One hundred fifty-one and counting… That is the number of Bishops who, at the time of this writing, have issued public condemnations of the Obama administration’s confirmation of its radical and unjust “contraceptive mandate.” Led by USCCB president and Cardinal-elect Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, our shepherds are stepping out in front of their flocks and challenging the administration in no uncertain terms.

The unprecedented move by this administration has been met in turn by an unprecedented display of outspoken and public unity in the Church. Even liberal Catholic supporters of the administration, and entities that brazenly supported the passage of the healthcare reform bill over the objections of the bishops, have begun to voice their concerns publicly. They seem to be expressing surprise that they would be used by the administration and then kicked to the curb when their cover was no longer needed.

While this unusual display of support from the left wing of the Church is welcome, the question must be asked about how we got to this point. It is left to our imagination to wonder what would have happened if, during their many meetings with the administration leading up to the passage of ObamaCare, the leadership of the Catholic Health Association (CHA) would have told the administration in no uncertain terms that they would immediately withdraw their effusive public support for the bill unless there was clear and strong language within the bill itself protecting conscience rights in absolute terms. We must also wonder what would have happened if, months before the CHA leadership received a “signing pen” from the president – a trophy given only to those few who were absolutely essential to the bill’s passage – they told him that, given President Obama’s past record in promoting abortion at every possible turn, they would need him to adopt the Stupak language (which even its sponsor abandoned in the final stretch, citing CHA as an authority, and which also was not as strong as many preferred) to ensure that abortion coverage would not be expanded by the bill.

I do not say this to condemn CHA’s leadership or anyone else. That isn’t my job, and like any Catholic who understands his faith, I trust those responsible to address issues of authority in this matter. Our faith demands forgiveness be given – 70 times 7 times – and if CHA’s leadership were to at this point help lead the opposition to this assault by the administration on our Faith, I would, like many I’m sure, welcome them to the front. Up to a point, I believe engagement with the administration was at least potentially valuable, if the terms were clear and truthful, and people were acting in good faith.

But that assumes that all parties are acting in good faith, an assumption that very few now believe. If we are going to learn from this painful episode, then we need to – in Charity and in Truth – look at how we got here. Charity is not, and never has been, about “niceness;” and we should learn our lesson about dealing with this administration, and the others that will follow it, if we are not to be fooled again.

President Obama promised Planned Parenthood before the election that he saw “reproductive care” (which, according to the president and Planned Parenthood essentially includes abortion and contraception) as being “at the center and at the heart” of his health care reform plan. Why so many refused to take him at his word for this is baffling to me.

Before this, he voted four times in the Illinois State Senate, and even advocated in a speech on the Senate floor, against a bill that would have required that life-saving treatment be given to children who were born following botched abortions. Even the unequivocally pro-abortion Barbara Boxer voted for an almost identical bill at the federal level, so careful was its crafting so as not to impinge on the so-called “freedom of choice.” In opposing this bill, the president placed himself squarely in the tiniest minority of the most radical of anti-life politicians.

As a U.S. senator, Mr. Obama had a 100% rating from the pro-abortion group NARAL. I could go on for hours, but you get the point – the president is no agent of compromise when it comes to abortion or contraception, and he never has been. And with his appointment of the baptised-Catholic Kathleen Sebelius to the position of Secretary of HHS, he ensured that his health care policy would be carried out to the letter by the entity that, by the design of the legislation that is now nicknamed after him, would have total control over all aspects of health care practice and coverage by the time it was fully implemented.

This is exactly what ObamaCare was designed to do.

How this enormous power grab by people – people who could not have done more to telegraph their intentions – received even the slightest amount of support from Catholic “experts” in health care is a question I can’t begin to understand. Catholics are now being told we that we have no choice but to pay for things that we know will kill children and harm women, or to go out of business. The experts knew that this power was being given to the government, but somehow they bought into unwritten backroom assurances that freedom of conscience and religion would be respected?

Of course Catholics believe in basic, essential health care for everyone! That’s why we have built and run hundreds of hospitals that serve people of every faith and background. It’s a part of our mandate as Christians to serve the poor and heal the sick out of our love of Christ, whom we see especially in the weakest and most vulnerable. This is how we live solidarity, a key principle of Catholic Social Doctrine.

But we also believe in something called subsidiarity, which is another basic principle of our doctrine that essentially says that we shouldn’t cede control of any services to larger entities when we can do them better ourselves at the local level. Catholic hospitals treat patients as persons – persons made in the image and likeness of our Creator, and who thus have inviolable dignity from the moment of conception until the moment that their Creator decides to take them home. This understanding of the human person has consequences in how we perform health care. The people who now, or within the next year if nothing is done, have almost complete control of every aspect of healthcare radically disagree with Catholics about the nature of the human person – the patients being served. And their beliefs also have consequences with how they think health care should work, and their view is summarized in the now-president’s statement that abortion and contraception are at the heart of such care.

A bill now being discussed that intends to defend freedom of conscience in law is good, and deserves support. But again, this administration has not only laid bare its disdain for the Catholic faith, but also for the rule of law. Five words: The Defense of Marriage Act. This administration cares not a whit about any inconvenient legal impediment to realizing its goals – their only law is the law of power, which they currently have. A bill will not stop or even slow them down in their expressed goal to “fundamentally change” our nation.

And it is our nation. ObamaCare must be repealed in its entirety, and all of its bureaucratic tentacles that are now being constructed must be dismantled one by one. In its place we argue for a system that respects not only life and freedom of religion and conscience, but the right of local communities to take care of their own; and one that has a great humility in implementing intermediate levels of control when necessary, due to inadequacy at the local level.

Hallelujah! The Church is awake! Let’s welcome back those who were misled into supporting this legislation and who want to set things right. Remember, we are forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. But let us not be fooled again into thinking that “dialogue” with this administration is currently possible on a truthful basis.

Let’s support our bishops in prayer and in action as they lead the charge against this assault on the Church, and toward a health care system – and a society – that is truly more just.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith.

The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people – the Catholic population and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build Arnerica’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

And therefore, I would ask of you two things. First, as a community of faith we must commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I would also recommend visiting www.usccb.org/conscience, to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to Contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Administration’s decision.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Most Reverend Dennis M. Schnurr
Archbishop of Cincinnati

For anti-Americans and others addicted to Schadenfreude, it could hardly get better. The delicious clip of Republican candidate Rick Perry, unable to remember the name of one of the three departments of the federal government he had pledged to abolish, was a moment to treasure.

But seen in a larger context, the comic relief soon fades. For the American political system seems to be unravelling in the most extraordinary way. A president whom many regard as a failure, and who is a disappointment even to his most fervent admirers, looks likely to squeeze through the 2012 presidential election, now less than a year away, only because of the antics of the extraordinary menagerie of candidates the once Grand Old Party can put into the field against him.

In the meantime, neither the president nor the Congress seems able even to begin to address the United State’s grave problems — public and private debt, high unemployment, economic stagnation and policy paralysis. The fact that the next election is of vital importance to America and the world makes this a chilling reality.

The Republican circus

Rick Perry’s amnesia in a televised debate is far from the only worrying aspect of his personality and campaign. He was the governor of Texas: yet even on questions about Texas’s constitution and its economy’s alleged immunity to national problems, he has proved evasive or uninformed.

Herman Cain is an even more implausible candidate, whose only qualification, it seems, is having accumulated a fortune selling pizza: the suspicion has been voiced that he is only running to push up his appearance fees. His own broadcast moment of embarrassment (over the administration’s Libya policy) was as excruciating as Perry’s, and he too has shown comprehensive ignorance of public life at home and abroad. The accusations of several women job applicants that he propositioned them further expose his flaws.

These two are only the most obviously absurd contestants. Mitt Romney, superficially the most acceptable candidate by conventional standards, seems dull, little more than a profile over a well-tailored suit of clothes. His qualifications for entering the race are that his father was a (not very impressive candidate) forty years ago, and that he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in his private-equity business, Bain Capital. Two biographical details that might commend him to an unbiased observer — his loyalty to his Mormon faith and his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, where he passed a healthcare-reform measure — are seen by many Republicans and much of the media as negatives.

Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives and in the mid-1990s an influential and innovative conservative politician, has by default re-emerged as a plausible option among many Republicans, commentators and others. He a man of real political stature, but is vulnerable to media scrutiny of many details of his personal and financial life.

Someone will emerge a winner from amid the scrum of televised debates, costly advertising wars, and local votes. But so far the pre-election circus has had little to say about two fundamental questions:

* Why is the American political system now apparently so dysfunctional?

* What will be the implications, for the United States and the world?

The dysfunctional system

Many answer the first question by identifying specific constitutional problems, such as the high barrier needed for invoking cloture in the Senate. But these are often a symptom rather than an originating cause. Here, two processes seem of especial importance.

The first is the breakdown of party, especially at the level of presidential electoral politics. While party allegiance has considerable importance in Congress and at the state level, presidential campaigns are essentially raids by charismatic leaders who campaign with little or no loyalty to party or party program (that is, charismatic in the classic sense in which Max Weber defined the term: leaders who attract a horde of followers with the promise of gain, here on earth or in the hereafter).

Since the campaign of John F Kennedy in 1960, few successful presidential candidates have owed much to party ideology and less to party organization. Their success, when it comes, is owed to personal magnetism, promoted by media manipulation, and sustained by massive fundraising. That is why candidates wealthy enough to pay for a significant share of escalating costs (Kennedy, Rockefeller, Bloomberg, Corzine, Romney and many others) have such an advantage in pursuing the race).

Moreover, as the two parties have become more defined and indeed polarised in ideological terms, presidential candidates emerge not from debate within a party organisation but rather impose themselves in a sort of ideological auction. The process is exacerbated in this electoral cycle by the influence of the Tea Party (itself supported by a small number of very wealthy men, from the Koch brothers to Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News).

The second process is that the influence of money in the system is increasingly excessive and distorting. The single reform that would do most to clean up American politics and to make the procedures of election more democratic would be a ban on political advertising. More than half the money spent on electioneering, which threatens to break all records in 2012, goes on advertising — and this overwhelmingly still means television advertising, which remains the essence of American campaigning.

The cost of buying space is exorbitant; the cost of hiring and paying experts to research, write, design, promote and buy political advertising is beyond all but the deepest purses. As a result, political consultants, often guns for hire with little coherent political philosophy, have excessive influence.

A reform of this kind, however, is unthinkable. The Supreme Court, since its decision in Buckley v Valeo in 1976 that political advertising is a form of speech and is therefore protected by the first-amendment guarantee of free speech, has steadily amplified the import of its commitment to this absurd proposition. The present court, dominated by conservative ideologues, has carried the protection of political advertising to new lengths. In January 2010, in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, the court removed all limitations on political expenditure by (among other bodies) business corporations.

This will give the Republican Party, traditionally the representative of corporate business and private wealth, an even greater advantage; and within the Democratic Party it will increase the importance of a number of sources of campaign funding, among them Wall Street and Hollywood. It may well, as a result, make it even more difficult or Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, to be more even-handed in their approach to the (now more vital than ever) politics of the middle east and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

The current media dynamics, especially the migration of readers and advertising to the internet, make it likely that there will be even more attention to the personal issues and scandals surrounding the candidates, and less to policy matters (particularly the economy and foreign affairs). In this respect, the hopes of many that social media would democratize political campaigns have so far proved over-optimistic.

The international implications

The second question is already being answered in the multiple signs of a diminishment of Washington’s authority in world politics, all of them overshadowed by the political consequences of the US government’s failure to deal with its debts, trade and structural deficits, and the economic slowdown.

President Obama and his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner have continued to berate European governments for their failure to solve economic problems that Washington itself has scarcely begun to address. For this and other reasons, it is probable that relations between the United States and Europe will deteriorate, perhaps quite sharply and quite soon. This will make the resolution of the economic and financial crisis much harder to achieve. The historic achievements of the alliance forged between the US and European (and other) democracies are near forgotten in contemporary Washington.

The inability of the American political system to resolve its problems has weakened the country’s capacity to sustain a central or decisive part in world affairs. Barack Obama’s reluctance to take the lead over Libya is a much-noticed example, though equally revealing is the influence of domestic politics on his awkward Afghan strategy (a mixture of military “surge” and preparation for withdrawal). The crisis in relations with Pakistan, and the loss of position in the Arab world — where Washington is sleepwalking towards a crisis where it will be found to be allied with Israel and Saudi Arabia against the spread of democracy — emphasize the dangers it faces.

The major commitments of American policy — to “containment” in the cold war, to the “western alliance,” to other international obligations — were once clear to its allies and adversaries alike. Some American leaders (such as Hillary Clinton and Timothy Geithner) continue to behave as if the United States were still a hegemonic power, unchallenged in its financial reach and ideological beliefs as well as militarily paramount. But many of their interlocutors, from China to Latin America and Russia to Israel, are ever bolder in their rejection of the implied claim.

As a result there is a serious and growing disparity between the assumptions of media and politicians in the United States and the realities of the world which its political elites still aspire to dominate. The latter are losing not just the power do so, but perhaps even the will to understand the world.

This ought to be a source of fear rather than of satisfaction abroad. The world’s mounting problems will be hard enough to solve even if the United States is trying to help and capable of doing so — but will be all but insoluble if it is not. But how can the US get into a position where it again can help? Only by a candid acknowledgment that the American political system is very far from being an inspiration to the world or governed by ideals that others now seek to emulate (as the neo-conservatives, with their ill-fated adventures of persuasion or force, believed) — and that this system itself is in serious need of reform.

It is near impossible to imagine any of the eight Republican candidates on show — obsessed as they are with self-pleasing fantasies about the American past — undertaking this work. For his part, Barack Obama was once invested with — and did much to cultivate — huge hopes that he could do so. There has been little reason to believe that in office he understands how vital and unavoidable it is.

John F Kennedy’s favorite general, Maxwell Taylor, posed an old question in 1971 that is more urgent now than ever: “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”

Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters’ Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer’s correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. Among his books are A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007) and The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009. This article is reproduced from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons licence.

A barrage of news headlines on the Solyndra scandal continue to remind us that President Obama made green jobs one of his administration’s priorities. Those headlines also reveal this initiative to have been a costly mistake.

The bankruptcy of Solyndra, the solar-panel manufacturer that has collapsed despite receiving half a billion dollars from the federal government, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that several other green companies that received generous federal aid are teetering on the brink.

Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel received a $118 million federal grant, lost $165 million in FY 2010 and has dim prospects. According to the Journal, Ener1 had “lost its bid to supply batteries to Fisker Automotive, a battery-powered car maker which received a $529 million U.S. taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantee in 2010,” when “Fisker chose to buy its batteries from a company called A123 Systems, itself the recipient of a $249 million U.S. Department of Energy grant.”

Great! First Team Obama extends taxpayer dollars to green companies, then it torpedoes them by giving larger grants to their competitors. Meanwhile, Fisker, itself a recipient of over a half-billion dollar handout from Uncle Sam, is making its cars in Finland.

Team Obama’s record on creating green jobs is no more confidence-inspiring than its record in midwifing a viable electric car industry.

A recent study by the Labor Department’s Inspector General examined what became of $162.8 million of Obama stimulus money funneled to the Employment and Training Administration. Set up to “train and prepare individuals for careers in ‘green jobs,’” the score is this: 53,000 individuals were trained, 8,035 got jobs, and only 1,033 trainees still held those jobs after six months.

There are at least four important reasons why we should stop funding “green” government programs:

First lesson: government-appointed experts are incompetent economic planners—a fact of life that any intelligent adult should know after the spectacular failure of central economic planning in the socialist experiments of the twentieth century. No matter how brilliant and how well-intentioned government planners may be, they do not and cannot know what consumers want and how much they are willing to pay for it. Only free markets can solve this challenge. If electric cars are to be a viable industry, private companies will make them so.

Second lesson: The government’s involvement in Solyndra raises troubling questions about possible corruption. While I think the Solyndra deal stinks to high heaven, I wonder whether any laws have been broken. Where is the dividing line between influence peddling, legitimate lobbying, political deal-making, and actual crime? Many farm-state Republicans have supported the uneconomical ethanol boondoggle for decades in exchange for generous support of their electoral campaigns, so the practice is bipartisan.

Third lesson: Government job programs are a blatant failure. They have never been economically beneficial. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the department of agriculture hire 100,000 Americans to monitor how much acreage American farmers were cultivating. These federal jobs produced no wealth. Their jobs made no more economic sense than paying people to dig holes and then fill them up.

Today’s green workers are economically nonsensical, too. True, they sometimes produce something, but the economic value is invariably less than the amount of tax dollars needed to subsidize their job. In other words, federal jobs make us poorer.

Fourth lesson: Finally, we simply can’t afford these green boondoggles. Uncle Sam’s official debt is now $15 trillion, and when you include off-budget items and unfunded liabilities, the situation is far worse. Given this fiscal reality, it is the height of irresponsibility to throw taxpayer dollars at any special interests, and it is particularly egregious to subsidize enterprises that are plainly uneconomical.

I am not opposed to green industries. What we need is for the government to get out of the way and let green technologies prove themselves in the competitive marketplace. It’s time for change and an end to economic foolishness. Let’s get the burden of green boondoggles off the taxpayers’ back.

There are a great many things we do not know about the current President of the United States. For a while there was concern about Barack Obama’s birthplace, some “birthers” denying that he was born in the United States, a constitutional requirement for the office. Thanks to the taunts of billionaire Donald Trump, who was thought to be a 2012 presidential candidate himself, the President belatedly made his birth certificate public. But many other questions normally asked of presidential candidates and chief executives remain unanswered.

The details of his early family life, for example, are far from clear. Were his parents ever married? Who were his girlfriends and early buddies? How well did he perform in school, and who got him into (let alone paid for) Columbia University and Harvard Law? Who financed his world travels? (Neither book records a 1981 trip to Pakistan.) What are his most serious religious convictions, if any? How close is he to the ever-corrupt Daley Machine in Chicago? What does he read? How hard does he work, apart from campaigning? Perhaps, above all, we should know if Barack Obama really is as brilliant and creative as Democrats routinely contend.

The historical record is extraordinarily minimal for two major reasons. First, Obama himself has been very tight-lipped. He saw to it, for example, that all of his academic records are sealed. And he has been evasive when confronted with his past. In a campaign interview with Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, Obama giggled and smiled his way through a thicket of meaningful questions, coming across as a very nice man who had said nothing of substance. That’s effective politicking, of course.

A second reason for the silence is the well-documented fact that the major media in the United States are overwhelmingly liberal and desire success for the most left-wing president in American history. Then too, many on both sides of the ideological fence are hoping that the first black president will lead the nation proudly and effectively.

The establishment right’s fear of being labeled “racist” surely explains part of the reluctance on its part to examine Obama’s past very closely. Then too, Obama has the Ivy League, “insider” credentials that almost automatically protect candidates from beltway critics. In many an elite cocktail party and faculty gathering, criticism of the President is simply “proof” of the speaker’s mental incapacity. Time magazine assured us that with Obama’s election, “brains” had now returned to Washington.

True, in recent months the foibles and failures of the President and his administration have become so glaring that a great many on the right (and a smaller number on the left) have begun to savage Obama’s vision of an America wed to a massive federal government, ever climbing debt, subjective moral standards, and international retreat. Perhaps if these critics had known, or even wanted to know, more about Obama the man before jumping on his bandwagon, they could have spared themselves and the world much anguish.

The far right in the United States, of course, has been the most critical of Obama from the start of his presidential campaigning. The rise of the Tea Party, the popularity of Fox News, and the Republican sweep of 2010 reveal the eagerness of conservatives and centrists to change the nation’s course. Despite leftist claims to the contrary, race is not an issue. The Tea Party’s enthusiastic embrace of black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain in 2011 illustrates the fact.

Some on the far right have been probing Obama’s past, convinced that he is not what he claims to be: a centrist, an intellectual, and a non-political savior of the vast majority of Americans. One of the best examples of the work underway is Jack Cashill’s new book Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, And Letters of America’s First Postmodern President, published in 2011 by Simon and Schuster’s Threshold Editions. Cahill, who holds a doctorate in American Studies from Purdue, is the author of six popular books and a novel. He writes frequently for online publications WorldNetDaily and the American Thinker.

Deconstructing, despite its rather misleading subtitle, is mostly about the claim, made by Cashill during the election campaign of 2008, that Obama did not write his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Does this matter? Well, if the charge is true, Obama has consistently lied about his authorship, which tells us something important about his character. Moreover, Dreams is the source of much of what we know about Obama before he became a presidential candidate. Cashill delights in pointing to its factual errors and inconsistencies.

Cashill charges that Obama ‘s fellow Chicagoan William Ayres, a radical leftist and one time terrorist, was the author or co-author. In the presidential race of 2008 this issue was part of a larger and apparently unsuccessful effort by conservatives to link Obama and Ayres as close friends and ideological allies. Ayres, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a skilled and much published writer.

Cashill bases his case on two major premises. First, that before Dreams, Obama had shown no propensity for exceptional writing. Indeed, from the sparse collection of writings we have, Obama displayed a very mediocre style and at times had trouble matching nouns and verbs. (pp 160-168.) Cashill presents several more current examples of the President’s clumsiness in extemporaneous public speaking. (One cannot forget his public mention of the “Marine Corpse.”)

Secondly, Cashill matches excerpts from four books by Ayres with Dreams. The parallels are at times persuasive (pp 48, 50, 77-80, 120-122, 192-198, 200, and 205-207). For example, both Ayres and Obama used nautical language extensively in their books, often the same words (pp 79-80). Ayres worked as a merchant seaman; we have no knowledge of Obama at sea — other than in a metaphorical sense. Other attempts by the author to show similarities fall flat. The allegations cry out for more sophisticated and scientific examinations.

Cashill also discusses Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope (pp 208-19), a volume which is little more than a collection of platitude-filled campaign speeches. Cashill believes that much of it came from Obama speech writer Jon Favreau, a wunderkind who joined the Obama camp in 2004. The brilliant writing in Dreams is largely missing; still, there are parallels with passages in Ayres, and Cashill thinks that Favreau tried to make this book sound like Dreams. Cashill also points to Obama’s hectic schedule preceding the publication of the book, arguing that the candidate could not possibly have had the time to write anything original.

Cashill’s poorly organized and often padded book is of interest largely because of its attempt to link Dreams with Ayres. On pages 230-31 we read that Ayres told two journalists he was the sole author of the book. He may have been merely trying to be ironic. However, Anne Leary, one of the interviewers, thought later that Ayers was dead serious, and he told Will Englund of the National Journal that he wanted the royalties that were due him.

Like John F. Kennedy, Barak Obama has many secrets. It may well take decades to identify and document all of them. It seems likely that Obama employed Ayres to some degree when writing his autobiography. But further probes into Obama’s past must be based on much greater research and careful reasoning than we find in Cashill’s admittedly partisan blast.

Thomas C. Reeves writes from Wisconsin. Among his dozen books are Twentieth Century America: A Brief History, and biographies of John F. Kennedy, Joseph R. McCarthy, Fulton Sheen, Walter J. Kohler, Jr., and Chester A. Arthur.

It took a lot of guts for President Obama to publicly reverse campaign promises at his 100 days press conference and tell the pro-abortion crowd that “I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they…suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations…The Freedom of Choice Act is not [my] highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s where I’m going to focus.”

It takes a big man to make such a statement about moving away from FOCA. Additionally, those who mailed in their red envelopes also deserve praise for getting him to pause and consider that the issues of abortion (and micro-abortion — directly attacking human embryos) are not just a matter for scientists (materialists), a matter where the ends justify the means. The issue is a matter of the values that define us: an issue where the culture’s values matter as much as cold techniques that use freedom as an excuse for anything.

Seemingly oblivious to it, President Obama — within the very same press conference — created the foundation from which perhaps he can reverse some of his earlier bad social decisions and reverse the hypocrisy within which he still walks. Discussing waterboarding of terrorists, President Obama said: “Waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do… because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are…. You start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.” The same argument against abortion could be made by replacing the word ‘waterboarding’ with ‘abortion’ and replacing ‘torture’ with ‘murder’. Watch…

“[Abortion along with human embryonic stem cell research] violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is [murder]. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do…because we could have gotten this information [or healing] in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are…. You start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.” Yes America, there is reason for hope…. There’s no reason a U.S. President can’t say these words about abortion if he can say them about torture.

Be as suspicious as you may over President Obama’s motives for backtracking on FOCA. Was he just trying to keep poorly informed Catholics within the Democratic party with false hope? [Disclosure: I’m a registered Independent.] Has the leadership read the tea leaves and realized the party is about to be punished with mass defections? Being an optimist, I send President Obama my thanks. I prefer to believe the future is not written in stone, that humans are partners with God in determining the future. The future is determined by today’s actions, above all prayer and fasting. A second wave of red envelopes would also help to remind President Obama of the values of our country; that people are greatly upset that abortion continues to “corrode the character of our country”. The second round could remind him: “In case you mistook my silence last time.”

People of hate see nothing wrong with direct attacks upon innocent human life or direct attacks upon the importance of traditional marriage. “Many who’ve examined the topic” for thousands of years are in agreement… abortion is the taking of innocent human life and produces a culture of death that corrodes everything. Additionally, the reason so many pseudo-feminists (“pro-choicers”) think only of abortion, in Obama’s own words, “simply [as] an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations” is because the Marxists taught them to think that way. They know human relationships only in terms of power struggles (hate). Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator, believed the Marxist/atheistic revolution could only work and take hold with the abolition of the family. He taught that the revolution had to start with the abolition of the family (cf. Schooyans) because marriage was just another form of the assertion of power. Thus, women were “forced” into pregnancy and so needed greater freedom from marriage. The U.N. continues these false ideals under the guise of feminism (cf. Schooyans) as the rest of the world suffers homosexualist attacks on true diversity (male and female) from their State supreme courts.

The problem with most Marxists (really just materialists who deny God and authentic human values) is that they can’t believe in love. Everything is about power politics. They believe only in what their eyes can see and have little value for past wisdom. Everything is about change and revolution. They treat others as only means to an end or have been used by others so much they just won’t believe in love anymore. They’re a lot like secularists. Neither can live fully human lives because neither lives in love. They are simply diminished persons — living like animals, slaves to passions. To be human is to live in love, suffering for others, living for others. Humans are made to be God’s image and likeness and God is love. We can’t say we are fully human, fully in God’s image, if we withhold love from the unborn humans who await our love. Instead we become like animals when we choose to kill the innocent or when we seduce them into bestial behavior. As Marxists and Secularists fail to realize their own humanity, they fail to realize it in others, hence abortion thrives.

It is nice to see Obama indicate that he may be moving away from ideals that were ultimately inspired by Marxists. Let’s increase our prayers for him. And let’s keep those red envelopes going.

Having made several attempts, on American Spectator Online, to make sense of this interminable, albeit exciting, election, I have been chastened by events throughout its unpredictable twists and turns. Thirty days out from the election, with the end game now commencing, I am profoundly uncertain as to its ultimate outcome.

RealClearPolitics.com puts Senator Obama up by 5.9 percent, an averaging of all polling to date. It also has him beating McCain in Virginia, on average, by 2.4 percent. From where I sit in Fairfax County, Virginia, within the orbit of Washington, D.C., Obama is likely to follow the pattern of other statewide Democratic candidates who have rolled up double-digit numbers in this part of what was once considered a safe Red State.

As a native of St. Louis, I note that the Arizona Senator is still holding onto a narrow lead in Missouri, 1.7 percent, which has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election of the post-war era except for 1956. Of course, Virginia, with its growing and diverse population, may be a better indicator than the Show Me State. But I really don’t know.

Clearly, the near meltdown of the nation’s finances in the last two weeks has been a “game changer,” to use the cliche now in vogue. And it is has not changed in favor of Senator McCain and the Republicans.

Last weekend I recall telling my daughter, who is working at a ranch outside of Cody, Wyoming, to move at least some of her deposits from Wachovia into another local bank. While I assumed that federal deposit insurance would eventually come through, I did not want her to be shut out of her cash if the dismemberment of the bank dragged on for months or even years. No one in our family has had a conversation like that since, what, the 1930s?

Although the Obama campaign is sitting pretty for now, thirty days is certainly an eternity in a national political campaign. Just recall the past thirty, sixty or ninety days. Governor Palin has only been around for five or six weeks. The stock market lost between 9 and 10 percent last week. Remember Senator Clinton’s rally late in the primary campaign? Moreover, the McCain campaign is about to “unleash hell,” to use a phrase coined by Peggy Noonan on Meet the Press yesterday. Well, politics ain’t bean bag, as Mr. Dooley reminded us.

Still, the Obama campaign is the model of calm, cool, relentless organizational perfection, registering voters, raising money and organizing volunteers on line and emulating U.S. Grant’s harassment of Lee in forcing the McCain campaign to over-extend its supply lines, divide its forces, or begin triage sooner than it would like. McCain’s recent decision to abandon the field in Michigan was quite a blow given previous high hopes among Republicans.

This general election race pits maybe the weakest of the Democratic candidates against the strongest Republican candidate. Hillary Clinton would probably be winning handily right now given the economic morass, two wars, and an unpopular Republican incumbent in the White House. John McCain’s reputation as a maverick allows him to distance himself from the Bush administration and flourish in a hostile political environment that would have been fatal to the other contenders in the GOP primary. Nevertheless, McCain’s relative strengths are presently overshadowed by the present economic crisis.

The countervailing factors threatening Obama’s recent rise in the polls are the character issue which the McCain campaign is already raising and the dark undertow of any potential “Bradley Effect” in which race may still impact the final vote in November.

Finally, the Catholic vote, often referred to as the “jump ball” of American presidential politics, will be crucial to victory, especially in the Midwest. On social and cultural issues, McCain has a clear advantage with this block of voters. On the economy, Obama has the advantage. The issues of war and peace cut both ways.

This is still an election too close to call.