Britannia Radio

Obamamania and hysteria get out of control!    The Sunday Telegraph 
uses its political editor to gush mind-bogglingly useless drivel 
which is quite dreadful.  Obama has done nothing yet, except to have 
some good slogans and be a youngish BLACK! !

This fixation on Obama is unhealthy.  He was a second-rate politician 
with a very undistinguished record in the Senate. He has the gift of 
the gab and got elected on a 'policy-free' platform of platitudes AND 
race.

A majority of Whites voted against him (55%) but 95% of blacks and  
66% of Hispanics and 62% of Asians voted for him. He was elected on 
his race.

In Britain the mechanism is different and nobody gets to be PM 
without leading a party first (except Brown!) . There's nobody yet in 
the frame though I see no reason to suppose that it could not happen 
though these things change slowly.   I'm quite happy to vote for 
anybody whose qualities are suitable and whose views represent mine.

Obama is irrelevant to all this. He might turn out to be good 
president - though I doubt it - but let's wait and see.  He has taxc-
cutting promises totalling $1.3 trillion and in the present climate  
he can not possibly deliver on that promise.   This very day (only 4 
days after his triumph) he is facing severe in-fighting amongst his 
backers  (or his 'masters as some would say) as he tries to fill the 
key post of Secretary of the Treasury.

But then Peter Hitchens - thank heavens - pours a bucket load of cold 
water on the whole unhealthy fixation.  Bless him!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX CS

=========================
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH    9.11.08
Barack Obama has brought 'change' to the politics of Britain

By Matthew D'Ancona

It was a second Black Wednesday, only this time joyously so. Dull was 
he of soul who did not find a way to relish the global carnival that 
was November 5, as the world awoke to find that the 44th President of 
the United States was an African-American. It was not a moment for 
partisanship, or personality, or even policy, but planet-wide poetry. 
Such moments do not come often in a lifetime and they are worth 
savouring.  [What unadulterated piffle and gushing drivel - The man's 
bonkers-cs]

In this country, the impact has been instant and transformative. To 
be specific: at about 2am on Wednesday, the defining figure of 
British politics ceased to be Tony Blair and became Barack Obama. 
[Only because the meejah are whipping up the same OTT hysteria that 
they applied to the death of Princerss Diana.  The latter had the 
effect in the end of cheapening and devaluing the memory of that 
Princess -cs]

In modern politics there is always a magnetic North, an individual in 
relationship to whom all other politicians position themselves. Just 
as Blair defined himself as the natural successor to Thatcher and an 
exponent of "strong leadership", the basis of David Cameron's initial 
strategy was to position himself as the "heir to Blair": not a carbon 
copy, you understand, but the next prospective national leader in 
sequence.

Gordon Brown, of course, had long defined himself as the "non-Blair": 
the man who would restore Labour's soul, cleanse the party's stables 
and end the spin and the showbusiness. So the next general election 
looked as though it might be a battle between the "post-Blair" 
candidate Cameron and the "anti-Blair" candidate Brown. In any case, 
there was no doubt that Blair would remain the pivotal point around 
which political discourse revolved.  [Unfortunately for this theory, 
it died about 15 months ago! -cs]

Until that is, the junior Senator for Illinois loped into the history 
books with his dazzling cocktail of youth, multi-ethnic glamour, 
oratory and the indefinable aura of infinite possibility. By the 
early hours of Wednesday every senior politician in Britain was 
checking himself out in the mirror and asking: "Does my Obama look 
big in this?"

The President-Elect is less a politician than a search engine: you 
can find whatever you want in him. Already the broad contours are 
clear. The Conservatives will hail America's embrace of "change" and 
the unambiguous mandate it has given to a "novice". Mr Brown's allies 
predict a new era of Atlantic partnership between progressive 
statesmen who believe in the power of government and regulation to 
deliver security in times of global crisis. They unabashedly 
interpret Labour's stunning by-election victory in Glenrothes as the 
first whisper of a thunderous change. [Again d'Ancona doesn't know 
what he's talking about!  The figures when properly analysed show 
that the vote was a clear rejection of the SNP's policy of Scottish 
inderpendence.  Most of the Tory and LibDem votes moved en masse to 
Labour to defeat the SNP.  The Scots were scared by the vulnerability 
of a small country like Iceland or Ireland in these turbulent times. -
cs]    Gordon, they argue, has effectively "rebooted" his premiership 
in the new economic context, starting afresh, just as the President-
Elect is starting afresh. Most audaciously (to borrow Obama's 
favourite word), Number 10 sources claim that Brown will run as an 
"insurgent" at the next general election, becoming what he tried and 
failed to become when he entered Number 10 in June 2007: the 
candidate of "change".

Cameron's job, meanwhile, is not only to argue that this is patently 
ridiculous. We often talk, in Bill Clinton's language, of the need to 
"renew in office". Blair never pulled it off, and Brown now believes 
that he can. But we talk all too seldom about the challenge for a 
party of renewing itself in Opposition. It is hard for a modernising 
leader to keep up the momentum of change, the "fierce urgency of now" 
as Obama calls it, borrowing the phrase of Martin Luther King. But 
that is the hand Cameron has been dealt.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that Glenrothes has not altered the 
pencilled-in election date of May 2010. Already Opposition leader for 
nearly three years, with the prospect of a further year and a half to 
go against a dramatically mutating backdrop, Dave must continue to 
persuade the electorate that he is indeed the "change" and under no 
circumstances become part of the dreary Westminster furniture: a 
leather armchair in White's rather than a fully-updated iPod Touch. 
Familiarity and its ugly cousin, public boredom, are Cameron's 
greatest foes. To adapt the Obama campaign slogan, the Tory leader 
must shout with ever greater confidence: "Yes we Cam". [sic]

The first and most obvious lesson of last week is that the economy 
will be the main issue at the next election: it is no accident that 
Obama was flanked by his new team of economic advisers at his first 
official appearance as President-Elect. [but now they're fighting 
over the spoils! -cs]  British voters are more scared than they were 
three years ago when the Cameroon Project began, less interested in 
General Well-being than GDP, and they expect to be told, in plain 
language, why they will be better off under a Conservative Government.

It is clear that Obama's tax-cutting rhetoric has already emboldened 
UK ministers to pursue a similar political strategy. [This is total 
hogwash.  The matter was on the drawing board long before last week 
and, in fact, Obama's promises are so wildly impossible that will 
make him look devious -cs]  The Tory leadership must decide how to 
respond to this, without ditching their core conviction that it is 
the job of monetary policy not fiscal policy to manage demand. 
Without doubt, a greater urgency, a more visible sense of mission 
will be required: in this respect, as I have written before, 
countenance matters at least as much as content.

But there is another lesson of Obama's triumph which should encourage 
the Cameroons to hold their nerve: as to be fair, they have always 
tended to do. Tony Blair was lucky: his passage to Number 10 from his 
election as Labour leader in the summer of 1994 to May 1, 1997, was 
fairly straightforward. Cameron, in contrast, has had to accept that 
the road to power may have many speed-bumps and will not necessarily 
be linear. In summer 2007, many were writing him off. In summer 2008, 
they were writing Gordon off. Now Brown is enjoying a revival as 
Global Saviour and Local Hero in Glenrothes - although today's Sunday 
Telegraph poll suggests that the revival is, as yet, largely 
cosmetic.  [Oh! So reality HAS crept in! -cs]

The illusion of the Obama miracle is that it all happened suddenly, 
spontaneously, by magic. In fact, it was the result of awesome 
organisation, especially online, and equally awesome determination.

Never forget how shaky things looked for Obama after New Hampshire in 
January and Hillary Clinton's victories in Texas and Ohio in March. 
There was always a sense that the Clinton machine might eventually 
prevail. But it didn't and, for all Obama's lean grace, [Oooh!  Isn't 
he just gorgeous then? -cs] his eventual capture of the nomination in 
June really had as much to do with lowdown determination and 
political pugilism. "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be 
steep": that is the truest and most important [!!!]  thing the 
President-Elect has said so far. British politicians, take note: it 
only looks easy.

Matthew d'Ancona is Editor of The Spectator
=========================
MAIL ON SUNDAY   9.11.08
The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful 
replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell - or 
that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of 
the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-
deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced 
civilisation. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is 
focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the 
Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted 
in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around 
Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

The night America changed: Barack and Michelle Obama in Chicago
It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which 
recorded Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy 
Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a 
children's picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting 
record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted 
abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard 
to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-
wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can 
believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-
stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from 
nerves.  It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd 
promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of 
America's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill 
Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to 
collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, 
which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did 
talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we 
can'). He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, 
despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 
'enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even 
plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the 
arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once 
more toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson 
sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with 
this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his 
admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of 
the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against 
his will - 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we 
can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in.  No wonder. Yes we 
can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my 
advice. He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach 
the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same 
message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 
52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the 
obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political 
machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close 
associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has 
been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin 
Luther King - in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in 
its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The 
difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than 
by law.

If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good 
white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, 
or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the 
now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and 
denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive 
private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of 
useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so 
many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then 
every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people 
into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. 
Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably 
be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist 
nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't 
vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is 
obviously untrue.

Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America's beautiful 
capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided 
city in the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the 
White House - the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, 
like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one 
which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-
night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the 
night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is 
spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such 
places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington's secret frontiers. 
There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as 
the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the 
other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant 
that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. 
Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having 
for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just 
about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so 
much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, 
totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, 
unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, 
suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly 
controlled mass immigration and to the march of political 
correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America's 
conservative party - the Republicans - to fight on the cultural and 
moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting 
Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could 
order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And 
now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent 
into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?