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.

Such a nice day on the campaign trail for Mary Mitchell, who was able to watch her favorite man in the whole wide world hit home runs.

LANCASTER, Pa. — Maybe people are just too polite to ask Sen. Barack Obama about the recent controversy involving his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

But after three town hall meetings in different parts of Pennsylvania, not one question about race or Wright has surfaced.

Obama drew some pretty sensitive questions at each town hall meeting.

Such as from “an extremely emotional older woman” who begged him to forsake choice.

“I appreciate your passion,” he said. “I don’t think anybody in this country is pro-abortion. I think everybody feels this is a painful, difficult decision. I trust that women are not making these decisions casually.”

Finely crafted, what?

Or the “particularly poignant question related to his criticism of the war in Iraq” from a soldier’s mother.

“The probem is not with the military. The problem is with the civilian leadership,” he said.

He had a “pat response” when asked about health care,

that he is going to have a big roundtable and invite everyone — the doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, employers and patient advocates, as well as representatives of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, to the table.

“Insurance and drug companies just won’t be able to buy every chair,” Obama said.

He’ll do it “on C-Span so the American people will know what is going on.”

And if you think drug research costs lots of money, think again.  Daddy-O knows better:

“Most of it is marketing costs for TV ads with people running through the fields looking happy, and nobody knows what the drug is for except for that one drug … you know what that drug is for,” Obama said, as the audience erupted into laughter.

Let’s hear it for Mister Glib!

Not only that, he’s a gentleman:

When a reporter asked about how he would challenge GOP rival John McCain, Obama stayed positive.

“The guy is a war hero. He was a POW for years and rendered tremendous service. I haven’t heard John McCain going around challenging other people’s patriotism,” he said.

Thanks, Mary.  It’s positive, all right.

And you’ve heard how this primary race will split the Dems?  Forget it:

Although both the Hillary Clinton and Obama campaigns have been accused of sniping that could rip apart the Democratic Party, Obama’s references to Clinton have been measured, if not outright mushy.

He consistently describes his opponent as “very intelligent, very capable,” while pointing out their different approach to politics.

That said, he still had to dodge a high, hard one:

One participant seemed just about to open the door to the recent low point of his campaign when she asked what Obama had learned from the campaign.

“A lot of the political news on a day-to-day basis is really not relevant to people’s lives,” he said. “It is sort of like chatter.”

After four days on the bus, I’d say he has a point.

I’ll bet you would, Mary.  It’s because you’re so darned perceptive.  And professional.  And concerned primarily with your readers at 50 cents a shot.  And hoping for a job at the Obama White House.  And . . . happy as a clam after your day in Pennsylvania.

I have to lift these two quotes verbatim from the WSJ Political Diary.  One is about the black mayor who supports Hillary:

 “It’s not a disconnect, it’s about freedom of choice. Black people have a right to be for whoever they want to be. As an emancipated black man, I don’t take orders” — Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, under fire for endorsing Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama, as quoted in National Journal magazine.

The other is wonderful on its face.  Get to the last line, where I had my Laugh of the Day:

“This is not how the story line was expected to go, dammit, and the impatience of the (mostly male) punditocracy is palpable…. Why doesn’t she just get out of the way? The media have sorted it all out so neatly: He is young, glamorous, charismatic and funny; he represents the future. She is older, strident, earnest and humorless; she is the past. He inspires; she hectors. Ugh!… What if women actually started to assert their needs and interests, particularly women who have aged out of babedom? What if they stopped slinking dutifully into invisibility and instead rose up to demand their fair share of our nation’s resources and rewards? No wonder so many guys seem to have the vapors these days” — Leslie Bennetts, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writing in the Los Angeles Times.

About Obama in Pennsylvania, where he’s expected to lose:

There simply aren’t enough blacks, young voters, and latte liberals to build a successful coalition for a Democratic candidate in a general election.

He’s of each group and speaks to their condition.

I’d like to be able to feel Andrew Greeley’s pain, but he hurts in so many places, I wouldn’t know where to start. 

It’s a darn shame Obama had to “defend his outspoken pastor,” says G. in his Sun-Times column.  I would have said he had to defend himself for picking the guy, and not in a month of Sundays at Trinity UCC on 95^th St. or in any other church would I let him off the hook with “outspoken.” 

“There is no evidence at all that the senator identifies with his clergyman, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”  Other than he picked him as a veritable soul mate and guide and stayed with him 20 years.

If O. loses Pa., “[t]he United States will reveal itself to the world as a country in which a candidate can be destroyed by a single explosion on YouTube — at least if he’s black.”  Oh boy.

“The media will celebrate that they have dragged down another celebrity like Gov. Eliot Spitzer.”  Oh my.  Where do we start with that comparison?  Or “the media” as undifferentiated beast.  Where is this Andrew Greeley coming from, to use a semi-current expression meaning, what makes him tick or what in tarnation is he thinking?

The teacher [whom G. creates for the moment] will have to tell [students wondering years hence why a good speaker like O. didn’t make president] that there were enough closet racists in the United States (especially in Pennsylvania) in those days who seized on the outburst of his cleric as an excuse to destroy Obama. It’s not fair, they will cry out. Whoever said fair? The teacher will reply, quoting John F. Kennedy.

Or he will tell them what he says about William Jennings Bryan or Adlai Stevenson — excellent speakers, I believe — using the reason offered frequently by Mayordaley I when one of his candidates lost, they didn’t get enough votes.

Hillary C. and her staff

did everything they could to keep the race issue alive during the campaign [the teacher will say]. They attacked Obama on every possible occasion, just as if they were Republicans. She even hinted by lack of strong support that Obama might not be a Christian.

I am working on that “lack of strong support” part and hoping it comes to me in the wee hours when I sit up in bed and say “Eureka,” which is a once-current expression meaning, “Yippee, I got it!”

Hillary, G’s teacher will tell these terminally disillusioned kids, one of them “a boy with clenched fists,”

was the only one to gain by it. Of course, it proved that [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright was correct in his judgments about the American people. Many of them hated blacks so much they would do anything to keep one of them out of the White House. At least they didn’t shoot him.

I’ll say.  G’s teacher, his hyper-melodramatic back-to-the-future alter ego, concluded:

He almost won the primary anyway. If he had, they probably would have shot him.

Spattering brains all over the motorcade.

Back to 2008, when “many of the gloating members of the commentariat” — the dirty stinking bastards! sob! —

have appointed themselves to be the jury to determine whether Obama was guilty or not guilty of a major “gaffe” that cost him the election.

The majority seems to have found him guilty. In fact, the only thing of which he is guilty is that he is black. Worse still, he is a pushy black. My teacher in the future used the wrong word. Obama was lynched.

And Clinton was ultimately responsible for playing the race card.

She set loose the whirlwind.

Beat that for purple prose if you can.  Does this guy get excited or not?

Count me among those who wondered if the grandmother who worried about black men she passed on the street were still living.  Answer: yes. 

Here’s John Fund:

Mr. Obama’s campaign has made clear that his 84-year old grandmother, who has asked to be left alone, should be considered off-limits to political reporters. But yesterday, it was Mr. Obama who didn’t leave her alone when he used her for one of the central themes of his speech.

O. said he can’t disown Rev. Wright, who spoke from a pulpit to a crowded church that sold CD’s with his sermons recorded, any more than his grandmother, who raised him and along the way made “stereotypical” remarks in private that made him “cringe.”

Don’t they teach logic at Harvard?  Or gratitude in church?  Did Wright make him cringe?