A white conservative's take

As Obama takes the oath, I have a few comments.

The entire campaign/transition feels like spam to me…unwanted ads with deceptive claims. It’s got the feel of a rigged talent contest. I can’t say that McCain was one bit more forthright. Both candidacies were about glitz and sound bites and promises.

I suppose it is a byproduct of the caliber of the electorate. You can’t win by presenting America with a coherent business plan. Doing so will gain you a few votes but lose the interest of the masses.

What appeals to us is the old sales pitch. Promises, lots of color and music, and celebrity endorsements. And that is exactly what we got.

Even the Obama product is a deception. He’s bi-racial at best and perhaps more Arab-American than African-American.

But as one blogger noted, “Though Obama's racial/ethnic background is in and of itself irrelevant, it says a great deal about the man when viewed in the context of what he wants people to believe about him. Since entering politics, Obama has strenuously worked to identify himself as an "African American," i.e. as a black man. On what basis, though, does he establish this identity? … Culturally, he is white, having been raised in a white family and having known neither his father nor his father's cultural traditions. Socio-economically, he is among the wealthiest and most privileged 0.1% of the U.S. population. Educationally, he's attended -- courtesy of affirmative action -- the finest institutions of higher learning in the country. Obama doesn't even share with the vast majority of American blacks the "legacy of racism." He was born in the post civil rights era and his father was a foreigner, so neither he nor any of his ancestors suffered any racial discrimination. … Obama, then, has shared not at all in any aspect of the "black experience" as it has come to be defined in America, yet by all accounts he's poised to be the "first black President of the United States." How has this come to pass?

“Obama, it must be understood, specifically chose to style himself an "African American" as a matter of calculation, as his fastest, surest path to political advancement. That's why he went to Chicago. That's why he joined that racist church. That's why he chose to represent poor black constituencies. Being accepted into the urban black community, he became a big (political) fish in a small pond, a formidable candidate for elective offices far beyond his meager experience. Years later, this man who has accomplished and who has been denied absolutely nothing in life has perfected this phony image, having mastered the rhetoric of personal victimhood. Obama would never wear the American flag on his lapel, but he wears his adopted black identity on his sleeve every day. It serves as his ticket to entitlement as well as his shield against all criticism.”

Richard Cohen expressed concern over Obama’s embellished back story in March of 2007. But Barack’s story, laced with accounts of discrimination leveled against him, was never seriously questioned for accuracy.

It is all part-and-parcel of the Obama package, the aura, the mystique…and voters bought the story. They overlooked reality and bought the message.

But even now he talks about racism as a problem we need to deal with.

From Philadelphia in March of 2008:
“But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”

“The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”

And again from Philly, where he began his Triumphal Entry into the Unholy City on January 17, 2009:
“And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that our founders displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives - from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry - an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

What concerns me is that he ties it all to health care, housing and jobs.

Racism in health care? Well, we have Medicaid for the poor and free Emergency Room care for the poorest of the poor. To be sure, some hospitals in the ghettos have closed their doors as a result of too much charity care. But how much more can we afford to do as a nation?

Here is the breakdown of in-patient revenue for Sherman Hospital in Elgin in 2007:
Medicare 37.1%
Medicaid 18.4%
Private Insurance 40.4%
Private Pay 4.1%
Charity Care amount $1,564,086

And Provena St Joseph’s:
Medicare 57.5%
Medicaid 13.1%
Private Insurance 26.8%
Private Pay 2.7%
Charity Care amount $1,994,456

And Rush/Copley in Aurora:
Medicare 26.9%
Medicaid 19.6%
Other Public 18.4%
Private Insurance 26.6%
Private Pay 8.6%
Charity Care amount $2,957,000

Source: http://www.idph.state.il.us/about/hfpb/pdf/2007%20Hospital%20Profile1.pdf

So, we can see that the government is already a major player in health care in the United States. Just exactly where will this fine-sounding rhetoric lead?

As for housing, one need look no further than the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac to see that government programs to put the poor and marginalized in homes has not only resulted in foreclosure but sent the credit market in general into chaos.

Jobs for minorities and unskilled? Not one federal candidate in Illinois was willing to address the FACT that illegal aliens and high levels of third world immigrants have had a direct negative impact on wages, benefits, safety, and availability of jobs for American citizens. And the hardest hit are those same African-Americans who voted for Obama!

I fear that Obama’s plans for equality will play well in the streets of the United States but will, in practice, lead to more money spent and more of the same results.

Obama came close to revealing himself during his whistle-stop grand entrance when he said that “our politics had grown too small for the scale of the challenges we faced.”

My greatest fear is that what he means is that our government has “grown too small for the scale of the challenges we faced.” Our only recourse then is to employ more people to work for the government (which is part of his back-to-work strategy) and print more worthless money. Frankly, that solution doesn’t appeal to me.