What? The US Isn't A Banana Republic?

Charles Krauthammer gets right to point of Obama's fall from grace. It was his arrogance.

Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.

Healthcare: The "Reinvention" Of 155% Of The Economy

What credentials do the Democrats have?

Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party.

Leave aside how much power the state would have to exercise over us to run the medical system. Suffice it say that if government attempts to control our total medical spending, sooner or later, it will have to control us.

Have any of them even run a lemonade stand?

Obama Condescension and Arrogance

As usual, nobody says it better than George Will. Obama is the pinnacle of an attitude that has been growing within the Democratic Party for decades.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Obama's Fatal Flaw - Arrogance?

"To know me is to love me."

"Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there."

"A light will shine down from somewhere. "It will light upon you," he continued. "You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it."

Just a few Barackisms that Ron Fournier of the Associated Press has collected.

Even Michelle gets into the act.

"Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics,"

Fournier also makes very important point missed by the rest of the Obama loving mainstream media.

While he deserves credit for forecasting the complications of war in 2002, Obama's opposition carried scant political risk because he was a little-known state lawmaker courting liberal voters in Illinois. In 2004, when denouncing the war and war-enabling Democrats would have jeopardized his prized speaking role at the Democratic National Convention, Obama ducked the issue.

Does the sudden media scrutiny mean that Obama is toast?

Could be. Mickey Kaus is predicting a 20-25 point loss for Obama in Pennsylvania, with bonus Obama contractions - just the sort of error one would predict from a candidate enraptured by his own smooth talk.