Could it be that America is beginning to get a bit tired of Obama-mania?From the New York Times -- Senator Barack Obama stood before Washington’s elite at the spring dinner of the storied Gridiron Club. In self-parody, he ticked off his accomplishments, little more than a year after arriving in town.
Mr. Obama poked fun at himself at the Gridiron Club in 2006 with, left, his current chief strategist, David Axelrod, and his communications director, Robert Gibbs. “I’ve been very blessed,” Mr. Obama told the crowd assembled in March 2006. “Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape. “Really, what else is there to do?” he said, his smile now broad. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.”
They were the two competing elements in Mr. Obama’s time in the Senate: his megawatt celebrity and the realities of the job he was elected to do.
He went to the Senate intent on learning the ways of the institution, telling reporters he would be “looking for the washroom and trying to figure out how the phones work.” But frustrated by his lack of influence and what he called the “glacial pace,” he soon opted to exploit his star power. He was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors...
From Victor Davis Hanson: In fall 1975 I remember sitting in the Stanford student lounge watching two apparently educated and bright students compare their pet rocks, as the craze spread all over Silicon Valley and then went national. By summer few would admit they had purchased one. Never underestimate the ability of mass wired consumer society to go hysterical.
Something like that happened with the Obama campaign in mid-February, as he became the new generation's pet rock. No one knew what he had done; no one knew what he would do; no one cared whether they knew; all only wanted to be a part of it. It was a sort of self-described "movement" to "change the world," that offered absolution for all sorts of sins, real and imagined, of commission and omission, an atonement for past and present, here and abroad.
And now, as some people wake up from their pet rock purchase, they are seeing they've de facto nominated someone rated about the Senate's most liberal senator based on three years of experience there...
And from Ed Morrissey: When attempting to defuse an embarrassing situation, the best strategies rely on early and full disclosure in the hope that the eventual revelations prove anti-climactic. Barack Obama apparently hasn’t learned this yet, but the Tony Rezko trial may wind up schooling Obama on the principle. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Rezko and his associates provided three times as much money for Obama than the presidential candidate has admitted...
All of this — and more — centers on the Rezko-Obama relationship. Obama has tried to minimize his connections to Rezko, understandably, as Rezko sinks deeper into his federal trial. The Sun-Times and other Chicago newspapers keep finding more and more connections and showing that Rezko was more than just a contributor to an election campaign. Obama and Rezko have significant ties, and at the very least it calls into question how Obama could have remained ignorant of his friend’s corruption while at least indirectly benefiting from it.
He might convince people he had no knowledge of it. However, as more connections come to the light, the best he can argue is that he is so naive and unschooled that he couldn’t see corruption where it obviously exists. If so, how can he argue that he’s sophisticated enough to run the nation?
