The Presidential Race Made Easy

[Geee]

American Spectator:

WASHINGTON -- In the weeks ahead I shall be in Europe to speak on American politics. What will I say to old Europe? Well, I shall give them my broad view of American politics and end with the present election cycle in which I believe Barack Obama will be retired to private life, though he cannot really conceive of private life. He will continue his public life as he has for all his adult life. That is how Democrats live. He will be a community organizer to the world, as Bill Clinton has become in the words of MSNBC, "President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon."

Both sound ridiculous, but do any Democrats ever retire to private life today? They are always taking on noble causes, which is to say illusory causes. Harry Truman retired to private life and Lyndon Johnson, but not Bill Clinton or Al Gore or for that matter Jimmy Carter. The other day Jimmy wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying we had lost the drug war and he was now smoking while listening to the Grateful Dead unto death. Perhaps he is not listening to the Grateful Dead and possibly he is not smoking marijuana, but I lost interest at about the third sentence. He might well have said almost anything. He has been latching onto fads for thirty years, anything that will keep him in the ink. The reflective life is not for him. It might cause him to become aware of what a miserable president he was.

His miserable presidency is key to any summation I make of current American politics. The standards of leadership have declined abysmally, especially in the Democratic Party. It its upper tiers there is not a person who could match Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, to say nothing of Roosevelt II. The 1960s generation -- the Clintons, Gore, John Kerry, et al. -- were a bust. They quite possibly set the stage for an even more inferior generation led by Obama. Think of it! From Carter to Obama the Democrats have led a motley string of trivial figures onto the national stage.