut. He justifies this by asserting that his eight "refundable" tax credit proposals for people who pay no income tax are "tax cuts." Mr. Obama is disguising the kind of pure income distribution that Mr. McGovern failed to sell as a $1,000 "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's packaging is post-ideological but his package is from the Great Society. In this and in other policy areas, Mr. Obama is different from Bill Clinton and the New Democrats of 1992 and 1996. Mr. Clinton made real...
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