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| Hugh Hewitt: What Obama doesn't know |
| 2008-04-14 |
| Obama doesn't understand a great deal of America. He has no experience with it other than as a politician looking for votes, and even that experience outside of Chicago has been accumulated only since he began his run for the U.S. Senate in 2003. His life has made him keenly aware of urban dysfunction and of African-American issues even as it has exposed him to the Third World in a way that very few American officials have been. But he is blind to what makes most American communities work. His family experiences and his work experiences have never immersed him in the majority of America that not only functions but indeed thrives. His projection on to that America of his own beliefs -- that odd mix of the beliefs assembled during his very unusual childhood, in Hawaii's most privileged school, on Chicago's south side, and at Columbia and Harvard Law School and Trinity's congregation-- has opened a lot of eyes to just how different Obama's vision of America is. . . . . . . Most Americans are productive and generally happy; hard-working and actively involved in their communities through church and their children's schools. Most Americans are generous, and favorably disposed towards strangers and eager to help the world. Obama doesn't know this America, which is certainly the backbone of most suburbs, small towns and rural communities in flyover-country and, truth be told, on most of the coasts outside of the largest urban centers. What Obama knows is the world in which he has lived, which is a strange combination of some of the toughest neighborhoods in the U.S. and its most elite institutions. He belonged to a church that indulged radical politics in its weekly bulletin and from its pulpit even as it struggled to help some devastated neighborhoods. He did so after attending and absorbing the attitudes of America's most elite law school and having been taught by its --mostly-- hard-left professors. He does so from the lofty perch of the U.S. Senate. He's had a schizophrenic life that combined the toughest aspects of America and its most indulgent. No wonder he is clueless about "flyover land." . . . It is clear that Obama has spent much of the last 30 years in and around some very dysfunctional neighborhoods full of some broken and almost certainly bitter people. He has been hearing and speaking complaints against the powerful for just as long. He has not been building a small family business and coaching in the AYSO league, making budget in a medium-sized corporation or manning the snack booth at the football game, teaching the AP English course or organizing the Knights of Columbus or Society of St. Vincent de Paul food drive. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |