Obama's Masculinity Problem

I really don't care what anyone else has to say.  After the merciless beatings that Hillary Clinton has taken night after night from Keith Olbermann, for her to have gone on his show Monday night was nothing less than courageous.  And as for Barack, it's not a question of whether he's Black enough or White enough, whether he's too liberal or too centrist.  The question is whether Barack Obama is man enough to be president of the United States.

I saw the wreckage of the brownstone bomb factory in Greenwich Village where friends of Ayers and Dohrn died.  It was later replaced by a beautiful modern townhouse.  Kids today (mostly from NYU and its environs) pass by it without even knowing or caring what it represents.  And that's precisely the problem with this year's Democratic primaries.  Everything about Barack Obama has been carefully crafted and tailored to appeal to the youth cult who are bereft of living memories of what their parents and grandparents lived through during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.

In the ABC debate last Wednesday night, Obama got a disproportionate number of questions and, I think, a disproportionate amount of time, but he is the front-runner for the nomination and it was predictable that he would be something of a target. He has already proved himself to be something of a moron, and an insolent one to boot: Does he have a right not to wear a flag pin?  Sure!  But considering how easy it would be for him to remove the whole flag pin conundrum  from the discussion by just wearing the damn thing, purely for the sake of appearances, his refusal to make this exceedingly minor concession to convention has to be seen as cocky, obstinate, and downright insulting to those people who, for whatever dumb reasons of their own, attach  importance to the symbolism.  You don't get a stupid person to vote for you by insulting their symbols and making it plain to them how stupid you think they are. This is relevant to who and what this man is. And it gives the lie to his feeble attempts to explain away the Mayhill Fowler flap.  He knows what he said, and what he meant, in front of that audience in San Francisco.  He apologizes for his choice of words, but not the sentiment behind them.

Obama's behavior toward Wright, Farrakhan, Ayers and Dohrn is all of a piece and proves unequivocally that he's ashamed of the causes and people with whom he freely identified himself when he was "on the make" as an up-and-comer in Chicago politics.

If everything about Obama has been carefully crafted, it has not always been to good effect.  No matter how attractive he has seemed on the stump, when confronted by an older and vastly more experienced woman, time and again he has displayed his immaturity, irritation, and discombobulation.  I was especially struck by his stammering and stuttering equivocation on the defense of Israel, and the same on gun control.  He still cannot get his story straight as to whether he did or didn't hear the more inflammatory sermons by his pastor during his 20 years as a member of his congregation.

If he were a true man, then instead of wilting, stammering and stuttering whenever he has to extemporaneously confront a woman, he'd stand up, man up, and, instead of calling Ayers and Dohrn "detestable" say "Their tactics were extreme, but they believed in what they were doing, and they were right to oppose an illegal, immoral, and unjust war."  But he's not a man.  He'll sell out his own grandmother in a hot second to be president, and he has done exactly that.

Clinton makes him look like a hypocrite and a fool, and she's forced him to adopt the very same tactics he once so grandly and pompously eschewed

Now she's won the endorsement of Richard Mellon Scaife, the devil incarnate. Quite an accomplishment! Who gives a damn what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh think?  Only those who have been gulping Kool-Aid have taken offense.  Bring people together to sing Kumbayah?  It is Obama and his Netroots backers who will tear the Democratic Party to shreds in ways that will make George McGovern look like a savior by comparison.

Whatever the outcome, and notwithstanding the vituperative rants from the ultra-left on this board and elsewhere, the Democratic Party owes Hillary Clinton a debt of gratitude for persisting this long and helping to reveal more facets of Obama's personality and character, which were shrouded in myth and mystery before this journey began.