Times of London:

Obama: is America ready for this dangerous leftwinger?

Asks the Times of London in the above headline. I heard about this one on the car radio but just got the chance to get to the source. The full extent of the ultra Left connection with Obama has not been examined by any American news organization (including the vastly overrated FOX) so we leave it to the Brits to do it for us. The Times of London has a major piece today which starts by detailing the more recent accomplishments of this country ending with the interception of the wayward satellite several days ago. So after mentioning the fact that those of us with less than an advanced degree feel very proud of our country, the Times piece follows up, "but not Michelle Obama.

"Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack's campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.

This, even by the astonishingly self-absorbed standards of politicians and their families, is a remarkably narrow view of what makes a country great. And though she later half-heartedly tried to retract the remark it was a statement pregnant with meaning for the presidential election campaign.

The piece explains that Mrs. Obama could have put things in proper context but did not. Her apology was empty but at the same time very instructive.

It was instructive for two reasons. First, it reinforced the growing sense of unease that even some Obama supporters have felt about the increasingly messianic nature of the candidate's campaign. There's always been a Second Coming quality about Mr Obama's rhetoric. The claim that his electoral successes in places like Nebraska and Wisconsin might transcend all that America has achieved in its history can only add to that worry.

Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is.

Exactly. This opinion does not exist in a vacuum. It has much family support and the support of many friends and associates plus a huge portion of the extreme left in this country, which is dominating the Democratic Party.

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

The fact that he wants to ship over 800bln dollars to the UN to take us to the World Court, among other things. This group of Americans want us to be more like France. France, for Christ sakes? A country with a stifling bureaucracy, one where you literally cannot do work on your house without government permission and guaranteeing to pay the highest wages possible and you cannot fire the workers once the job has started. The piece continues with the shortcomings of Hillary's campaign and then focusing on what Obama really wants to do (and like every dictator who ever lived, he HAS written everything down). His Castro length speech in Wisconsin the other night is evaluated thus:

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.

Though he talks with great eloquence about the future, he sounds for all the world like one of the long line of Democrats from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis, who became history by espousing policies and striking a rhetorical pose that was well out of the mainstream of American politics.

America is certainly moving left in the post-George Bush era. The long period of conservative ascendancy is clearly over, buried by a Republican Party of recent years that has preached intolerance and practised incompetence. That a new era in American politics is beginning is not in doubt. But are Americans really ready to leap all the way across in one go to embrace a European-style Left?

It takes a real look from somebody across the pond to really see us. Now what are we going to do about it?