Topic category:  Other/General

The late William F. Buckley had faith in God and the American people, not illusions about Harvard. He sagaciously announced, "I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.”

On Election Day 2008 the American people will decide whether a former president of the Harvard Law Review should become the next President of the United States of America.

Mr. Buckley's only child, Christopher, is supporting Senator Obama, and announced it in an article the title of which began with the words "Sorry Dad."

"Dad" knew better.

National Journal's Stuart Taylor's pre-election article is titled "Which Obama Would America Get?" and subtitled "The Liberal Ideologue Could Be A Well-Meaning Failure; The Pragmatic Reformer Could Be A Great Leader."

But neither is the real Obama.

Obama is the most Far Left candidate ever nominated by a major political party, not a "liberal ideologue." National Journal itself rated Obama the most liberal of the United States Senators. (Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an avowed Socialist, was number 4.) Even liberal former Senator and 1968 Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern can't swallow taking away the secret ballot in union election that the election of Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress would bring.

Obama is not a "pragmatic reformer" either. He has no military experience and no governmental executive experience. He's running on "the fierce urgency of now" as the candidate of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. For major accomplishment, he's substituting gall. He can deliver a prepared speech superbly, but when he speaks extemporaneously, he slips and shows disdain for Americans who "cling" to God and guns and an intention to use the taxing power to redistribute wealth.

Mr. Taylor:

"When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, 'Who is the real Barack Obama?' there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist.

"I don't believe that...."

BUT, Obama is extremist.

Example: Obama's position on abortion as an Illinois state senator was about as extreme as possible. What the United States Congress did nearly unanimously to protect babies born alive as a result of botched abortions, Obama blocked the state of Illinois from doing.

And the most Mr. Taylor said was that he did not believe Obama is "sinister."

That's because Obama has not been properly scrutinized.

Are YOU afraid to show your birth certificate?

Presidential candidates routinely produce tax returns and medical records, even though the Constitution does not require their production, but Obama is hiding the evidence that supposedly would prove that he is a natural-born United States citizen, which IS a constitutional requirement.

Mr. Taylor: "...I... think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience -- albeit as willing to deploy deception as the next politician. But while the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president."

Maybe it's a Harvard thing. (Mr. Taylor too was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.)

What's "admirable" about any politician who "deploy[s] deception"?

Mr. Taylor:

"An ultraliberal in moderate garb? The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called 'redistribution of wealth' in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system's all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits.

"This redistributionist Obama has stayed in the background since he set his sights on the presidency years ago, except when he told Joe the Plumber that his tax plan would help 'spread the wealth.' This Obama seems largely invisible to many supporters. But he may retain some attachment to the radical-leftist sensibility in which -- as his impressive 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, explains with reflective detachment -- he was marinated as a youth and young man."

That autobiography definitely impressed me--with Obama's appreciation of his ability to manipulate white people and Obama's choice of black liberation theology and Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr.

Why Mr. Taylor believes that Obama ever became detached from his "radical-leftist sensibility," I don't know. It's not an assumption I make, especially with Obama lying about his relationships with William "domestic terrorist" Ayers and, more importantly, ACORN.

Mr. Taylor: "Obama spent much of his teenage years searching for his black identity. He was mentored for a time by the poet Frank Marshall Davis, a black-power activist who had once been a member of the Communist Party, and who was (according to Obama's book) 'living in the same Sixties time warp' as Obama's mother, a decidedly liberal free spirit."

One does not become a political star in the United States, even President of the United States, by declaring oneself a Communist.

Reread Obama's discussion of Rev. Wright in his autobiography. Then read those principles on the paper that Obama walked away with from his first meeting with Rev. Wright.

Mr. Taylor: "While the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president."

Only if, like Saul on the road to Damascus, he has a conversion!

Mr. Taylor:

"In college, lest he be 'mistaken for a sellout,' Obama 'chose my friends carefully,' according to his book: 'The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.' After college, his social conscience steered him to become a community organizer and 'organize black folks' in Chicago, from 1985 to 1988.

"It was then that Obama met the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who as head of Trinity United Church of Christ did many good things but had a now-famous penchant for America-hating, white-bashing, conspiracy-theorizing, Farrakhan-honoring rants. A central theme of the first Wright sermon that Obama attended -- the one titled 'the audacity of hope' -- was that 'white folks' greed runs a world in need.'"

Obama chose Rev. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, which adopted the Black Value System, written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee, chaired by the late Vallmer Jordan in 1981, and set forth on its website (www.tucc.org/black_value_system.html).

The twelfth and final commitment reads as follows: "Personal Commitment to Embracement of the Black Value System. To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the Black Community and the Advancement of Black People towards freedom."

So much for Dr. Martin Luther King's dream about judging based on character instead of color!

Mr. Taylor: "After graduating near the top of his Harvard Law School class in 1991, Obama could easily have landed a prestigious Supreme Court clerkship and gone on to a big law firm where partners make well over a $1 million a year. Instead, he followed his social conscience and political ambition back to Chicago, joining a small law firm."

Agreed. But he also could have joined the military, or the Peace Corps, or Vista, and he didn't do any of those things either. At Harvard, Obama spoke of becoming the Mayor of Chicago, so naturally his political ambition took him to Chicago.

Mr. Taylor: "Obama became more than casually acquainted with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground bomber with whom he served on the boards of two Chicago philanthropic groups. In 1995, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn -- the same Dohrn who in a blood-curdling 1969 speech had cited the Charles Manson gang of murderers as role models for the Weather Underground -- co-hosted a political fundraiser for Obama at their home. By then, the still-unrepentant Ayers had become a respected member of an academic establishment in which far-left views are fashionable."

Respected by whom? Not by me. I don't find unrepentant terrorists respectable. The Far Left contaminated the academic establishment, but that did not make Ayers or Dohrn respectable.

Mr. Taylor: "I dwell on these much-debated associations not because I think that Obama sympathizes with what he has called Ayers's 'detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8' or identifies with Wright's wild ravings. But I do think that Obama has understated (at best) his involvement with Wright and Ayers. And I wonder about the worldview of a man who was so comfortable with such far-left extremists and whose wife, Michelle, asserted earlier this year that America is 'just downright mean' and 'guided by fear' and that most Americans' lives have 'gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.'"

There's plenty that is worrisome about unscrutinized and media-protected Obama. Ayers' wife and Obama's wife were at the same big Chicago law firm together before Obama ran for any public office and Michelle Obama had to know about the terrorist history of Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, William Ayers. Much more importantly, Obama has been lying about, not understating, his relationship with ACORN.

Mr. Taylor: "Obama's voting record as an Illinois and then U.S. senator is not extremist or radical. But it is not a bit bipartisan, either. He has hardly ever broken with his party, and he famously had the most liberal record of any senator in 2007 (although not in 2006 or 2005), according to National Journal's vote ratings."

Obama opposed welfare reform and supported infanticide. That's radical.

Mr. Taylor:

"This Obama has endorsed a long list of liberal restrictions on free enterprise that could end up hurting the people they are supposed to help, along with the rest of us: statist remedies for our broken educational system; encouraging unionization by substituting peer pressure and an undemocratic card-check process for secret ballots; raising the wages of women or lowering those of men who have dissimilar jobs that are declared by bureaucrats to be of comparable worth; renegotiating NAFTA; and more."

That's radical too!

Mr. Taylor:

"I wonder how far Obama wants to go down the road suggested by his lament in that 2001 radio interview that the civil-rights movement had failed to engineer 'redistribution of wealth' and 'economic justice.' Would he be content with the moderately redistributive, Clintonesque increase in taxes on high-earning Americans that he proposes now? Or would he end up pushing for confiscatory taxes that could stifle entrepreneurship and job creation?"

We better not risk satisfying Mr. Taylor's curiosity!

Mr. Taylor: "The best thing for the country would be for Obama to take on the interest groups and to govern from the center."

It would be a huge improvement if Obama was a centrist like Mr. Taylor, but he's not. The best thing for this country is for McCain-Palin to win.

Mr. Taylor: "And would Obama's declared desire to appoint judges and justices driven mainly by 'empathy' for 'the powerless,' rather than by fidelity to the law, lead to judicially invented constitutional rights to welfare, to ever-more-rigid preferences based on race and gender, and to other novel judicial overrides of democratic governance?"

Such legislating from the bench and more--striking "under God" from "The Pledge of Allegiance," sandblasting "Laus Deo" (Praise to God) from the top of the Washington Monument and substituting Winter Day for Christmas as a national holiday to maintain strict governmental neutrality between religion and irreligion would be on the way.

Mr. Taylor:

"A pragmatic reformer? The pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign is a prodigious listener and learner. He can see all sides of every question. He seems suffused with good judgment. His social conscience has been tempered by recognition that well-intentioned liberal prescriptions can have perverse unintended consequences. His tax and health care proposals are much less radical than Republican critics suggest.

"This Obama has surrounded himself not only with liberal advisers but also with mainstream moderates such as Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. He has won the support of moderate Republicans, including Colin Powell and Susan Eisenhower, and conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman and Charles Fried.

"This is the Obama who said in his dazzling 2004 Democratic convention speech that 'there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America.' This is the Obama who distanced himself not only from Jeremiah Wright but also -- more subtly -- from the rest of the racial-grievance crowd in a March 18 speech deploring as 'profoundly distorted' the view that 'sees white racism as endemic.'

"The pragmatic Obama is smart enough to know that reforms take root only if they enjoy broad public support and that self-identified conservatives vastly outnumber self-identified liberals in America. He also understands that while we need more-effective regulation, 'America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress. It's created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It's led to a standard of living unmatched in history.' He has said that 'we don't want to return to marginal tax rates of 60 or 70 percent.' He wants to expand the armed forces and to send more troops to Afghanistan.

"The pragmatic Obama is not just a made-for-the-campaign creation. He was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 not only because he was one of the most brilliant students but also because the handful of conservatives whose votes helped tip the balance saw him as fair-minded and open to their point of view. And they were not disappointed.

"Obama has dipped his toe in the water of questioning Democratic interest-group orthodoxies. He has supported charter schools (while opposing vouchers) and merit pay for teachers; he offended trial lawyers by voting in 2005 to curb unwarranted class-action lawsuits; and last year he questioned whether affluent black children such as his daughters should continue to get racial preferences over more needy whites and Asians."

"The Senator from ACORN" IS a made-for-the-purpose creation and a viable candidate because his manner contrasts sharply (and favorably) with previous presidential hopefuls Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, he is protected instead of scrutinized by most of the major media, white guilt is real and more helpful than white racism (also real) is detrimental to Obama's chance of winning and blacks voting for Obama because he's partly black is treated as appropriate.

Abraham Lincoln was right: "It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

Mr. Taylor:

"To be sure, apart from these less-than-bold gestures, Obama's down-the-line liberal voting record does not give a centrist like me much basis for hope that he would resist pressure from Democratic interest groups, ideologues, and congressional leaders to steer hard to the left.

"But I do hope that if Obama wins, the enormity of the economic and international crises facing him will accelerate his intellectual evolution and convince him that simply replacing dumb Bush policies with dumb Democratic policies will only drive the country deeper into the ditch. The best thing for the country would be to take on the interest groups and govern from the center. That would also be the best way for Obama to win re-election and have a truly historic presidency."

Voting for Obama and hoping for the best is not what's best for America.

Ann Coulter actually read Obama's autobiography and noted Obama's explanation of how he operated:

"When his mother expresses concern about Obama's high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother's hand and told her not to worry.

"This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: 'It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.'"

Ann continued:

"First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama's entire presidential campaign. But moreover -- he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: 'Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.' Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?"

Obama should not be, but he is.

Still, the voters, not the biased media, will decide whether Obama should be elected instead of McCain..

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.