DAK's Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Michael Barone

Obama's presidential campaign was an entrepreneurial enterprise whose success owed much to harnessing individual initiative through an innovative management structure and creatively using emerging technology. The campaign, as well as the candidate, helped inspire under-30 voters, who preferred Obama by an unprecedented 66 percent to 32 percent margin -- as opposed to his 50 percent to 49 percent margin in those 30 and over. But keeping the Detroit Three in their present form, with their extravagant health care benefits and the union's 5,000 pages of work rules, is an exercise in preserving in amber the America of the past.

Fred Barnes

The top priority for Obama is the economic downturn. We know his solution because he's been talking about it for two years. It's to revive the economy from the bottom up, cutting taxes for the middle class, sending checks to the poor, and paying for new spending by raising taxes on the well-off. That includes increasing the tax rate on capital gains and dividends.

Does anyone think this will work? It was tried by the president whom Obama seems to regard as his model, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rather than jolt the country out of the Depression, FDR prolonged the economic slump right up to World War II. He advanced the interests of organized labor over those of business. Obama would do roughly the same through card check, a minimum wage increase, and protectionism.

Camille Paglia

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind
prejudice.

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