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Barack's bad day

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

OK, that cool video I posted below was about the only good thing that happened to Barack Obama yesterday. Why was it so bad?

1) Well, as you may have heard, he's losing -- and it's almost all McCain's Sarah Palin bounce. If you don't believe that's what it is, I was just watching CNN and McCain wouldn't even let Palin come here to the Philly area today as was originally planned. He needs to keep her right by his side.

2) Palin is bulletproof. Voters -- not all voters, but the ones who matter, the ones who haven't been paying attention for three years and nine months -- are responding emotionally to Palin as a mother and -- while the McCain camp would never use this word -- as a celebrity. The Democrats and the media will think she will be underminded by "facts" -- how naive! As usual, Reagan was inadvertantly right -- facts are stupid things. Hard-hitting stories on Troopergate or "the Bridge to Nowhere" will be dismissed as the evil sexist or liberal or whatever media, and then there are stories like today's Trig Palin puff piece profile in the New York Times, which will generate sympathy for Palin and then will be attacked for invading her privacy, giving Republicans two different bangs for the same one buck.

3) This dumb verbal tongue tie by Obama is what it is -- a dumb (and horribly timed) verbal tongue tie, as even responsible conservative bloggers admit. That doesn't mean that millions of voters ready to believe the worst trash about Obama aren't emailing this like crazy (aided and abetted by Matt Drudge) and yukking it up.

4) On the other hand, there is this: As someone who's very close in age to Obama, I have no idea what he's trying to say here:

Mr Obama was asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "This Week" programme whether he'd ever thought about military service and replied: "You know, I actually did. I had to sign up for Selective Service [a means of conscription in case of war] when I graduated from high school.
"And I was growing up in Hawaii. And I have friends whose parents were in the military. There are a lot of Army, military bases there.
"And I actually always thought of the military as an ennobling and, you know, honourable option. But keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren't engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it's not an option that I ever decided to pursue."

OK, here's the thing about that. President Ford stopped requiring high school graduates to register with Selective Service in 1975; I know this well, since I graduated in 1977 and thus didn't have to sign up. At the end of 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter re-instated registration (made official in the summer of 1980); he did in fact make it retroactive to include people like Obama who graduated in 1979 (I had to look that up), but apparently he would have had to do this in the summer of 1980. That was not when he was in Hawaii, but after heds been in L.A. for a year attending Occidental College on a scholarship.

I remember quite well what it was like to be 18 back then in the late 1970s; interest in actual soldiering was quite low, thanks to Vietnam, but the Armed Services did successfully market their all-volunteer military because of the lousy economy; enlisting not only meant a job in the short run but money for college in the long run. Trust me, people like Obama who were getting scholarship money for college, would have been incredibly rare as candidates for enlistment.

"Consider" is a pretty vague word; there's lots of things in life that I've "considered" for a few seconds before thinking about how unlikely or impractical they were. You can't disprove this story, I guess, but I think it makes Obama look bad, especially since the dates on registration don't add up. And why bother go there? The truth is that when Obama was in college, America was not fighting any wars, but the inner city -- where he did go -- was in desperate need of service.

It sounds like he's panicking -- and that's not a good road to start going down.

And Obama doesn't destroy his own candidacy, Hollywood will.