When will the Obama cult end?

This spring? This summer? This November?

It's clear that Hillary Clinton is the better of the two Democratic candidates for the general election in November, and the primary voters seem to agree with this. She has won all but one of the big states (including her almost-certain victory in Pennsylvania coming up) and all of the swing states the Dems will need in November. Obama's entire primary vote lead came from his home district of Cook County, Illinois. If the Dems had more rational primary rules, like the Republicans, she would already be the nominee. The weird inability of Dem primary voters to make the full weight of their voice heard is what's allowing the media and the left wing of the party to "wag the dog," so to speak. This is likely to be the Democrats' final opportunity for the forseeable future to have a large impact on national politics, and they seem determined to blow it.

Obama has on his side an extraordinary alliance of the left wing of the Democratic party and the media, which seem determined to get him nominated. Let's go over this again: He's the most underqualified candidate to run for President in a long time. His political "movement" smacks more of a cult than anything else. Given his views, which are to the left of Clinton and which he tries hard to hide, he has a poor chance against McCain in November. Without the center and center-left vote Clinton has a better chance of getting, Obama stands no chance of winning the general election. The Democrats, in fact, would have to start thinking about how big the loss will be: not just the White House, but one or both houses of Congress as well. The defections will be fatal and leave the Party in a shape similar to what it was like after 1972 or 1984.

The complaints about Bush, his inexperience and provinciality, were well-founded seven or eight years ago. They hold with much more force for Obama. In spite of his talk of "restoring" America's reputation, he's a foreign-policy lightweight, at best - it's more about restoring some fantasy shared by, say, Ted Turner and George Soros. His obvious ignorance of foreign trade and the Middle East make his noises about these issues laughable. With leadership on trade and other international issues, Bush looks profound by comparison. Obama has in addition the heavy political baggage of the people he's chosen to associate with. All of these problems will become far worse in the general election, no matter how hard to media tries to distract people. That only works for so long.

Of course, the Democrats were always going to have a hard time this year: they're no longer running against Bush. Early on, they eliminated their most qualified candidates and, instead, gave us the spectacle of empty identity politics and exceptionally slick levels of political cynicism - more obviously from Clinton, less obviously but even more disturbingly from Obama - that leave any outside observer with a simple conclusion: the Democratic party is politically and morally bankrupt. Its putative base continues to shrink, and an Obama nomination will accelerate the shrinkage and defections to the point that the Dems may cease to be a viable national party at all. Once a forward-looking optimistic bunch, the Dems have become a strange collection of panicked, self-hating rubes.

The cult of Obama feeds on a number of things, including a surprising amount of misogyny. But more than anything, it is the desperation of liberals that makes them prone to bad choices. Democrats can look back on over fifty years and not see (with one exception) a successful Democratic presidency since Truman left office in 1953. The turning point was undoubtedly the awful day in November 1963 that started the liberal "unhingement." The JFK presidency left an ambiguous legacy; Johnson began with great success and ended as a failure. Carter was just a failure. Clinton's second term, after a failed first term, is the only bright spot for the Democrats in half a century - but it came at the price of Clinton's adopting some of the most conservative Democratic policies since - well - Grover Cleveland. This left liberals in the strange position of being ready to do anything to defend Clinton personally but hating his policies. The consequences were bad for the Dems. In 2000, Gore, instead of sensibly running on Clintonism but keeping Clinton at arm's length, ran a bizarre pseudo-populist campaign spooked by the fringe candidacies of Bradley and Nader to his left. The same logic was at work in the fringe Dean candidacy in 2003, heavily promoted by the media and the left wing of the party, and only ended when the primary voters had their say.

The Democrats need to think long and hard before they continue down the road with the Obama cult, drink the Kool-Aid, walk over the cliff - or whatever other cult metaphors you want to use. Cinnamon Stillwell has this to say: "He's not the Second Coming, you know" - but according to some, he is apparently the First :)

When will the Obama cult end? Maybe when Clinton wins in Pennsylvania ... nah. The cult will end when the media lose interest.

POSTSCRIPT: I missed this column by Robert Samuelson in February, but it's worth reading.

A detailed article on Obama's early career, including more disturbing material about the Reverend Wright (see page 8), from the New Republic.

Inside the biofuels craze

I've been meaning to blog on this topic for a while. Reading the apparently opposing conclusions of Cinnamon Stillwell's blog and Robert Zubrin's book on biofuels, Energy Victory, pushed me over the edge.

The first thing to say is, human-induced global climate change isn't happening, at least not at a level significant enough to distinguish it from anything happening in climate anyway. The facts that biofuels, when burned, produce more carbon dioxide is not important from that angle. OTOH plants currently alive will love it - at least, until they're harvested to feed our fuel hunger.

Ah, the circle of life :)

Anyway, the corn-based ethanol industry does seem to be an unequivocal subsidized boondoggle. It's breathed new life into those ridiculous agricultural supports that Congress actually tried to phase out a decade ago,* but failed to. You pay twice for them: once through your taxes, and then again the grocery store - they indirectly drive up the cost of other commodities, as Cinnamon explains in her post. The craze for ethanol is also causing a lot of environmental damage, much of it government-subsidized: accelerated chopping down of rainforests and other trees, pollution run-off, pressure on water supplies, and so on.

The real argument for biofuels is geopolitical. It's a way for hydrocarbon-burning countries to get alternatives to the monopoly of petroleum. Moderating petroleum demand worldwide is the key, not the obsolete ideal of energy independence. Zubrin argues more in favor of biodiesel and methanol (which can be made from any biomass, and the latter from coal and natural gas as well). But his recent statements have increasingly gone over the cliff in promoting biofuels, and he's thrown away any earlier caution he had about ethanol. He does effectively demolish the claims for hydrogen as a fuel source, something that thankfully you no longer hear much about. He also smartly promotes nuclear power for fixed-site power generation. Virtually every other advanced country in the world has been moving rapidly forward with nuclear power; the US is stuck in the 1970s on this.

But there's still a significant role for conservation. Scandalously, the US vehicle fleet's fuel efficiency, which rose from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, has been falling for more than a decade, thanks to all those SUVs and monster "light" trucks out there. There's been something of a turn-around recently, but not enough. It has to be larger and sustained for a decade-plus to make a real impact. Since this is a geopolitical problem, it's perfectly reasonable for the Feds to impose a much higher gasoline tax, say enough to pay for a quarter or a third of our military budget, that part tied up with the Middle East. The tax rate should be set up to rise or fall as the price of petroleum falls or rises, so as to maintain a roughly constant and high pump price for gas. The gas price doesn't have to be at European levels, but it does need to remain at a reasonably high, sustained level. A few years of oil price collapse would probably erase whatever progress is made, by removing the pressure to conserve.

There is a good case for methanol and biodiesel. They're derived from partially or completely transformed biowaste, not from plants grown for food, and their negatives are far less than ethanol. Methanol is also economically competitive at the $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon level. It's just then a matter of getting a vehicle fleet that can burn methanol pure or mixed with gas (so-called M-85 fuel and variants). That's what Zubrin's book is about. Unfortunately, there's no big payoff for politicians. Methanol is easier to produce than ethanol and can't be rewarded with targeted subsidies the same way. But selling cars with the right engines is complicated by pollution and fuel efficiency rules. Like many of our problems these days, this is more political than anything else.

POSTSCRIPT: Here are some basic science about ethanol and methanol, both alcohols, and some basics about alcohols as fuels.
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* Back when Congress still had a significant number of conservatives.

West Coast Cinnamon

Cinnamon Stillwell is a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, but does a lot of her own freelance work as well, especially for an important organization called CampusWatch (linked at right). Kavanna's blogroll now links to her excellent blog, which is part of Pajamas Media, and you can see her Web site here.