Last week I had a brief, and interesting, interaction with a friend. He is a confirmed liberal, a committed supporter of Barack Obama and he and I have often enjoyed tweaking each other about the foibles of our preferred candidates and our competing political philosophies. Our banter is usually light hearted and breezy, however last week he stopped by my office to gloat about the polls showing Obama ahead by double digits over John McCain. I agreed that it looked like everything was going his way and he should be pleased. I added that I wouldn't be ready to concede until after the elections but that it seemed the most likely outcome. He uncharacteristically became irritated. He launched into an attack on the unfair tactics and ads that the Republicans were airing. He thought their attacks on Bill Ayers were out of line. He continued in this vein for a few minutes. I occasionally pointed out that both sides were not guilt-free when it came to ads that distort their opponent's positions but that he should be pleased at the state of the race. He fumed that he didn't like the unfairness of their attacks on Obama., there was probably a lot of hidden racism, and he was fearful that the election would be stolen from his man.
I have wondered why my friend was so irritable. Was there a sense that the polls were inaccurate? Was he enacting a type of projection, where the various untoward and nefarious acts from his own side of the aisle had to be disowned and attributed to the other side? Perhaps he was trying to guard himself against disappointment. It was a puzzle to me.
Recently I wrote a post that differentiated the democrats and the Republicans on their weighting of Fairness versus Freedom. The Democrats are, in relative terms, the party of Fairness and the Republicans are the party of Freedom. Because the Democrats have been so attuned to seeing and reacting to the ubiquitous unfairness in the world, they see unfairness all around them (and, of course, extremism in the defense of fairness is not recognized, let alone appreciated as the danger it is) and struggle with their expectation that life will, once again, turn out to be unfair and that John McCain will become our next President.
Most people react to unfairness with anger and this election has become distorted into an argument about how actively our government should ensure fairness; such fairness has become defined by outcomes and in the service of their notion of fairness, for the left, anything goes. They are angry and in no mood to brook opposition. It remains unclear how closely Barack Obama hews to the standard "text" of the left, though what little is known is troubling. Further, his lack of any ability to tolerate barbs and his lack of any evidence of humility or self-deprecating humor, compound my concern.
(Those who excuse excesses on the right with similar "ends justify the means" reasoning exist but have been marginalized by John McCain, who has expressly eschewed powerful arguments [ie, Jeremiah Wright] because of his sense of honor.)
This morning Glenn Reynolds linked to a disturbing post by Megan McArdle, How dare he point out my error? in which she briefly discusses the Obama campaign's fund raising fraud facilitation and his campaign's authoritarian bent:
The Obama campaign screwed up massively; it should not be possible to charge something to a credit card without matching the name to the name on the credit card. Most responsible web processors also require that you provide a fair amount of other information, to ensure that people aren't using stolen cards. And beyond that, last time I looked it was mandatory to get correct names to ensure that people aren't violating the campaign finance laws. I don't support those laws, to be sure. But as long as they are the law, all the campaigns have to abide by them.
Wondering if we can't prosecute the person who exposed the campaign's error smacks of police state tactics. Yes, I still support Obama, and I have no reason to think that the error was deliberate. But that doesn't mean that I think the Obama team has a right to have its errors protected from public exposure.
For those who have not been paying attention, the Barack Obama campaign site turned off its fraud detection software which enabled a massive amount of poorly documented donations to the campaign. Some of the donations were made with real credit cards but posted to obviously fake names (often coming in from out of the country), others were made with stolen credit cards. The size of the fraud is impossible to tell since the Obama campaign refuses to release the names of small donors (under $200) but the already documented fraud is remarkable. Mark Steyn has more on this; please note, disabling fraud protection requires acts of commission:
If they'd really wanted "to be fair", the Times would have pointed out that, in order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing - ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.
This sadly, falls well within the so far indistinct limits of what BarackObama has been willing to countenance in order to win this election. Thus far, we have seen the overt intimidation of critics, attempts at silencing critics, character assassination of critics and fraud apparently designed to both hide the source of much of his money and allow for the campaign to benefit from the float. The Obama campaign has a higher purpose, to ensure fairness in the United States and around the world and in order to ensure fairness, a few broken laws and regulations, not to mention the forfeiture of common decency, are apparently simply the price they are willing to pay to achieve their ends.
Barack Obama has been a stealth candidate, hiding his views except when he commits a slip (as in his "redistribution of wealth" comment to "Joe the Plumber". Our MSM, determined to help elect Obama for a whole host of reasons, have not done their work of investigating Barack Obama; in fact they have colluded on covering up his past. (Note today's Drudge headline of the recently discovered Obama tape in which he expands on both his desire for a more fair redistribution of wealth and his impatience with Constitutional prescriptions against his desired outcomes. The tape, now up on you tube was conspicuously not found by a journalist.)
All politicians (most people) dislike criticism; they dislike being skewered by difficult to answer questions. They dislike having their motives or their beliefs too carefully exposed. Most politicians want to avoid offending potential voters and learn from an early age to obfuscate and say as little as possible with as many words as possible. This is not the issue. The issue here has to do with the response to criticism and the unprecedented nature of Barack Obama's past lacunae. Few people really know what he believes, fewer still can predict how he would govern (though it seems clear that his tendencies are much further to the left than any previous occupant of the White House.) What has become abundantly clear is that to a greater degree than we have seen in a very long time, Barack Obama sees himself as not being bound to follow the same rules as the rest of us and that he is willing to use any and all means to silence those who threaten him. From such attitudes do authoritarian rulers emerge. This why I am deeply troubled that knowing this, Megan McArdle can choose to first minimize his campaign's behavior, ("I have no reason to think that the error was deliberate") and that even recognizing his authoritarian tendencies she continues to plan to vote for him. I suspect most supporters of Obama (except the hard left who support him in the hope that he is one of them) will vote for Obama not knowing about his habit of attacking his critics. They will agree with the MSM that the McCain campaign has been the more nasty of the two. But for an informedvoter, as Megan McArdle surely is, to vote for him knowing what she knows, is troubling. Liberals are always prone to supporting authoritarian leaders because they fall easily into the kind of relativistic thinking that excuses excesses because the leader means well.
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