The Company You Keep

We do it all the time, sometimes unconsciously. If you want to know more about somebody, you look at his friends. Whom one surrounds oneself with is important, says a lot about you. And I don't think that anybody should come under as much scrutiny in this regard as a president or prospective president of the United States.

Suddenly, Democrats disagree. And no wonder: Barack Obama has been shown to have friendly ties to so many vile, America-hating radical leftists that he's being legitimately called "out of touch" by a woman who once embarrassingly affected what she must have considered a "black accent" to appeal to African American voters. Alan Colmes last night tried to suggest that Republicans were using only a few relationships in the Obamessiah's life to characterize the man as a whole, then went on to talk about how he grew up in Kansas. Newt Gingrich immediately pointed out that Barack Obama grew up in an expensive private school in Hawaii, had a brief stint in boarding school in Indonesia, went to (I think) Columbia and then Harvard Law, then attended a black separatist church in South Chicago and became a state senator. His relationships with the racist, anti-American Jeremiah Wright and with the socialist, anti-American Bill Ayers aren't outliers, they are part of a pattern.

But it's no wonder that he won't seem out of touch to people in college. To them, it will seem mainstream, seem like common sense. Sadly, he also won't seem out of touch to a large portion of the Democratic electorate, who don't see America as specially good or extraordinary. Hopefully voters do realize that Barack Obama does not share their belief, and mine, that America is an exceptional nation in the history of the world. Judging by some recent poll results, I think that they will.