Barack Obama should really stop digging:

And after years and years and years of this, a lot of people in this country have become cynical about what government can do to improve their lives.

Do Americans expect (or want) the government to improve their lives?

John McCain captures his Reagan moment, sticks it to Obama, and uses him as a footstool from which to launch his campaign for real:

“In my other profession and the war I served in, the country relied overwhelmingly on Americans from these same communities to defend us. As Tocqueville discovered when he traveled America two hundred years ago, they are the heart and soul of this country, the foundation of our strength and the primary authors of its essential goodness. They are our inspiration, and I look to them for guidance and strength. No matter their personal circumstances, they believed in this country. They revered its past, but most importantly they believed in its future greatness, a greatness they themselves would create. They never forgot who they were, where they came from, and what is possible in America, a country founded on an idea and not on class, ethnic or sectarian identity. And America must not and will not forget them.

The McCain campaign will now start his “Forgotten Parts of America” tour.

Is it impossibly corny? You betcha.
Will it work? Maybe, if the media gives him some airtime … which is doubtful.

Hugh Hewitt says that Barack Obama doesn’t know America:

Senator Obama doubled down in this appearance at the Compassion Forum last night. (RCP has the transcript here.) In fielding a question about poverty from Jim Wallis, Obama added this explanation:

You know, this actually goes back to the earlier point you raised where Senator Clinton suggested I was being elitist when I said that people are frustrated and bitter. That is absolutely true. That’s not just true in small towns. That’s true in urban areas. That’s true in my community of the South Side of Chicago. Because people feel forgotten. They feel as if nobody is listening in Washington.

Politics as therapy; Americans as bitter, failed people. That’s the senator’s story and he’s sticking with it. It is the very vision that motivated Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech –”It’s clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession”– recycled and with a much better delivery.

But Obama’s vision just isn’t true for the majority of Americans. 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.

This isn’t very different from the conclusion I reached a year ago, when I wrote:

lame and lamer
April 24th, 2007 — America at war, armchair psychiatry, politics

Laying out his foreign policy “vision” (murky at best), this is the famous “hope” Barack Obama offers to Americans:

“The American moment has not passed.”

Thanks for that! We were really worried that we would fade into oblivion without your lame reassurance, Dr. Blue.

Barack Obama is a downer.