OK, I’ll admit it: six months ago I was very near buying into the whole Obama thing. That was when he was in his post-racial phase — before Jeremiah Wright, back when voting for Obama seemed like a way of putting an end to the unhealthy obsessiveness about race that disfigures liberal politics.
I was even willing to swallow hard and give Obama a pass on his left-wing populist rhetoric. That got more difficult when the connection with Bill Ayers, unrepentant Communist bombthrower, came to light — but I might have managed to choke down even that.
Why, you ask? Because John McCain was no prize. The political-speech restrictions that came with McCain-Feingold reform have stuck in my craw from the day it was enacted. I found Matt Welch’s dissection of McCain as an authoritarian maverick all too convincing in light of what I knew about the man. Once you get past his determination to win the Iraq war there is very little I can find praiseworthy in McCain.
(Anyone who finds this suprising may need a reminder that, despite my strong pro-Second-Amendment and pro-Iraq-War stance, I am not and have never been a conservative. Much less a “neocon”, whatever that means.)
Of course, my extreme dubiousness about McCain made Barack Obama more tempting. I suppose that attraction might have survived flip-flop after flip-flop, advisors and old friends thrown under the bus, and the increasing whiff of arrogant elitism coming off Obama and his appalling wife. I could have made excuses to myself about these things; Goddess knows enough other well-meaning people have been doing so.
No, what really put me off Barack Obama was the increasingly creepy and pathological tenor of the relationship between him and his fans. I think it was in mid-February, a bit before the Jeremiah Wright story got really ugly, that I started to notice my “Never Again!” nerves tingling.
I’m not Jewish. But I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at an impressionable age. Years later, what I learned in that book made me into an anarchist. What it did much sooner than that was to instill in me the same sense of the Holocaust as the central moral disaster of the 20th century that the Jews feel. It left me with the same burning determination: Never again! Ever since, I have studied carefully the forms of political pathology behind that horror and attended even more carefully for any signs that they might be taking root in the West once again.
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