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Friday, August 8, 2008
Pretty rhetoric is not what will win this thing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As the dog days of summer draw to a close, the sleeping-dog conservatives have sprung to life — almost spontaneously, it was — but with enough vigor and passion to signal the truth: We can win this thing.
The reality is, as recent weeks have demonstrated, John McCain wears well. Barack Obama doesn’t. Give the American people enough time to assess the character, competence and core of anybody in public life and they’ll end up making the right choice. It’s instinctive, maybe. But People Know. They know what’s best for them and for the country.
Obama die-hards, especially those on the Left, don’t recognize it. They’re mesmerized by him and fixated by their fanatical desire to move George W. Bush to the dustbin of history and to begin the process of dismantling his legacy. It’s a real blind spot. An adversary this cocky, this blinded by the certainty that “we are the ones we have been waiting for” can be defeated.
The rhetoric that charms and soothes when TelePrompTed, the language supporters don’t hear, is the rhetoric that triggers alarm bells in the America that doesn’t share the passions of his committed followers. This week, for example, he responded to a 7-year-old girl who asked why he wanted to be president. His answer: “America is, uh, is no longer, uh, what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”
Obama simply cannot stay on the “I love America” script, a threshold requirement. With him, it’s conditions and qualifiers, lawyered-up codicils to define precisely the America he embraces, lest his adoring acolytes on the Left think he includes all that Big Oil, God, guns and bigotry stuff, too. Middle America hears him and it jars. We don’t know what America he’s talking about, whether we and our values are in or out. Middle America will not get comfortable with Barack Obama as president in 90 days — and the Left will never understand why.
But that example of Obama’s tendency to talk himself into losing is not the near-spontaneous spark that invigorates the conservative base.
It is, instead, the spunk demonstrated by two Georgia members of the U.S. House of Representatives, quickly joined by others frustrated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to allow a vote on offshore drilling.
The had-enough moment came at 11:23 a.m. on Friday a week ago, when Pelosi gaveled the House to adjournment as U.S. Reps. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Grantville), Tom Price (R-Roswell) and Indiana Republican Mike Pence stood near the well, waiting to deliver the five-minute speeches members are allowed after the day’s business is done. Their speeches were an appeal to allow a vote on expanded drilling offshore.
Four-dollar gas has jolted Americans into reality. While additional exploration is not the sole solution, it is an essential element. Pelosi knows that if she allows a vote, oil exploration wins with a bipartisan majority. Hence the quick gavel.
“I just happened to be standing there in the well,” said Westmoreland. With the gavel, the cameras and microphone were cut off. “It’s one of those ‘do or die’ things,” he continued, “I started addressing the gallery, telling them that we had failed to address the fact that our U.S. domestic production had not been addressed.”
He talked for about eight to 10 minutes before losing his voice. Price spoke too. “It was clear almost immediately to me that the gallery was engaged and people began to line up and say, ‘When can I do mine?’ ” Price recalls. About 50 members spoke and went until 5 a.m. without microphone or cameras.
A week later, it continues. Congressmen appealing for a fair vote, up or down, return to Washington to speak to a House chamber that’s often filled with visitors. Price returns on Monday, Westmoreland on Tuesday.
The dead-microphone protest may be considered a stunt. But it’s a stunt that sends a message: We’ll fight the important battles.
That message is one the base needed to hear.
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