Dan McLaughlin (who blogs as the Baseball Crank) has written what may well be the seminal essay to date on Barack Obama’s experience, or what little there is of it. By all means take a few minutes and read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

He's never run anything at all, not even a small law practice like John Edwards. Besides his campaign, probably the biggest thing he's ever run was the Harvard Law Review.

He has nothing resembling national security experience or even particularly sustained advocacy on the issue before announcing his candidacy in 2007. The man has apparently hardly even traveled to Europe, to pick one example.

He is running in a contested election outside the insular world of Chicago politics for the first time and has never had any sort of responsibility for political leadership.

He's never served in the military and seems to have scarcely any experience even knowing people who served in the military.

His private-sector business background is negligible.

Are any of these things disqualifying from the Presidency? No. But electing a man who is so seriously lacking in all of them is indeed unprecedented. And that is and should be a central issue in this campaign.

I would add to the Crank’s list a related point that I blogged on this morning: It often doesn’t seem like Obama has even seriously considered serious presidential-level matters as an outside observer the way most readers of this magazine have. The lack of literacy he has displayed on issues such as the capital gains tax and FDR’s shuttle diplomacy with Hitler are jarring coming from such an intelligent guy.

But hey – he has great judgment, right? And that should compensate for everything else.

Posted by Dean Barnett at 04:49 PM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article

By now you've seen the footage of Barack Obama ruing the fact that he hasn't been able to visit all 57 states in this great union of ours. If you haven't, scroll down a bit and read Goldfarb's post on the matter. I'll wait.

This faux pas is beyond weird; I know the guy is tired, but “How many states are there in America?” is the kind of question they ask you at the hospital after you've had a seizure to see if your brain is still working. I speak from personal experience on this matter, by the way. When I had a random seizure in 1996, the guy at the emergency room asked me how many states there were and then who was president. I responded with a ten minute rant on Whitewater - he urgently ordered up more tests.

But I digress. What I'm trying to say is there is no way Obama could have been so disoriented as to have even momentarily forgotten that we have but 50 states. Besides, there was something about Obama’s additions to the Union that rang a bell. Then I remembered - Grand Strategist (and likely Obama supporter) Thomas P.M. Barnett in his seminal work “The Pentagon’s New Map” urged America to add several states to the nation, perhaps as many as a dozen.

Has Obama absorbed such expansionist designs to such an extent that he's already counting his proverbial new chickens before they’ve hatched? Is he planning on adopting Canada? Perhaps he only has his eyes on the cool parts of Canada like Montreal and Toronto, and will let the remainder of our northern neighbor peacefully tend to its hockey playing and curling. And what of our neighbors to the south? Will we find ourselves in an Obama administration forced to refer to Haiti as Really South Dakota?

Regardless, I'm shocked that Obama apparently believes in a hyper-muscular 21st century version of Manifest Destiny. Truly, I didn't see that one coming.

Posted by Dean Barnett at 06:43 PM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article

Deftly pivoting on a dime, the Obama campaign has emphatically declared the irrelevancy of the Hamas endorsement. But it was not ever thus. Let's enter the way-back machine and journey all the way back to April when Hamas let its preference be known:

When asked about the endorsement, Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, was flattered that Hamas compared his candidate to JFK: “We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it's flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.”

And yet suddenly it's dirty pool to mention this endorsement, one that initially flattered the Obama campaign? Actually, Axelrod's initial reaction highlights something I pointed out a couple of weeks ago – Obama loves to be loved, and that leads him to some strange places. We truly have entered some odd ground when a presidential campaign welcomes kind words from an Iranian terror proxy.

The affair hints at the biggest concern many serious voters will have about an Obama campaign. Too often when it comes to foreign affairs, Obama’s instincts head in precisely the wrong direction. In his stirring speech on Tuesday, Obama chided the Bush administration, saying, "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did."

Forget the fact that the implied FDR-Hitler summit never actually happened nor was it ever contemplated. Instead focus on FDR's truly vigorous pre-war diplomacy with Imperial Japan. This Obama proclaimed "wisdom" got us Pearl Harbor.

Talking to Iran in itself would not be bad. But assuming that we have a good faith partner in such a dialogue would be not only obtuse, but dangerous. So then the next question becomes, Would Obama make such an assumption and govern as a latter-day Jimmy Carter? Carter has never met a dictator or potentate that he didn't think he could move by his unique combination of sanctimony and self-regard. The potentates and dictators have also uniformly charmed the former president. Perhaps Obama would be cut from the same cloth.

Of course, Obama could assuage such concerns by making an announcement that an Obama administration, like a McCain administration, would be Hamas’ worst nightmare. Such a statement would also be a quaint tip of the hat to a bygone era when politics ended at the water's edge. But such vulgar saber-rattling would sound uncomfortably Bush-like. Besides, if Obama made such a statement, there would be people somewhere who wouldn't love him. Would he be willing to pay such a high price?

More importantly, is Obama capable of making such a hard-headed determination that America actually has enemies in this world who are intractable? If the answer to that is yes, we have seen no signs of it in the campaign to date. Obama seems very comfortable with the left wing notion that America's international disputes began with George W. Bush and thus will end with Bush's departure from office.

Very important exit question: Do you think our enemies are trembling at the prospect of dealing with the blood-and-iron troika of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama?

Posted by Dean Barnett at 09:36 AM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article

Jonathan Alter on Barack Obama:

"Opposition to him is not so much old-fashioned racism as fear of the 'other,' with the subtext not just our tortured racial history, but tangled views of class and patriotism."

Hmm. Maybe opposition to Obama is not so much any of the above as it is opposition to Obama's politics? Opposition to a policy program that calls for higher taxes to pay for bigger government, more regulation, and a less assertive foreign policy?

Nah, that couldn't be it.

Posted by Matthew Continetti at 04:15 PM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article

Despite Hillary Clinton's victory yesterday, the Democratic party is likely to nominate for president a candidate who lost primaries in large, key states like California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One reason this will happen is that Obama leads in states won and in pledged delegates. That is because he has won - in addition to primary victories in places like Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, and Maryland - almost every one of the caucuses held so far. And he has won many of them - dominated by antiwar grassroots activists hostile to Sen. Clinton - by significant margins. He won Alaska 75 percent to 25 percent, for example; Hawaii 76 percent to 24 percent; Nebraska 68 percent to 32 percent. He also won the Texas caucuses by 12 points. Those margins of victory translate into Obama's probably insurmountable lead among pledged delegates.

When the history of this primary campaign is written, therefore, a major theme will be the Clinton campaign's hubris. It was hubristic to believe that the backing of the party establishment and a sense of "inevitability" meant that grassroots organizing at the state level was unnecessary. It was hubristic to assume that the nomination fight would be over by February 5 - an assumption which led to confusion, the misallocation of resources in the post-Super Tuesday One states, and Obama's string of victories that month.

Thanks to demographics and Obama's past few bad weeks, Clinton now has a (slim) second chance. But all of this could have been avoided. If her campaign had treated the caucuses seriously and won a fair share of them, Hillary Clinton would now be the Democratic nominee for president.

(Thanks to WEEKLY STANDARD intern Robin E. Wright, who helped research this blog.)

Posted by Matthew Continetti at 03:39 PM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article

We've heard about the waffles. Now Illinois's Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, dogged by questions over his relationship with indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, recently deployed the trademark political dodge:

Blagojevich came out of his Capitol office after meeting with top legislators about a public works construction bill. He was accompanied by former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard. Hastert did the talking while Blagojevich remained silent.

While this was going on, a group of school kids touring the Capitol crowded around to catch a glimpse of the governor. Then the questioning turned to events in the federal corruption trial of Blagojevich fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, including statements by one witness that Blagojevich had offered him state business in exchange for raising money for a possible run at national office.

Blagojevich turned from reporters and looked at the kids.

“Kids, get over here when I need you,” Blagojevich said.

Continuing to ignore questions, Blagojevich lifted a security rope and invited the students into his office. “C’mon over. C’mon,” he said.

(HT: Political Diary.)

Posted by Matthew Continetti at 03:23 PM filed in: Obama | Permalink | E-mail the author | E-mail article