The Reactionary Utopian
                   December 14, 2006


THE MAGICIAN
by Joe Sobran

     Senator Barack Obama is a real louse.

     Just thought I'd say that to shake you up a little, 
because it's a sentence I'm sure you haven't read 
anywhere else, and I dislike saying what everyone else is 
already saying. That's not what I'm paid for.

     Actually, the young Illinois Democrat himself is 
startling enough. He manages to excite liberals 
enormously, especially those in the press, without much 
offending conservatives. And he appeals powerfully to 
"moderates," or people of no particular political 
philosophy. At the moment he is approximately as popular 
as the Beatles once were.

     Yet he takes positions definite enough that you 
can't accuse him of dodging issues. He has a generally 
liberal voting record, and he has been an outspoken 
opponent of the Iraq war from Day One. It is not too 
early to say that he is a master of tone, an essential 
skill in politics.

     Obama seems to take everything into account before 
he takes a stand, and he is articulate and charming. He 
is slicker than Slick Willie, yet one doesn't really 
think of him as "slick." I find myself using the word 
reluctantly. He is the most disarming politician I've 
ever seen, and maybe the most adroit. He seems to make 
passionate friends without making a single enemy.

     Observing him is like watching a brilliant magician 
and wondering how he does it. Do our eyes deceive us? Did 
he actually do what we just thought we saw him do? But 
that's impossible! Isn't it? Have we all been hypnotized?

     Even apparent political handicaps don't slow him 
down. He is "black" (though he talks "white" and his 
mother is white), and his full name, Barack Hussein 
Obama, sounds like that of a Third World terrorist. (A 
week after the 9/11 attacks, he might not have been 
allowed to board an airplane.) No doubt he has had to 
acquire extraordinary tact in order to survive in 
politics at all.

     President Bush used to say, "I'm a uniter, not a 
divider." It hasn't worked out quite that way. He should 
have taken lessons from this guy. Bush too has tried to 
straddle the liberal-conservative divide, but he has 
wound up doing for the image of conservatism roughly what 
the movie DELIVERANCE did for the image of Southern 
hospitality. (I just watched the film again and kept 
thinking, "This is a real Red state!")

     Young as he is, Obama is already poised to snatch 
the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination from Hillary 
Clinton. Maybe his magic was actually a successful 
gamble. He is almost her opposite. She can't help 
enraging conservatives, while her support for the war has 
badly damaged her appeal to her party's liberal base. His 
unequivocal opposition to the war endears him to that 
base, and yet he avoids antagonizing conservatives; in 
fact, many of them now admit that the war has been a 
disaster, so his position looks like a very smart move.

     Was this just beginner's luck? Or was Obama shrewd 
enough to foresee that the war would go so badly that 
lots of conservatives would turn against it? I don't 
know, but as they say, fortune favors the bold. Fortune 
also favors those who have kept a safe distance from the 
man Hillary is married to. She has kept her old 
implacable enemies, while this new kid has quietly stolen 
many of her old friends. I'll bet she thinks he's a real 
louse.

     As a friend of mine once said of Ronald Reagan, when 
a man is this lucky, it isn't just luck. In crucial 
respects Obama is the opposite of not only Hillary, but 
also Bush -- and just at the right time, too.

     His greatest strength vis-a-vis Hillary is that he 
is even more different from Bush than she is, which makes 
him more electable than she is. Bush has been a worse 
calamity for the country than 9/11 itself. The 2008 
election, like this year's, will be a repudiation of the 
worst president, by far, in most Americans' memory.

     Right now things are going almost too perfectly 
Obama's way. Time will of course force him to make 
definite and therefore costly choices, even if some 
unforeseeable disaster doesn't befall him. Or maybe -- 
cruel fate! -- he'll turn himself into a joke. A single 
televised gaffe could do it!

     As always, time is the mysterious stranger who will 
have the last word. But for the moment, as long as he is 
neither Bush nor Hillary, Obama looks mighty electable.

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