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Dec. 2, 2008
Melanie Phillips: The Mumbai atrocity is a wake-up call for a frighteningly unprepared world
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report: Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack
Dec. 1, 2008
Max Freidlander, as told to Jacklyn C. Wadler: India Inkings
Mark Steyn: Whodunit!?
Nov. 28, 2008
Rabbi Ahron Rapps: An evil seed that didn't have to be
Melanie Phillips: Carpe diem --- or can we all relax now?
Nov. 26, 2008
Michael Feldberg: Meet the Orthodox Jew who laid groundwork for scientific development of ordnance that undergirds America's current world leadership
Andrea Simantov:
Shades of life
Nov. 25, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Getting Emotional For Influence
The Kosher Gourmet
by Ethel G. Hofman : Thanksiving feast!
Nov. 24, 2008
Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: 'I just Became a grandchild!'
Barry Rubin: Don't flatter your enemies, protect your friends
Nov. 21, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?
Caroline B. Glick:
Civilization walks the plank
Nov. 20, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness
The Kosher Gourmet
By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto
Nov, 19, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality
Elliot B. Gertel:
'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?
Nov, 18, 2008
Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason
Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?
Nov, 17, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason
Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?
Nov, 14, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia
Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead
Nov, 13, 2008
Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic
The Kosher Gourmet
by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla
Nov, 12, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers
Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks
Nov, 11, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?
Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate
Nov, 10, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?
Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist
Nov, 7, 2008
Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality
Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy
Nov, 6, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism
The Kosher Gourmet
By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes
Nov, 5, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors
Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie
Nov, 4, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law
Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East
Nov, 3, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?
Jonathan Tobin:
Was He Wrong About Everything?
March 22, 2007
J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
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Jewish World Review
Sept. 19, 2008
/ 19 Elul 5768
Scary times on the third rail
By
Wesley Pruden
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It's a little early to play the race card, but the Obama partisans, if not Barack Obama himself, are scared. They don't know what else to do to get their expectations, so carefully nurtured over spring and summer, in line with reality. The mainstream media's ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old girl didn't work. Neither did the candidate's calling her mother a pig.
After Mr. Obama became the inevitable president, dispatching Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, his cult thought it was going to be a downhill coast to a left turn into Pennsylvania Avenue. Alas, the slam dunk - the favorite metaphor of midsummer - now looks more like a lost ball. Suddenly it's all elbows and rim shots. The politics of hope has been reduced to the politics of merely hopeful.
He sent his wife out yesterday to warn voters not to vote for someone just because she's "cute," and when that got a harsh look from one of her handlers she quickly added that she was talking about herself. Michelle is cute enough, but she's not running for anything, so far as anyone knows. (Maybe in France.) Joe Biden, the Democratic dream candidate for nearly two full days in Denver, is stumbling like everybody thought he would. He told a rally Thursday that higher taxes are coming and paying them is a "patriotic" duty. Just shut up and pay up.
The small but steady Obama lead in the polls, having evaporated in the wake of the two conventions, is enough to scare confident Democrats. The betting odds favoring Mr. Obama were off the board only a month ago; now those odds are essentially even. John McCain, moving up to a tie or even going ahead by a point or two in overnight tracking polls, has moved out front in the race for electoral votes, as measured in the state-by-state polling.
If all that were not enough bad news, John McCain and the unreliable Republicans just won't raise the race issue. Heavy-handed though some of the McCain rhetoric and television commercials about the legitimate issues may be, the Republicans and their friends have stayed apart from anything suggesting race, understanding that race has replaced Social Security as the deadly "third rail" of American politics, something for everybody to think about but not for anybody to talk about except in empty platitudes. Goading John McCain's friends, if not the senator himself, to talk about race, so the Obama boodlers and bundlers reckon, would inoculate him against having to answer embarrassing questions about who he has been hanging out with over the past two decades and prevent critical examination of his Senate record (if anyone could find it).
When the campaign moved through September, summer waned, and nobody in the McCain camp showed signs of crying race, someone else had to do it.
When someone asked Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the Democratic governor of Kansas, why Mr. Obama can't seem to achieve take-off speed, she stepped up to put a match to the kindling. "Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American?" she asked. "That may be a factor. All the code language, all that doesn't show up in the polls. And that may be a factor for some people."
Out in the down-ballot fly-over country, where the Obama magic is dissipating in the local legislative races, subtlety rarely has to be a virtue. "Race, that's the only reason people in the Valley won't vote for him," says state Rep. Thomas Letson, who thought he had a lock on re-election to the Ohio legislature and now thinks maybe he doesn't. "There are a thousand reasons to vote for Obama and one reason why you won't. Race."
Another rattled Ohio incumbent, state Rep. Robert Hagan, told the Youngstown Vindicator that it's the independents, on whom the politicians depend to rescue them from close encounters of the scariest kind, who are the racists.
That might not be a death rattle in the throats of Democrats, but it sounds like something more than throat-clearing. Mr. Obama told a rally in Las Vegas that his supporters have to "get in the faces of Republicans," presumably to say and do things "the transcendent One" never would. He's concerned, perhaps rightly, about the tendency of voters to tell pollsters they'll vote for a black candidate when they actually won't, lest they be regarded as racists. Nobody puts a number on it, though one Democratic pollster says "unless Obama has a five-point polling lead on Election Day he's toast." That's scary, and it's not yet Halloween.
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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
Wesley Pruden Archives
© 2007 Wesley Pruden
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