An article in The Gazette, the local paper here in Colorado Springs, features a front-page article on 5th congressional district Democratic delegates.  It prompted the following letter to the editor from ClearCommentary:

For those who lack a historical memory of the Democratic Party, presidential candidate Barack Obama might seem like the quintessential selection for the nomination ("A Look at Some Local Delegates," May 21).  However, for people who have an understanding of the party of Truman, Kennedy, and Jackson, it's painfully evident that, as the National Review reported, Obama is the most liberal member of the senate.

This is a senator who supports a total ban on handguns and indictments of gun manufacturers, who supports partial birth abortion, a practice that titan Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan called "infanticide," who has pledged to raise corporate taxes, and, crucially, is on record stating he would sit down, without pre-conditions, with the leaders of Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. 

Delegates Mike Maday and Lynn Young seem representative of Obama's supporters.  Although Maday, a student volunteer for George McGovern, a 1972 presidential candidate who lost in a landslide, believes Obama "will have broader appeal than McGovern," he's actually a carbon copy of him, most importantly in naive views about appeasing dictators.  Young is a former volunteer at Planned Parenthood and a sexual education curricula writer who is clearly in the thrall of Obama-mania:  "There is something larger than party politics happening here."  I wish she'd tell us what it is because Obama is an arch liberal who has never challenged the smug assumptions of the hard left and, desipte his repeated invocations about bipartisanship, has no record to support it.

It was Truman who stated that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."  And, who can forget Jack Kennedy's pledge that America will "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom."

If you can't imagine Barack Obama making similar assertions it's because he's a member of the new Democratic Party, which seems to have forgotten its laudible past and has adopted a foreign policy that apologizes for America's alleged sins and looks forward to presidential level meetings with despots.  As such, he's clearly out of step with mainstream Americans.

Senator Obama's speech yesterday concerning America's energy consumption, which would be better described as a lecture, reprised the theme we'll see more of as November approaches, which is the left's love of international consensus.  He argued that driving our SUVs and keeping our homes at 72 degrees is simply no longer going to be accepted by the rest of the civilized world; that's always followed by the comparative statistic that although we're a small percent of the world's population, we use a disproportionate percentage of its energy.

Well, before we open our collective veins in a warm bath we should also note that the United States produces 36 percent of the world's wealth, something you'll never hear from a liberal.  Moreover, you'll never hear them state that the world should first express its thanks for America's role in two world wars and for expunging Soviet communism.  We could add to that mix the fact that Americans are among the most generous people per capita, donating $245 billion to charity in 2006.

But none of that advances the left's goal of flattening America's profile on the world stage, or of using such canards as global warming to achieve goals it can't otherwise politically achieve.  They are also determined to inhibit what they see as America's imperialist instincts, nationalist hubris, and hegemonic designs.

None of this has any more substance than other liberal fictions that are meticulously crafted for a dark political purpose, but they are a prelude to their goal of imposing international 'law' on America.  Indeed, the Obamas of the world see America as ripe for right-sizing, for emasculating its Wilsonian beliefs that democratic principles are at once self-evident and universal, which are embarrassments for them, and, which is why wearing a flag lapel pin is a form of civic torture.

The global warming debate may be cooling but you would never know it by the way in which Obama--and McCain with his love of 'cap and trade'--seems determined to hobble the U.S.  Curiously, the Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine just announced that it has the signatures of 31,000 scientists attesting to the statement that humans aren't, in fact, responsible for climate change.  That's 15 times the number of scientists as the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which the left routinely lionizes as the gold standard. 

Mr. Obama's argument for America to fall passively into line with the so-called international community can be linked to his previous comments about rural white folks who turn to guns and religion out of frustration--it's those folks, the common man, the freedom loving, culturally unalloyed individual, who are in his cross-hairs.  Those are the 'conspicuous consumers' who still think of money when you mention 'green,' who are baffled by the phrase 'carbon neutral,' and who think that 'gun control' takes two hands.

It's curious that upon closer scrutiny it's Obama and his liberal brethren who want hegemony over America with their own form of laws and regulations, those derived from the forced consensus of the 'global community.'  Ideological permissiveness, or to use their pet phrase, 'diversity,' is reserved for those whose beliefs neatly comport with the left's vision of a world under the rule of International Law, where individualism is obsolete, where freedoms are doled out in pre-set measures, and where ownership of money and land is overseen by an unelected committee.

They won't say that, of course, but astute observers can make credible inferences from Obama's speeches that bring you to those same conclusions.  And, despite his admonition to leave his wife alone, Michelle has inserted herself into this campaign and so her newly found pride in America is fair game for critics, as are her research papers from college, which have a decidedly Marxist tinge to them.

In the past year, the picture of Obama as clearly outside of the mainstream of traditional American thought, has become ever more apparent and stands in stark contrast to McCain, who appeals to Independents and conservative Democrats just as well as he does Republicans.  Obama may one day understand that you can't win that broad middle swath of American voters by scolding them about their energy consumption--indeed, it's kind of un-American.