The Young Turks

What the Cult of Obama doesn't realize is that he's a politician. Not a brave one taking risky positions like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, but a mainstream one. He has not been firing up the Senate with stirring Cross-of-Gold-type speeches to end the war. He's a politician so soft and safe, Oprah likes him. There's talk about his charisma and good looks, but I know a nerd when I see one. The dude is Urkel with a better tailor. [LA Times]

The rise of democratic frontrunner Barack Obama signifies an alarming victory of style over substance. Not unlike the dot-com hype, his campaign promises more than he can deliver. The one thing his voters can count on is that they will ultimately be disappointed. [Der Spiegel]

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media -- preoccupied with the political "horse race" -- have treated his invocation of "change" as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's major problems when, so far, he isn't. [Washington Post]

But if you listen to Mr Obama's speeches, it is not the lack of substance but the quality of it that ought to worry Americans. His victory speech after his latest primary win in Wisconsin this week was a case in point.

There was no shortage of proposals. He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

While he speaks of the need for Americans to move beyond partisanship ("We are not blue states or red states, but the United States" is a campaign meme), when you cut through the verbiage there is nothing to suggest he believes anything that is seriously at odds with the far Left of his party. If you think about it for a second, it's not really an accident that he has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson. [The Times]

"Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can."

This sounds to me like a man doing an impression of what he thinks a great speech might be like. It is the kind of empty exhortation that usually gives politicians a bad name. Peter Sellers, a British comedian of the 1960s, caught the genre nicely in a parody speech: "Let us assume a bold thrust and go forward together. Let us carry the fight against ignorance to the four corners of the earth, because it is a fight that concerns us all." Mr Obama might easily give a speech like that - although he would probably strip out some of the detail.

Exhortation can make for thrilling rhetoric. But the difference between Mr Obama and some of the great speakers he is sometimes compared with is that Churchill, Kennedy and Martin Luther King were genuinely challenging their audiences. Surrendering might have seemed rational in Britain in 1940. King's "I have a dream" speech was made at a time when racial segregation was still a reality in the southern US. When King coined the phrase the "fierce urgency of now" (borrowed with acknowledgement by Mr Obama), he was explaining why he had come out against the Vietnam war. Even JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" demanded something from the audience.

Mr Obama is much vaguer and much less bold. He has taken the occasional risk. He likes to remind audiences that he called for higher fuel efficiency standards before an audience of Detroit carmakers.

But, in general, his campaign is relying on some of the most clichéd and least challenging slogans in the American political lexicon: unity not division; the future not the past; change not stagnation; an end to "business as usual"; lobbyists are bad, the people are good. Or as the man himself puts it: "We are choosing hope over fear. We're choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America." [Financial Times]

Do you remember chlorophyll? Then you're showing your age. For chlorophyll was all the rage back at the dawn of the '50s when Lever Brothers, in its finite wisdom, put on the market a bright green, mint-flavored dentifrice that promised not only to improve the condition of your teeth, but cure bad breath as well. How did the emerald goop work such wonders? Hard to say, as chlorophyll is nothing more than the green pigment found in most plants. Sure, it looked like it had something special to offer. But at the end of the day, chlorophyll toothpaste succeeded in making teeth green (if brushing was carelessly executed) and nothing more. Its market history was intense but brief. And so may well be the marketing history of Barack Obama - if American voters get wise to him.

I say marketing history rather than political campaign because that's precisely how the first-term senator is being sold to the American people - not as a person but as a product. And as "product placement" goes, you can't argue with the success of this one. Why, it seems like only yesterday former First Lady and the current senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, had the Democratic presidential nomination all wrapped up and tied with a neat litle bow. But over the past few months, that's no longer the case, with Obama winning primary after primary. And the Illinois senator's success is clearly the result of an element every bit as powerful today as chlorophyll was in the '50s - Melanin. What's that, you ask? Simply the primary determinant of human skin color that also exists in the plant and animal kingdoms where it serves as a pigmentation.

Like chlorophyll. [LA City Beat]

And just to prove that I can link to more than the latest example of a journalist or pundit jumping off the Obama bandwagon, David Ignatius has written an interesting column that argues that Obama's inexperience is a good thing.

KenTX and John Derbyshire are on the same wavelength:

Memo to the DNC: You are fielding two lackluster candidates here. What's more, they will get weaker, as the Clinton-Obama scrapping knocks coats of paint from off both of them between now and August. No doubt John McCain will trip over his tongue a time or two, but he won't be doing any scrapping. Doesn't need to. Within his party, he's a winner. Everybody likes a winner. Are you guys worried yet? You should be.

[. . .]

The Democratic party has two lame candidates, without a dime's worth of executive experience between them. Competing on the campaign trail, by August each will have thoroughly alienated the other's supporters, and turned off the voting public. Meanwhile, in the wings, there is this guy who was vice president for eight years, who ran a campaign for the presidency and actually won it! (well, according to party lore). He looks presidential, with a fine strapping physique and a big square jaw. You're hankering after moral authority? How about a Nobel Peace Prize, for crying out loud!!

But - does he want it? Does Al Gore want to be the president of the United States?

Are you kidding me? [National Review]

Last but not least, a video: