Can a Junior Senator From Chicago Commit More Troops to Afghanistan? Barack Hussein Obama said he already had!!!!!!

July 29, 2008

Exclusive: Obama’s Rainbow Tour…Shades of EvitaPrint This
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Pam Meister


Let’s hear it for the Rainbow Tour
It’s been an incredible success
We weren’t quite sure; we had a few doubts
Will Evita win through?
But the answer is yes…

(Lyrics from ‘The Rainbow Tour’ in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Evita)’

Presidential candidate Barack Obama just returned from a whirlwind tour in the Middle East and parts of Europe. He wowed ‘em in Germany with a speech in Berlin delivered to thousands. (Having a free concert just before the speech like there was in Portland, Oregon back in May couldn’t have had anything to do with the large crowd, right?) He played basketball with a handful of troops in Afghanistan (while snubbing those recuperating at the Landstuhl Medical Center in Ramstein, Germany because a photo op could not be obtained). He met with world leaders. He walked on water, healed the sick, and fed thousands with just a handful of loaves and fishes.

In other words, it was just another week on the Obama campaign trail, each moment reported in excruciating detail by his faithful followers in the media who have plenty of time for it, seeing as how they seem to have forgotten that this is not a one-man race. German public television’s original estimates of 20,000 spectators at the Berlin speech somehow grew to a miraculous 200,000. But what’s a hundred thousand or so among friends? The important thing here is that Obama has given Europe a reason to believe and hope in America once again.

Spain has fallen to the charms of Evita
She can do what she likes, it doesn't matter much
She's our lady of the new world with a golden touch
She filled a bull-ring, forty-five thousand seater
But if you're prettier than General Franco, that's not hard

Funny thing is, though, that as much as they wish they could, Europeans can’t vote in American elections. So one imagines they’re biting their nails over in the Old World, hoping the churlish, boorish, Luddite American voters in the New World do the right thing.

There you are, I told you so
Makes no difference where she goes
The whole world over just the same
Just listen to them call her name
And who would underestimate the actress now?

But how did Obama’s world tour go over with Americans? Were they convinced that Obama was merely on an extended fact-finding tour in order to bolster his foreign policy credentials? According to a Fox Opinion Dynamic poll, 47% believed that this was a campaign event, while only 19% thought it was a fact-finding mission. (25% thought the trip was a little of both.) And as for the big bounce this tour should have had, the race between Obama and John McCain remains in a statistical dead heat in most polls. Considering historic trends, this election should have been in the bag for Democrats. That McCain, who has had much less media coverage than Obama, is nipping at his heels is not a harbinger of great things to come in November.

As Carrie Budoff Brown notes, “[I]f Obama fails to win the White House because he couldn’t close the sale in Poughkeepsie rather than Paris, a trip that Republicans have described as an extended photo opportunity could appear silly in retrospect.”

But hold on…not everyone in Germany was impressed:

The Hollywood-staged Obama event for a man who has yet to ascend to the presidency didn’t sit well with all the Germans. Germany’s Stern magazine carried the headline "Barack Kant Saves the World."

One of their columnists, Florian Güssgen, wrote: "The man is perfect, impeccable, slick. Almost too slick … Obama's speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon's feel good song 'Imagine' than of a foreign policy agenda."

It makes me wonder why we haven’t seen an Obama ad with the senator superimposed into one of those old Coca-Cola ads where everyone is standing around singing about “perfect harmony.” Maybe the same guy who ripped Hillary with his remake of the Apple 1984 ad can be persuaded to work his computer magic once again.

Eva started well, no question, in France
Shining like a sun through the post-war haze
A beautiful reminder of the care-free days
She nearly captured the French, she sure had the chance
But she suddenly seemed to lose interest
She looked tired

Someone else is tired from all of that globetrotting and flesh pressing. Obama checked in to a hospital upon his return to the U.S. because he had a sore hip from playing basketball. (He’s seen exiting the hospital here, looking more like a skinny kid running for class president than a grown man running for POTUS.) And even back in May it was noted that Obama was often tired. Don Surber wonders:

Tired? The man is all of 45. John McCain is 70 and served 5 1/2 years in a Vietnamese dungeon. He never complains about being tired. Why is Obama tired all the time? Has he no stamina at all?

Indeed. The president must be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when he’s on vacation – national security crises don’t wait until his two weeks are up. But there’s nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Like Eva “Evita” Perón, Obama had no official reason to make such a noisy splash overseas, reminiscent of the old Nestea plunge (ahh!). She was the wife of Argentina’s president; he’s a U.S. senator who is running for president. While a fact-finding mission is appropriate during a campaign – especially for a candidate with as little legislative or executive experience as Obama has – giving speeches that resemble political rallies (and that downplayed “American strength and resolve” during the Cold War “in a paean to international cooperation”) is not.
Also worth noting is that Evita was called Dama de la Esperanza (the Lady of Hope), and she didn’t believe in private charity, but social aid under the guise of the state, where all citizens were required to “voluntarily” contribute to her charity fund. Evita herself had this to say about private charity:

Charity humiliates and social aid dignifies and stimulates. Charity is given discreetly; social aid rationally. Charity prolongs the situation; social aid solves it…Charity is the generosity of the fortunate; social aid remedies social inequalites. Charity separates the wealthy from the poor; social aid raises the needy to the level of the well-to-do. (Evita: First Lady, John Barnes, Grove Press 1978, pg. 120)

Obama, seen by many as the arbiter of Hope, also believes charity begins not at home, but in the legislature:

“The idea here is to give everyone one big refund on their government — divvy it up into some tax breaks, hand them out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own healthcare, their own retirement plan, their own unemployment insurance, education, and so forth.”

In Washington, he said, “They call this the Ownership Society. But in our past, there has been another term for it — social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself.”

In other words, the people can’t be trusted to do the right thing, so taxes (“voluntarily” given, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) collected and redistributed by the government are the answer. In fact, Obama’s generosity with American tax dollars extends beyond U.S. shores to the “global community,” – to the tune of $845 billion – and his Global Poverty Act would end up making Americans subservient to the whims of the incurably corrupt UN.

Are shades of Evita during the 2008 presidential campaign life imitating art or art imitating life? The American voter must be the judge.

Let’s hear it for the Rainbow Tour
It’s been an incredible success
We weren’t quite sure; we had a few doubts
Will Evita win through?
But the answer is yes…

Pam Meister is the editor of FamilySecurityMatters.org.