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One Obama to Live

by Conservativity Staff,
Originally Posted: 1/13/2005 12:25:36 PM
Last Updated: 1/14/2005 2:11:42 PM

On Jaunary 12, there aired a soap on ABC.  Its name: One Life to Live.  It’s fairly popular, especially among younger viewers.  One scene depicted the local D.A. kissing up to a man simply called "The Senator."  My wife and I were watching as we said, "wait a minute!"  The man portraying "the Senator" was none other than newly-elected Barack Obama, junior liberal senator from Illinois.  On January 14, I found out I was wrong.  The person portraying "The Senator" was an actor, one who happens to look enough like Senator Obama to make both my wife and me think it was him.  I will say when I was wrong and I was wrong.  It was pointed out to me that the resemblance was in all likelihood intentional, and intended to promote the Senator.  I agree.

The elite left is banking on Barack Obama, even though on January 12, Ted Kennedy accidentally called him "Osama Obama."  Obama is a talented orator, and seems to have an appeal that his extreme left views do not warrant.  Last week, he spat out the extreme left party line, implicitly assuming that the government owns your tax money, decrying anything that would portend to empower the people and advocating the appointment of paternalistic socialists to the bench.

"So why did Obama win by such a huge margin?  Because the GOP in Illinois destroyed itself."

So why did Obama win by such a huge margin?  Because the GOP in Illinois destroyed itself.  Obama’s predecessor, Peter Fitzgerald, retired from the Senate after one term.  Why?  Because Fitzgerald asked President Bush to nominate honest U.S. attorneys to the Illinois seats.  One of them, Patrick Fitzgerald of the Northern District of Illinois (no relation to the former Senator), aggressively investigated the "license for bribes" scandal that rocked the Secretary of State’s office when Governor George Ryan was in charge there.  The probe has brought many GOP cronies, up to and including Ryan, into the criminal justice system.

The GOP hated Fitzgerald for letting their cronyism, unchallenged for 25 years, be exposed to scrutiny.  They made it clear that they would rather lose the Senate seat to an extreme left-winger like Obama rather than support his re-election.  So Fitzgerald, a fundamentally decent and honest man, retired after one Senate term.  There was a bitter primary fight for the GOP nominee, and the people chose Jack Ryan, ex-husband of Jeri Ryan.  The surname "Ryan" was itself a handicap, even though Jack Ryan is no relation to Gov. Ryan.  Moreover, Jeri Ryan made her name in skintight outfits as "Seven of Nine" in the series Star Trek: Voyager and then went on to star in Boston Public.  Well, it seems that Jack liked to go to swing-clubs and tried to drag Jeri along for the fun.  This decimated his campaign, and the shattered mantle was picked up by Alan Keyes, who lived in Maryland when he was approached.

"There was no way that Keyes could get past the Democrats’ ultra-strong support for Obama, fueled by their desire to gain this senate seat to stem the GOP tide.  In the end, Barack Obama won by a gigantic landslide."

So Obama faced a carpetbagger who is on the right side of the right side of the GOP.  Keyes is a brilliant orator, and he is uncompromising in his support for moral values.  But there was no way that Alan Keyes could overcome the lukewarm support of the corrupt crybabies in Illinois GOP elite circles.  There was no way that he could shed the "carpetbagger" image.  There was no way that Keyes could get past the Democrats’ ultra-strong support for Obama, fueled by their desire to gain this senate seat to stem the GOP tide.  In the end, Barack Obama won by a gigantic landslide.

But is Obama’s victory based upon his ideology?  Hardly.  Illinois is still the state that had Republican governors from 1976 through 2000.  It’s the state where Peter Fitzgerald handily unseated leftie darling Carol Moseley-Braun after one term.  It’s the state where the Democrats carried Cook County, Springfield, Peoria and a county or two near St. Louis.  The rest of the state is GOP, including all of the Chicago suburb counties (Lake, DuPage, Kane, Will, McHenry).  While the left-leaning media is talking about the state "becoming increasingly Democratic,"  that is an illusion.  In fact, the truth is that Keyes was so unpopular that Obama got over one million votes from those who voted Bush for President.

So is Obama the ultimate rising star, or the luckiest man in Illinois?  I personally vote the latter.  However, the left is bereft of stars, so Obama is on One Life to Live for face time.  Remember that the same thing happened to Carol Moseley-Braun when she took this very seat in 1993.  In January of 1999, Peter Fitzgerald was sworn in to succeed the one-term wonder.

I hope and pray that the GOP reorganizes itself in Illinois, putting someone honest in charge -- perhaps Peter Fitzgerald?  Then the rebuild can empower the next generation of Illinois GOP stars, including the ones who will succeed Rod Blagoievich and Dick Durbin in 2006, and Mr. Obama in 2010.  As long as they focus on personal independence and ability, and work to keep Illinois from taxing them to oblivion, they will prevail.