Obama has a week to go in Pa. to repair his “bitterness” damage, which has hurt him badly there. But it will take more than waiting for Hillary to be her usual off-putting self:

If voters are going to forgive and forget they won’t do it because Hillary is being Hillary. Obama’s got to make nice with them. But he seems unwilling to do that because, at bottom, he really doesn’t think he did anything wrong. This is becoming standard operating procedure for Obama. (Associate with a racist; lecture the country on racial unity. Insult a state; lecture us about the mindset of rural Americans.) Lots of lectures and changing the subject; never a full-throated apology.

Look, if you’re smarter than everyone else, there’s no use hiding it. I said he was cocky.

Later: Good point here by Pat Hickey, as in Chi Daily Observer, in re: small-towns business:

Barack Obama was not only speaking to ‘small-town’ America, but the small towns that exist in Big Cities as well – we call them neighborhoods: Obama was talking to Dorchester, Queens, Staten Island, Pilsen, Canaryville, Brighton Park, Edison Park, Norwood Park, Evergreen Park, Morgan Park – hell every Park. Well, maybe not Hyde Park.

He has some of those big-city neighborhoods wrong, however. two of those Parks don’t belong, being separate municipalities. We call them suburbs.

Yet later: Oops, only one is a ‘burb, my South Sider wife’s home town of Evergreen Park.

In the middle of his “The McGovernization of Obama” at National Review’s Corner, Victor Davis Hanson raises a very interesting issue, whether the Obamas have much experience not just in governing, but also in politicking:

“They” [for the small towns]. This evokes Michelle’s similar “they” (as in the “they” who raised the proverbial bar on the Obamas), and likewise suggests both hostility and a certain us/they contempt for a slice of America that the Obamas apparently know very little about—but for the first time in their lives are rapidly discovering.

They don’t know enough about the country, that is, which fits with the overriding argument that they don’t know enough about anything.  This speaks to the narrow gauge of black experience.  They see less of the country, in part because of ingrained habits of staying with their own, in part because what they see, they see with black eyes. 

Whites see with white eyes, but its their culture for the most part, allowing for incursions of blackness, especially in entertainment and athletics; and they get around more.  Small towns, for instance, have darn few native Chicagoans; but white native Chicagoans visit them quite a bit.

As for Hanson’s main point, it’s a killer: O. talks the talk of the latte liberal, in this case to a quintessential example of it, the San Franciscan, and will walk the walk if elected.  And voters will catch on, and he will win two states. 

“I still believe that by August, Obama, the half-term rookie Senator, will have become the second George McGovern,” says H., before quoting O. about small towns in Pennsylvania.  He explicates the San Francisco spiel, with much attention to Jeremiah Wright, then lays it on heavy:

Let me get this straight: Obama goes to the Bay Area to an affluent liberal enclave to give a condescending take on the supposed poor fools that he is currently trying to court. This is not just hypocritical, but abjectly stupid. All of Pennsylvania surely is asking today what is so hip and sophisticated about the Trinity Church and Rev. Wright?

This is “the essential Obama,” he says,

a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright.

This dichotomy is also crucial.  O. went for his roots with a wild left-wing flair and found it in a black church.  He was already deracinated (made rootless) by his boyhood experience of serial abandonment by parents, and was ripe for ideological harvest by tenured radicals.  (Same for the wife as regards campus experience, we may presume.)

There he is, deep in the heart of two electoral contingents, snooty liberals and the leftist black church, neither of which win elections.

Here’s quite a rundown on Obama as pathological:

Leftist politicos tend to be chronic overachievers because they have suffered significant loss—often the result of the disconnect with their earthly fathers [says Mark Alexander at Patriot Post]. They subscribe to rigid doctrines and “nanny state” regimes to satiate their persistent insecurity, the result of low self-esteem and arrested emotional development associated, predominantly, with fatherless households or critically dysfunctional families in which they were not adequately affirmed.

Obama manifests all of these characteristics, and clinically speaking, there is a diagnosis. Leftists are pathological case studies of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the standard reference used for psychiatric evaluation.

He is a cocky fellow, at that.  Because his Muslim daddy flew the coop when he was two to return to his tribal wife and their kids?

Later:

Reader B. objects:

BO will make a fine president.. his family problems–which probably caused him some pain and sorrow–will make him a humble and compassionate leader.

But here’s another apt comment by this fellow Alexander:

Obama is apparently undeterred [by arguments vs. raising capital gains tax]. His goal is not a robust and free economy that rewards work, risk, and ingenuity; it is instead a socialist redistribution of money from those who make it to those who do not.

The arguments?

Every time the capital gains tax rate has increased in the last 40 years, the investment market has suffered. When the capital gains rate has been lowered, investment has increased and tax revenues have increased.

And this:

Moreover, as is true of most tax increases, the middle class gets hurt the most. Many of the people who pay capital gains taxes are small-business owners, small investors or retirees. According to the IRS, 79 percent of those who paid such taxes had incomes under $100,000; 47 percent had incomes less than $50,000.

Dems are out of sync with the nation:

If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.

It’s their “convoluted system of proportional distribution of delegates that varies from state to state and that obtains in neither congressional nor presidential elections,” says Princeton prof Sean Wilentz at Salon.

It is this eccentric system that has given Obama his lead in the delegate count.

Hillary C. would be “comfortably in front” were it otherwise, “1,743 pledged delegates to Obama’s 1,257.”

Instead, she has about 1,242 pledged delegates to Obama’s 1,413, per CNN estimates.

Howard Dean et al. goofed mightily in handling Florida and Michigan, yes, but Obama has resisting repairing the goof, thwarting small-d democratic procedures, argues Wilentz.

For instance, O. arbitrarily wants half the Michigan and Florida votes, a ploy that Wilentz calls “a bold power grab, worthy of the Chicago machine organizations that claimed the votes of the recently deceased, their names gleaned from the voting rolls.

(This is truly a belt below the belt, involving as it does sharp criticism of how Chicago Dems do things, not to mention O’s connection at the hip with them.  How dare he?)

Wilentz has more, in near-numbing detail, and concludes that the new, fresh-faced kid on the electoral block is using “one of the oldest ploys in the playbook of American politics.”

You mean he’s just another?  Perish the thought.

Here is Tom Roeser on Obama’s “radicality”:

[H]e favors higher income taxes, higher Social Security taxes and higher corporate taxes. . . .  [He] supports enormous hikes in domestic spending, far greater regulation by government of the economy: …a massive increase of government control over health care. Strong opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement: in fact he is a protectionist.

He stands supportive of infanticide by having killed the “Born Alive” bill in the Illinois legislature, meaning that a baby born alive from a botched abortion has to struggle and suffer without care because Obama fears that to render mercy to the baby would endanger abortion rights. He is just about the only U.S. Senator to take that stand because a similar [”Born Alive’] bill passed with the support of Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein before Obama came to the Senate after having killed a version in Springfield.

He opposed the Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban on partial birth abortion. He wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted against John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. In his home state he supported banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. He supports giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. He voted to deny legal immunity to telecom companies that have cooperated with the government in warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists. He wants habeas corpus rights to detained suspected terrorists and security risks at Guantanamo. He wants a full-scale withdrawal from Iraq. He has vowed in his first presidential year to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea with no preconditions.

Seemingly everything he does stamps him as a far-left-wing radical. His insensitivity, his alienation from traditional moral values is exhibited in his ultra-crass secularistic statement the other day. He was referring to his daughters when he casually said in Johnstown, Pennsylvania: .

“If people make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

Roeser likens him to George McGovern.  That’s inescapable.  But ye gods, how about Mike Gravel while we’re at it?

Big, big electability factor here, splendidly laid out.  He’s on the way to being known as “Mad Barack.” 

But great smile.  I’ll give him that.