Idkal

It would be fun to watch this bizarre seesaw contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, except for the horrifying possibility that one of them could end up being our next president.

Conservatives have long recognized the power lust and ruthlessness that defines the Clintons. Finally, many Democrats opened their eyes to this, too, as they watched Bill Clinton’s deliberate ignition of racial tensions in efforts to quell the Obama surge. Who does this upstart Obama think he is, trying to disrupt the inexorable flow of history leading to a continuation of the Clinton co-presidency?

Though Bill’s strategy only yielded the Clintons temporary fruit, Obama delivered them bushel baskets of his own with revelations of his longtime association with a stridently racist black pastor. Obama might have been finished but for Hillary’s quasi-masochistic penchant for self-destruction.

Hillary just couldn’t resist claiming she came under sniper fire in Bosnia, presumably so she could add this combat experience to her resume of otherwise mostly vicarious achievements.

Caught red-handed in this gratuitous lie, she tried to pass it off as a mistake. Bill Clinton often tried to minimize the egregiousness of his deliberate misbehavior by characterizing it as a mistake, as when he called his ongoing intentional affair with Monica Lewinsky a mere mistake in judgment.

It is inconceivable that Hillary’s imagined sniper-fire incident was a mistake, and her lame effort to excuse her whopper as a product of campaign fatigue is enormously insulting. Sane people neither forget such dramatic moments nor imagine them if they didn’t occur.

Truthfully, I can’t describe how disillusioned I would be if I thought the candidate I was supporting were capable of such strange behavior. And this is far from a one-time occurrence. We’ve all known people, even friends, who embellish. But very few take it to this extreme, and none of those few would we remotely consider to be presidential material.

On the other hand, Democrats have only one other candidate on their side of the aisle, and he’s looking increasingly problematic. They should have known Barack Obama’s apparent transcendence was too good to be true.

Many of us understood from the beginning the unrealism in the promises of this extreme liberal partisan to be a messianic uniter. But little did we know that he attended a church whose pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has distinguished himself through anti-American and racist rants and as a scholar and practitioner of black liberation theology.

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell warned on “Hannity & Colmes” that what we really need to focus on with this Obama/Wright flap, are the tenets of black liberation theology and to what extent Barack Obama embraces them, assuming his pastor and church truly endorse this theology.

Blackwell said he is concerned this theology supports partial-birth abortion, pacifism in foreign policy, and economic socialism. He suggested that responsible voters have a duty to inquire whether Obama subscribes to these views.

As it turns out, Blackwell’s observations are just the tip of the iceberg concerning this theology. If half of what I’ve read about it is true, it promotes anything but a unifying message. Instead of centering on God and his relationship to man, it appears to be unduly man-centered, race-oriented and more political than theological.

Rather than adopting Martin Luther King’s colorblind approach, it stresses — according to Anthony B. Bradley of Covenant Theological Seminary — “an unqualified commitment to the Black community as that community seeks to define its existence in the light of God’s liberating work in the world.” The theology, says Bradley, “laid the foundation for many (black pastors) to embrace Marxism and a distorted self-image of perpetual ‘victim.’”

Doesn’t America have a right to know whether the leading Democratic presidential contender buys into the reputed theology of the church he has attended for 20 years? If Pastor Wright’s Trinity Church doesn’t teach this theology, Obama should have no problem telling us so. But if it does, he has much explaining to do.

It won’t suffice for him to dismiss the inquiry with the same casual indifference by which he attempted to trivialize Pastor Wright’s disturbing sermons as just a few remarks over 30 years condensed into a 30-second sound bite. Even a tenuous connection to black liberation theology undermines Barack’s self-description as a unifier.

These disqualifying attributes of both Democratic candidates would ordinarily be enough to motivate and energize conservatives to new levels of commitment to the GOP nominee. But so far, John McCain, especially in light of his recent speech to the World Affairs Council, seems, except for a few remaining issues, to be doing his best to become the first Democratic president to be elected on the Republican ticket.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I was one of seven people who each spoke at our church’s Good Friday service on one of the seven sayings of Christ on the cross. I chose, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”

In my more skeptical days, I viewed the question as odd — almost ammunition for the cynic. Why would Christ, if he were truly God, need to ask God about anything? Also, why would an all-powerful God have been in such a vulnerable position?

I now realize that these questions are no more unique than the basic misunderstandings of Christianity and Christian doctrine that give rise to them. But interestingly, this utterance of Christ that was once a stumbling block for me has now become a powerful reinforcement for my faith.

I used to wonder how the crucifixion, no matter how much physical suffering Christ endured, could cancel out our sins. After all, other human beings have experienced similar physical punishment. But I was completely unaware of the spiritual wounding that was involved. The Scripture tells us, “The human spirit can endure in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?”

But Christ was spiritually separated from and abandoned by God. To atone for our sins, he took on our sins, and God cannot look upon sin. We cannot begin to comprehend the agony he experienced in this separation after he had enjoyed infinite bliss with the Father and the Holy Spirit in eternity past.

After having lived a sinless life, the full force of mankind’s accumulated sin was heaped upon his human soul. All the spiritual forces of darkness were joined together in their collective hatred and fury in one last effort to defeat the conqueror of death because if they failed, death would be defeated forever.

Human beings had no power either to comfort or deliver him; the Father wouldn’t because he had to allow him to complete his redemptive work. At that moment, Christ was the loneliest man who ever lived. Yet consider this staggering irony: At no time was Christ more perfectly in his Father’s will. And through it all, he never renounced his Father, referring to him as “my God, my God.”

Although we sometimes separate ourselves from God, he will never abandon us this side of eternity. Witness the prodigal son. And consider the martyrs who died joyfully because even in their death, though hated and persecuted by men, God did not abandon them. Ignatius, waiting to be thrown to the lions said, “Let me be food for the wild beasts, if only God be glorified.” Christ, unlike the martyrs, did nothing to deserve his abandonment.

Skeptics should note that the Gospel writers never would have invented this potentially embarrassing saying of Christ because it suggests Christ’s powerlessness to deliver himself from his own predicament.

But I believe the statement is only comprehensible in reference to God’s Triune nature: Christ’s nature as both fully human and fully divine and God’s salvation plan for mankind.

Christ’s question to the Father on the cross shows not that Christ wasn’t God but that he was also a distinct divine personality in the Trinity and also fully human. If he had not been fully human, he could not have taken on our pain. Nor could he have died. If he was not God, he couldn’t have lived a sinless life or wiped away our sins.

Evangelist John Stott wrote: “We are not to envisage God on a deck chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered Himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. … I myself could never believe in God were it not for the cross. … In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of His. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark — the Cross, which symbolizes divine suffering. The cross of Christ … is God’s only self-justification in such a world as ours.”

Despite his indescribable suffering, Christ would not rescue himself, precisely because he was a co-conspirator in the salvation plan, which required him to fulfill his prophesied substitutional sacrifice.

As Bishop Fulton Sheen observed: “Every other person who ever came into this world came into it to live. Christ came into it to die. Death was a stumbling block to Socrates — it interrupted his teaching. But to Christ, death was the goal and fulfillment of his life, the gold that he was seeking.”

Christ died forsaken by God so that his people might claim God as their God; he endured abandonment so we would never be abandoned; he tasted hell so we’d never have to taste it ourselves; he endured loneliness so we’d never be alone.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Barack Obama is nothing if not smooth. He seamlessly turned a would-be apology over his pastor’s racism into an indictment against society’s racism.

It wasn’t, “Jeremiah Wright was wrong, and I was wrong for going to his church for 20 years despite his apparently unforgiving spirit, his racist and anti-American utterances, and his vulgarity, including taking the Lord’s name in vain from his very pulpit — the one venue above all on God’s sacred planet that such irreverence is inalterably forbidden. No matter what racial injustices have been perpetrated over the years by mankind toward mankind, they are never an excuse for disrespecting God, and especially in His house.”

Instead, Obama said, essentially, “I reject many of Rev. Wright’s remarks as divisive and perhaps even unfairly critical of America, but you have to admit, he has a point.”

You can talk all you want to about Obama’s “audacity of hope” theme, but the only audacity I heard in his speech was his lecturing Americans on their racism instead of explaining his longtime intimate relationship with Wright.

Obama’s forte is not, as many have suggested, waxing eloquent while saying nothing. His real gift is saying one thing while appearing to say the opposite, so mellifluously and disarmingly that audiences shake their heads in affirmation of the very proposition they oppose. Without changing their minds, they believe they have agreed with him. Amazing — and scary.

In his speech, he needed to condemn and distance himself from his pastor. And he did — sort of. But before he was finished, he had virtually excused his pastor’s statements and given us a history lesson in precisely why resentments giving rise to such statements came about — and were justified. In other words, “Sure, Pastor Wright sometimes crossed the line, but don’t let his tone obscure the underlying message: Racism is still pervasive in this country, which hasn’t come close to making amends for its shameful past.”

Reasonable people can debate the extent of the continued existence and effects of racism in both directions today, but in the meantime, we should recognize that Obama ducked the questions his speech was purportedly crafted to answer.

Assuming that not everyone listening to the speech was so mesmerized by Obama’s intoxicating spell of lofty rhetoric that they forgot its purpose, Obama is not yet out of the woods on this issue. And that’s his own fault.

He needed to speak directly, but he obfuscated with cleverly concealed contradictions and evasions. He said his campaign presents a powerful message of unity, but his words stoked racial unease and divisiveness. While paying lip service to our national motto, “Out of Many, One,” he couldn’t quit talking about people in terms of their color and ethnicity.

He scolded us for our racism, but he

— encouraged us to keep race-consciousness at the very forefront of our national psyche,

— sloppily conflated Pastor Wright’s manifest racism and anti-Americanism with his white grandmother’s stereotypical remarks and Democrat Geraldine Ferraro’s political observation about the effect of Obama’s race on his electability, and

— didn’t point his accusing finger at the race-hustlers of our time, who fan the flames of racial resentment and hostility.

Rather, he fed into feelings of racial distrust by playing to his leftist base and wrongly castigating Reaganism and conservative commentators for their alleged racism. He legitimized the noxious notion that conservative opposition to welfare and affirmative action are born of racism by saying we must “realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams.” He implied that conservative resistance to throwing endless money at public education is rooted in a “cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn, that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem.” These are misguided and damaging words.

Conservatives promote school choice precisely because they want to deliver disadvantaged children from their confinement in inner-city schools. Conservative opposition to affirmative action and unbridled welfare is not based on greed, selfishness or racism but on a philosophical difference over how best to solve problems while preserving the dignity of all individual human beings.

It is certainly Obama’s prerogative to make his campaign about race while saying it transcends it. It is his right to duck the question of his intimate connection to Wright, and he may take the offensive by deftly turning the charges of racism back on conservatives.

But it is up to the voters to evaluate his cultural analysis, his evasiveness and the wisdom of his proposed big-government solutions for our problems. I am unconvinced that his eloquence has successfully masked the deep problems that have begun to haunt his driving presidential ambitions.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The racist, anti-American rantings of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor and pastor of the church Obama attended for 20 years, raise many red flags about Obama’s supposedly best selling point: his unique capability for healing societal divisions.

Considering our deep-seated societal disagreements over cultural and political issues, promises by politicians to end societal divisiveness are dubious enough on their face. But when the promisor’s personal history contradicts his promises, even further scrutiny is required.

It’s difficult to gauge Obama’s genuineness in standing on this kind of platform because he has such a short political history to evaluate. Stories have been written, pointing to his extreme liberalism and scant record of reaching across the aisle, that cast serious doubt on his unifying claims. Until now, his lofty speeches have obscured these inconsistencies.

But with reports of his pastor saying “blacks should not sing ‘God bless America, but G– d— America,” and, concerning the 9/11 attacks, America’s “chickens are coming home to roost,” the burden of proof has now shifted to Obama. He must demonstrate not only that his claims to offer healing are sincere but also that he does not actually share his pastor’s and, manifestly, his congregation’s deeply disturbing views on race and America.

What can Obama say to meet this burden of proof?

Before this story heated up beyond the mainstream media’s ability to suppress it, Obama casually dismissed the pastor’s tirades merely as “controversial” remarks — as if they had some legitimacy and were not outright indefensible but in any event should not be taken too seriously. Now he appears to be saying he was unaware of the offensive statements. But if Obama’s deepest passion in life is to heal, wouldn’t it follow that he would make it his business to know — taking the willing suspension of disbelief here to new heights — what driving passions stir his pastor?

We must recognize the double standard that liberals typically apply to immunize themselves from accountability for bigotry. When the remotest connection can be inferred between a conservative and a bigoted supporter, there is always hell to pay. No excuses are permitted. Guilt attaches — not even by so much as true association but by passive receipt of an endorsement from anyone the left believes to have bigoted views.

Liberals, on the other hand, can be overtly racist toward conservative blacks like Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas and earn accolades rather than condemnation. And in Obama’s case, we have more than passive receipt of an endorsement. We have more than guilt by casual association.

Obama chose this pastor and picked this church and has been attending for two decades, presumably because he embraced its message and its approach. His wife’s curious statements about America, such as when she told the New Yorker that our country is “downright mean,” provide further grounds for our skepticism. It will not do for Obama to claim he was unaware of Wright’s racism and anti-Americanism.

A brief review of the Wright videos shows that his race-driven spirit was one of the animating forces in that church. We didn’t see congregants spilling toward the exits in protest but instead gesturing in participatory approval. It stretches credulity to deny that such vitriol was central to Wright’s worldview or to suggest that Obama was unaware that it was. It is thus silly to quibble over the irrelevant distraction of whether Obama happened to be in attendance at this or that particular hate exhibition.

Viewing all this in a light most favorable to Obama, if he chose this church for political expedience rather than spiritual nourishment, he must tell us what principles he wouldn’t compromise in furtherance of his ambitions. If he somehow clears that hurdle, he must next explain how he can possibly deliver on his promises to unite us publicly en route to a post-racial and post-partisan society, when he’s obviously willing privately to benefit from the energy of divisiveness and racism. This takes the ends-justifies-the-means approach to new extremes.

Democrats, including Clinton supporters, are quick to defend Obama because they realize he is still their likely nominee and they can’t afford this issue to have legs into the general election campaign. They insist we should look at “the issues” rather than this side story. Besides, Obama has denounced the pastor’s remarks.

The denunciation is hollow, given Obama’s long voluntary history with this pastor. And the Democrats’ attitude toward character has always been specious. They want it to be an issue only when they are claiming Republicans lack character — as with the falsely alleged lies of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

We all know that one’s character cannot be separated from his actions, as the latter springs from the former. Voters must satisfy themselves about a candidate’s character since his character will have an impact on their lives.

Instead of giving us answers to supplement our negligible knowledge of his character and history, Obama has given us only more questions — many alarming questions.

Popularity: 16% [?]

When Barack Obama promises change for America, I graciously assume, for now, that he doesn’t mean he will change America to conform to his apparently racist pastor’s vision for this country, though that whole subject deserves far more scrutiny. But we should also seriously examine his promise to deliver a more harmonious climate.

It’s not just Obama. A lot of Democrats have been pushing the idea of bipartisanship for years. One of the Democrats’ earliest criticisms of President Bush was that he didn’t reach across the aisle and extend a hand to Democrats.

Of course, the truth is precisely the opposite. Bush, unlike any president in recent memory, genuinely made a determined effort to work with Democrats. Not only did they rebuff him, but they attacked him with a relentless viciousness from before day one.

Democrats weren’t looking for bipartisanship. They were looking to get their way, even with a Republican president in office. They condemned as partisanship anything short of that, somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet Communists redefining imperialism not as the Soviets’ swallowing up of smaller nations but as the United States’ efforts to resist such Soviet imperialism.

Understand that I am not criticizing Democrats for being partisan; I’m suggesting they are cynically insincere or grossly self-deceived when they pretend to aspire to bipartisanship. They don’t seek compromise; they want the unopposed implementation of their unadulterated liberal agenda, which, of course, is their prerogative.

If I were a liberal — heaven forbid — I’d be promoting a liberal agenda, too — not bipartisanship. Indeed, conservatives and Republicans are foolish if they believe liberals won’t vigorously pursue their policies. They are hopelessly naive if they think Obama cares more about restoring harmony than advancing the leftist policies to which he has proven his fidelity. Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, better not fall for the ruse that bipartisanship is remotely likely in today’s polarized political climate.

I single out McCain here because he has been boasting of running “a different kind of campaign,” one that eschews conflict and negativity. That’s laudable if he means he will refrain from dirty politics — dirty tricks and lying about his opponents. But it’s unilateral surrender if he means he will not point out their genuine flaws and the sharp differences he professes to have with them.

From a humane, even Christian, standpoint, harmony and bipartisanship are noble goals. But when you consider that we have opposing parties with radically different visions for the country, is it even responsible for us to place collegiality above principle?

Should we conservatives, for example, place such a high priority on Republican and Democratic politicians making nice with each other that we agree to adopt growth-smothering tax increases? Socialized health care? Retreat-and-defeat in Iraq? Payoffs to trial lawyers instead of monitoring terrorist communications? Civil rights for terrorists? Abandonment of protection for the unborn? Acquiescence to the ongoing assault on Christians in the public square? Continued surrender of academia to America-bashing, atheistic, feminist-preoccupied, history revisionist, liberal indoctrinators? Unbridled open borders with a guaranteed transformation of our culture? The appointment of appellate judges who will continue to make, rather than interpret, laws and amend the Constitution by judicial fiat? Selective suppression of free speech? Imposition of the Fairness Doctrine to eradicate conservative talk radio and restore monolithic media dominance? The surrendering of American sovereignty to the United Nations or to other foreign bodies? Deferential reverence to the false gods of global warming with the guaranteed destruction of capitalism that would ensue? The refusal, for political reasons, to address our entitlement crisis that will otherwise inevitably bankrupt this nation?

With the stakes as high as they’ve ever been in the upcoming election, we have a duty to fight — yes, I said fight – for those policies and principles we are convinced are crucial for the best interests of this nation.

We can, if we choose to, delude ourselves into being swept up in false promises of hope and change and in the idolatry of today’s politically correct but grossly distorted notions of tolerance and bipartisanship. But if we do, we ignore at our peril the inescapable reality that we are engaged in a war of worldviews whose outcome will determine the future of this nation.

We should all be civil toward one another, including our political opponents, but we must never forget that getting along and feel-goodism should not be purchased at the expense of our liberties, our security and our culture. Be extremely wary of and vigilant against those who promise or imply otherwise.

Popularity: 17% [?]

When it comes to national security, Democrats are serving up softballs for John McCain. But he better be getting a lot of batting practice so he can knock it out of the park once the general-election campaign gets in full swing.

Democrats downplay the scope of terrorist threat and constantly obstruct our efforts to pursue this “overblown” enemy.

Having run out of all other excuses to oppose extending the bill that permits warrantless monitoring of international conversations between terrorists, they have settled on the specious argument that the private telecoms don’t deserve immunity from frivolous lawsuits commandeered by the trial bar.

It doesn’t matter to Democrats that these companies patriotically responded to the president’s call to assist with surveillance and relied on his assurances that they would be acting legally. What matters is that trial lawyers are among the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party — the party that supposedly eschews special-interest politics. The trial bar must be paid back whenever possible, even if it means telecoms will not cooperate in the future for fear of stepping into a malicious litigation trap.

Democrats say they’d allow the legislation to pass if Republicans would agree to sever the immunity provisions from the bill for later treatment. But everyone knows — except voters the Democrats are trying to dupe — that if you carve out that portion of the bill, Democrats will try to prevent it from ever coming to the floor.

Democrats duplicitously claim the GOP just wants to protect another group of evil corporations. But can they point to one real victim who the telecoms have abused while assisting the government in saving American lives? Can they point to a real motive the telecoms would have in harming such nonexistent victims? Enough is enough.

Also, Democrats passed a bill — which the president then vetoed — to prohibit the United States from performing any interrogation techniques not described in the Army Field Manual. National Review Online’s editors praised the president’s veto, pointing to the recklessness of this bill because it would telegraph to the enemy all available interrogation techniques and enable the enemy to train to resist those methods.

Even on Iraq, Democrats have a losing position if Republicans will just make their case. First, McCain can point to the success of the surge and his early support for it. If Obama and other Democrats had gotten their way, we might be well on our way to losing in Iraq.

But Democrats say we should never have attacked and that al-Qaeda wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t. We should have finished the job in Afghanistan, they say, because that’s where al-Qaeda trained to attack us on 9/11.

But has anyone ever challenged the Democrats on the absurdity of this position? If we were justified in attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan because they trained there to attack us, then why aren’t we justified in fighting them in Iraq since they are attacking us there?

Besides, we have the right and duty to attack them wherever they are. They are the enemy.

A strong case has been made that al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq preceded our attack. But irrespective of that, they attacked us and provoked sectarian violence there in furtherance of their own evil purposes.

Whether we had a right to attack Iraq, which we did for a multitude of reasons already exhaustively discussed, is a completely separate question from whether we have a right to fight al-Qaeda there.

The Democrats’ untenable position is that since we didn’t find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, we have no business fighting or defeating al-Qaeda there. They conveniently ignore that we had removed Saddam Hussein from power and were trying to establish order when al-Qaeda joined with Iraqi insurgents to prevent that from occurring. Democrats need to get this through their heads: Al-Qaeda is the aggressor in Iraq, not the United States.

Democrats pretend that if we will just withdraw from Iraq, al-Qaeda will forgive us and leave us alone. They will never leave us alone as long as they are capable of fighting us, no matter when we leave. But if we do leave before completing the job, al-Qaeda will be emboldened and become an even fiercer enemy, which will increase Middle East instability and invite further attacks against our interests abroad and at home.

I don’t care how charismatic, nice, eloquent or brilliant Obama is. If he were to pursue precipitous withdrawal and the other terrorist-friendly policies he and Democrats support, our national security will be exponentially imperiled. It’s time for Republicans to quit being on the defensive on these issues and take this fight to the public.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The Democratic Party cashiered Howard Dean and replaced him, fairly early in the process, with the deeply flawed John Kerry when it became apparent that Dean was unelectable. But what if party honchos, much later in the game, conclude Obama is unelectable? Look out.

Right now, it’s premature to conclude that Obama’s momentum has been permanently quashed. He won 12 states in a row before losing three out of four Tuesday night. But for a candidate whose main attraction has been his superhuman aura to lose those major contests should be cause for concern.

In terms of delegate count, Obama still holds a commanding lead. According to ABC, if Clinton were to win all 12 remaining states with 55 percent of the vote, she would end up with 1,793 delegates, short of Obama’s 1,841. If that scenario were reversed, Obama would end up with 1,902 and Clinton 1,732, which would leave Obama still short of the 2,024 delegates required.

Assuming no changes in the super-delegates from their present leanings, Obama would need to win 77 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to hit 2,024, which is extremely unlikely given the Democratic rules of proportional delegate allocation. But Clinton would need a staggering 94 percent.

Obviously, neither will win without movement of the super-delegates, and Obama will likely end up ahead in pledged delegates and overall popular vote even if Hillary continues to do well, including in the possible do-over contests in Michigan and Florida.

If Tuesday turns out to have been just a temporary speed bump for the Obama juggernaut and he regains his momentum, Clinton will have no credibility in urging Obama-prone super-delegates to defect.

But if things break Hillary’s way from this point forward, the situation will get much dicier. Hillary might not have closed the gap, but she will have severely damaged Obama and his mystique of electability.

If at that point the party powers believe Obama has a glass jaw or doesn’t have the staying power under fire to endure a contentious battle against John McCain, they’ll face a dilemma of enormous proportions. Short of Obama voluntarily bowing out, how will they avoid an internecine bloodbath if the super-delegates break toward Hillary and give her the nomination even though she trails both in popular vote and pledged delegates?

The inevitable elephant in this room full of donkeys will be the racial component. The Democratic Party, which depends on some 90 percent of the African American vote, can scarcely afford such a scandal.

Of course, such concerns never seem to deter the Clintons. It’s all about winning, no matter what the cost. Obama better concentrate on putting her away convincingly between now and then, which will be easier said than done when you consider the possible reasons for Hillary’s turnaround.

It could simply be that she was always supposed to win those states and she managed to hang on. But even there, she couldn’t have done so without holding back the Obama tidal wave, which she did.

At any rate, it seems she either convinced voters that Obama really doesn’t yet have the experience or gravitas to handle that 3 a.m. crisis call or that he actually does have weaknesses (NAFTA-gate, Rezko, etc.) and thus isn’t a god after all. And don’t forget the urging of a certain shrewd talk-show host that Republican voters cross over for Hillary.

Since exit polls show that voters who decided in the last three days went Hillary’s way by an almost 2-to-1 margin, it’s safe to infer that whatever other factors were at play, Hillary’s negative campaigning worked. Thus we can be sure of more of the same in the coming weeks, which will present Obama with a dilemma of his own.

How will he be able to fend off Hillary’s attacks without going negative himself? And if he gets down in the dirt with her, does he not betray his promise to remain above the fray as a uniter? Gods don’t get dirty.

Meanwhile, if Hillary also continues to play up the theme that Obama isn’t ready for that 3 a.m. call, and Barack fights back on that turf, they will both be playing into John McCain’s hands because the 3 a.m. call has to do with national security.

All of which is to say that though most polls show either Obama or Hillary defeating McCain in November, Democrats have their hands full, and they are guaranteed to get fuller. This should be fun to watch.

Popularity: 16% [?]

To me, the greatest irony of the Democratic primary contest is that while Hillary Clinton has tried desperately to make herself more human, Barack Obama has basked in the efforts of others to make him less so.

Eventually, Obama will be brought back down to earth from his pseudo-divine perch. When that happens, there will be plenty of areas of vulnerability for his opponent — presumably, John McCain — to exploit.

Unhappily for Hillary, she hasn’t been able to seize on Obama’s weaknesses. This is because many of them she shares, and the others she can’t politically afford to draw attention to. Obama’s extreme liberalism across the board makes him ripe for attack from the right, or even the center, but Hillary is hardly in a position to make a credible case against him there, except possibly on national security and Iraq.

With cool, premeditated calculation, Hillary methodically positioned herself as plausibly hawkish enough for the general election. How was she supposed to know she would face such a formidable challenger in the primaries?

Her response hasn’t helped. Instead of defending her position on Iraq and presenting Obama as irresponsibly dovish on foreign policy, she has distorted her vote on the Iraq War resolution to con the base into believing she was with them all along.

In trying to put that square peg into a round hole, she has succeeded only in making herself look John Kerryish, which is to say wishy-washy, unintelligible, deceitful and downright ridiculous on the issue. The net effect is that she has earned further contempt from the base and made no inroads with anyone else. Meanwhile, Barack has watched this delicious turn of events unfold while polishing his halo.

Belatedly, Hillary is now running ads suggesting Obama is unprepared and ill-suited to receive that 3 a.m. national security crisis call in the White House. But not having previously demonstrated Obama’s lack of national security bona fides nor her own possession of them, her attack ads are likely falling flat. It would be like LBJ running the TV ad of the little girl picking daisies only to be incinerated in a nuclear attack without first having established — albeit fraudulently — that Barry Goldwater was a trigger-happy, sadistic warmonger. (And liberals talk about the politics of fear!)

But looking ahead, Obama will not escape scrutiny from John McCain in the general election, despite McCain’s own liberal proclivities on too many issues. If I’m wrong and McCain treats Obama with kid gloves, he’ll go the way of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, who seemed to have more compliments than criticisms for Clinton and Gore in 1996.

You’d think Obama would be getting nervous about the artificial pedestal he’s been placed on. As an object of idolatry with an aura of inerrancy, there is not much margin for error. But Barack Obama, like the rest of us, is mortal.

Even for McCain, Obama’s liberalism is a target-rich environment. It’s not only woefully out of sync with the center-right electorate, but it also belies his claim that he’s an exemplar of bipartisanship. Talk is dirt cheap, though Hillary didn’t succeed in exposing Obama’s sophistry on this claim, either.

McCain would be well advised to make Obama own his socialistic affinities — on taxes, spending, health care and more. He should also show how radical Obama is on abortion, where he’s out of step with the majority of Americans.

And no matter how uncomfortable it may be to broach the issue, McCain should make Obama answer for membership in a church whose long-time pastor’s magazine lauded the overtly racist and anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan as “truly epitomiz[ing] greatness.” People are missing the boat in thinking Obama’s vulnerability here can be sidestepped with a semantic dodge over whether to denounce or reject Farrakhan’s support.

The real question is why Obama would choose to be in a church whose leading spiritual authority holds such repugnant views. This is his pastor we’re talking about, holding forth on a very important matter, not some tangential acquaintance discussing some inconsequential topic. On a related matter, Obama has explaining to do as well on his tepid support for Israel.

But where Obama is most vulnerable is on national security and Iraq, the very areas where McCain has the most credibility. Though Obama has received a pass from Hillary and the press on these subjects, and though he boasts prescience and wisdom on them, his record and statements make him a sitting duck.

Concerning Iraq, many of his predictions were wrong, his factual assertions false, his assessment and analysis erroneous, and his prescriptions reckless. If McCain is smart, before November he’ll have Obama in that infamous tank with Michael Dukakis, wearing that same silly-looking helmet.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Memo to former mainstream-media darling John McCain: I hope you are paying close attention to the MSM’s palpable favoritism toward Barack Obama because we haven’t seen anything yet. You think The New York Times was an exception? Just wait. I urge you to review the tape of the Ohio Democratic debate from Tuesday night.

In one sequence after another, Brian Williams and Tim Russert took proactive roles in the debate, playing “gotcha” mostly against Hillary Clinton instead of facilitating a debate between the candidates.

“So what?” MSM apologists might say. “This isn’t a high school debate where we are trying to pick the best debater. This isn’t about fairness to the candidates. The purpose is to elicit the most information from the candidates and test them under fire so the voters can make the most informed decision.”

Yes, but when the moderators team up against one of the two candidates, the dynamics change. It’s hard not to be defensive when everyone in the room who’s talking is against you. That’s difficult to overcome psychologically.

It reminds me of certain jury trials I’ve witnessed where the trial judge was noticeably prejudiced against one side and projected his feelings — in body language, words and attitude — to the jury. The less-favored litigant had little chance. And it was outrageously improper.

Even if you think it’s acceptable for the moderators to abandon neutrality, surely you don’t think it’s OK for them to start debating the candidates themselves. Are they running for something? The Smartest Guys in the Room Award, perhaps?

To be fair, Hillary brought some of this on herself by showcasing her most annoying side during the initial laborious exchange on health care, when she just wouldn’t yield the floor. “I have to respond to that because this is not just any issue. … Brian, wait a minute. I’ve got — this is too important.”

If Williams’ and Russert’s taking sides after that was just payback for Hillary’s refusal to play by the rules, it would be one thing. But they had most of their questions planned in advance.

For example, Russert, with his tough-interviewer’s hat on instead of his moderator beanie, pressed Hillary about her “economic blueprint in Wisconsin,” where she pledged to create five million jobs over 10 years. He essentially asked her if she was blowing smoke considering that she had breached her 2000 campaign promise to create 200,000 jobs for upstate New York, where there was a net loss of 30,000 jobs.

Isn’t that something Obama should be bringing out rather than Russert? It seemed to me this kind of thing went on all night, with far more of it being directed at Hillary than Barack.

Obama outclassed Clinton in form and presentation by a country mile. And while Hillary mostly did well on substance, where she utterly blew it was when Brian Williams invited her reaction to a video clip of her lampooning Obama’s unity theme. In the clip she says, “The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

(When I heard Hillary sat that, I fantasized for a moment that she might be channeling me since I had advised her in a previous column to challenge Obama on his ludicrous promises to bring unity while implementing the most liberal agenda in recent memory.)

To me, this is the one place Obama is vulnerable to a Hillary attack: his lack of realism, bordering on outright deception. She certainly has no credibility to attack his robust liberalism.

But instead of going after him on this, Hillary shrunk away from it as if she had been caught on tape in a dirty trick. Hillary said, “Well, I was having a little fun. You know, it’s hard to find time to have fun on the campaign trail, but occasionally you can sneak that in.”

Bull. She wasn’t trying to have fun. She was showcasing the absurdity of Obama’s feigned messiahship and hitting him in the jugular. But under pressure and outside the comfort zone of her own campaign rally, she didn’t have the courage to follow through and call him on his utopian nonsense.

I’m not sure it would have done any good, but the cards were stacked against her anyway, so what did she have to lose?

This is all ominous for John McCain because there is a common contributing factor in his and Hillary’s previous electoral successes: They were both greatly aided by favorable MSM treatment. But that was then.

The unspoken message from the MSM to Hillary and McCain, to borrow from Bill Cosby, is: “We brought you into this world, and we can take you out.”

Popularity: 16% [?]

If you want to better understand the intramural battles among conservatives today, there’s no better way than to review the historical development of the modern conservative movement. Al Regnery’s new book, “Upstream, the Ascendance of American Conservatism,” does just that.

It covers the development of modern conservatism from its inception to the present. Though I am too young to have firsthand knowledge of the earlier phases, I’ve read plenty about them. No book summarizes this entire history better than this one, bringing to life all the significant players and their causes.

But it’s not just for political junkies, though they’ll find it fascinating as well. It is for everyone who seeks a better understanding of today’s political issues because it provides essential historical context and perspective.

It is a book about great, enduring ideas and the great men and women who believed strongly enough in those ideas to dedicate their lives to advancing them against very difficult odds.

Many conservatives today tend to think we are experiencing something unique in our struggles against liberal Democrats and against moderate Republicans who want to take control of the party and dilute the conservative philosophy. They’re quite wrong.

Though we pay lip service to the axiom that history repeats itself, it is still humbling to realize that most of the debates between liberals and conservatives, as well as the internecine conflicts now taking place within conservatism, mirror those that occurred decades earlier.

It’s hardly surprising that in these grand struggles we see history repeating itself since the differences between liberals and conservatives arise from their opposing worldviews. Liberals tend to believe that man is basically good and that society is to blame for his infractions. It follows that they believe that an active, expansive government can eradicate most of those problems. Most conservatives don’t automatically view man as a victim but as afflicted with original sin.

Though Regnery wrote this book before much of the GOP primary season unfolded, it’s uncanny how timely it is given the widespread dissatisfaction among conservatives with the GOP primary results this year.

It’s as if he planned to console disgruntled conservatives by showing that we’ve been through this before and survived. And the stakes were every bit as high then, with the specter of global communism and numerous domestic threats to liberty, including FDR’s New Deal and court- packing schemes and LBJ’s Great Society.

“Upstream” reminds us that it wasn’t that long ago when there wasn’t even a conservative movement as such, only a handful of intellectuals, bereft of organization or coordination, courageously writing books that expressed ideas many Americans believed but which were not being promoted by any political party or movement.

Regnery describes the seminal contributions of FriedrichHayek, Ludwig von Mises, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley Jr. and others. But it wasn’t until the publication of Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” that conservatism gained a substantial degree of intellectual respectability. This foundational work not only explained conservatism as a cohesive philosophy, it also provided an identity to what had been just “an amorphous and scattered opposition” to liberalism.

During those years, liberalism was dominant in our institutions and culture, and conservatism, for decades, had to swim upstream. But the obstacles didn’t deter the conservative giants, who realized that preserving the United States as the greatest and freest nation in history hung in the balance.

From the early stages, there were basically three types of conservatives, distinguished by their different emphases: the anticommunists, the libertarians and the traditionalists, each of which has a modern counterpart represented by the so-called three stools of conservatism: national defense, a free- market economy and social conservatism. Like today, there was much overlap among the groups.

Regnery describes the rivalries among these sometimes competing groups and their eventual “fusion” into a unified movement.

There are many other aspects of book I found particularly relevant to what we’re witnessing today. For example, Regnery tells us that early conservatism was not a top-down enterprise. Interestingly, we’re discussing that very subject today, with commentators insisting that conservatism is presently a top-down movement led by a small number of influential radio talk-show hosts.

Others of us have registered our strong dissent. “Upstream” reinforces our notion that conservatism, by its nature, springs from the grassroots. Talk-show hosts aren’t dictating ideas to brain-dead sponges but affirming and validating deeply held beliefs they already share.

Similarly, those who’ve expressed concern over John McCain’s rise, despite his many liberal apostasies, can profit greatly by reading Regnery’s retelling of the battles between Goldwater conservatives and Nixon supporters. Those who think conservatives are treading new ground in threatening to sit out this election would learn that these same arguments occurred then with equal passion from both sides.

I’ve just covered a fraction of it, but this book offers a thorough history of the movement, with trenchant and admirably objective analysis. Those with the slightest interest in this subject will have difficulty putting it down.

Popularity: 15% [?]