Can a liberal be a unifier? Get serious

NY Times:

At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?

Also, and more immediately, if Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination, how will his promise of a new and less polarized type of politics fare against the Republican attacks that since the 1980s have portrayed Democrats as far out of step with the country’s values?

To many political strategists, the furor over the racial views of Mr. Obama’s former pastor is only the first of many such tests the senator will face if he is the nominee.

Mr. Obama, in an interview that was conducted on March 15, in the midst of that controversy, said he was confident that Americans were eager for a new kind of politics and were convinced that “a lot of these old labels don’t apply anymore.”

He said he was a progressive and a pragmatist, eager to tackle the big issues like health care and convinced that the Democrats could — and should — rally independents and disaffected Republicans to their agenda. Only then, he said, could the party achieve what it has so rarely won in modern presidential elections: a mandate to do big things.

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Liberalism would have to change its very nature for him to pull off that trick. It is an ideology that has destroyed the black family since the 1960's and would like to make every American dependent on the government for health care and other services. Liberalism would like to do for the Iraqis what it did for the Vietnamese.

There is no one in Obama's campaign that has demonstrated any comprehension of counterinsurgency warfare and the candidate has been naive and ignorant on the subject when asked specific questions about what has happened in Iraq since the new strategy was put in place last year. He has cast his lot with the willfully ignorant left that is in denial about the enemy's plans for Iraq even after bin Laden laid it out again this week. Bin Laden's latest statement destroyed the premise of Obama's Iraq policy and Obama and his campaign act like it never happened and the NY Time has done its best to bury this embarrassing detail.

Then there is Obama's church, not just his minister. It is still defending the racist hate mongering of Rev. Wright. Why would any sane person want to have fellowship with people who make the blood libel claim that the government invented the HIV virus for the purpose of perpetrating genocide on blacks. At best this is ignorance on stilts that is explained not at all. If he cannot persuade these people he has been around for 20 years to abandon a lie like that how does he expect to persuade anyone to accept liberalism with all its baggage? What the Wright episode has demonstrated is that the claims of Obama to be a unifier are an election year scam.