Personal Aside: Obama, with Much to be Modest About, Spreads Guilt for Bush Not Instantly Restoring New Orleans.

In a sharp moment of utter candor, the “Sun-Times” Lynn Sweet yesterday explained that the reason Barack Hussein Obama relies on the vagaries of hope-hope-hope and the misty apparitions of “a new generation,” is because his resume is so skimpy. Sweet, a superb reporter, can’t help herself: is forced to tell the truth as she reports in the same way George Tagge did a generation ago for “Tribune” readers. But Obama is more than a one-note candidate. He is skilled at using age-old guilt nostrums to mobilize black and white liberal voters. Any thought that his is a new day should be dismissed. New day? The same old creaky liberal Democratic pandering for black votes at the expense of the facts will be conducted under the aegis of a cool, tall, rangy youth who looks like tomorrow but sounds dishearteningly like lefty yesterday.

Blasting the Bush administration for the slow pace in restoring New Orleans, saying, without supporting argument, reconstruction is no longer a White House priority, Obama reviewed the disaster much like a routine event rather than a storm surge that breached the city’s levees at many points, leaving 80% of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters…a devastation called by the Coast Guard as the greatest disaster in U. S. history. The man who is going to give us all a breath of fresh air from the stifling climate of partisanship said not a word about the internecine battles waged between the Democratic governor of Louisiana and the Democratic New Orleans mayor who was reelected strongly despite widely-acknowledged incompetence…and commented not a whit about how Mississippi’s recovery, under an outstanding Republican governor, is fast leaving Louisiana with its 19th century jurisdictional fiefdoms behind.

Obama, supposedly the fresh young voice of a new politics, is instead the discouraging tenor of rebuke at whites for not doing enough for blacks—familiar to listeners of the Reverends Jesse Jackson, Sr. and Al Sharpton…a view that overflows with demand for more paternalism…that pleads plaintively: the federal government can do more for us than you’re doing but hasn’t done it yet! No message of real hope or fresh vision from presidential hopeful Obama who is talking hope with messages scribbled via David Axelrod. The message is: hey, whitey, once again you haven’t gotten the feds to do more for us…proof that Obama is just another polarizing Democratic figure masquerading as a hopeful one. In essence there is no difference between Obama and the rougher hewn Jackson and Sharpton.