Obama's "Subustance" is a Radical Agenda

By now it is a virtual truism among the Right that Barack Obama is all “style” and no “substance.”

It is equally true for the Right to see him as a left-wing radical, probably the most radical politician ever to get this close to the presidency. The contradiction between these two claims is clear: if Obama holds radical views then he does have “substance,” even if it is not the kind of “substance” that is palatable to the Right. If he is all “style,” then there is no basis to attribute any kind of views to him, radical or non-radical.

So which is it?

The truth is this: Obama is indeed a radical, and unquestionably the most radical presidential candidate this country has ever seen. His speeches, designed as they are to conceal this, consist of exceedingly vague generalities that render them, at least to the untrained ear, woefully vapid. But that is the point: his speeches wouldn’t need to place a premium on “style” if the “substance” of his views didn’t so offend mainstream American sensibilities.

And he knows it.

Still, the idea prevailing among some quarters of the Right -- that Obama says nothing in his speeches -- isn’t altogether correct. To those with even a remote sense of political savvy (to say nothing of those who are familiar with Obama’s history) the “substance” of his views is legible in spite of the euphemistic drivel that he spreads over it.

Obama’s rhetoric must be interpreted within the context of what we know about him. The “Change,” for example, that he promises, must be understood in the light of the radical, “black nationalist,” anti-free market, anti-“middle classness,” aspirations that in word and deed he has expressed continually throughout his life. The “Hope” that he champions must be understood similarly.

Obama’s speeches, overtly, are indeed all “style” and no “substance.” Yet covertly, they contain traces of the “substance” of which Obama is made, a “substance” that will taste poisonous to the American palate if ever they are forced to ingest it.

Obama’s opponents would be better off ceasing to make contradictory claims about him, because in so doing, they expose themselves as dishonest ideologues who will say anything to discredit their rivals. They appear to be fundamentally no different from their Leftist counterparts who simultaneously say of George W. Bush that he is both an idiot and clever enough to fool everyone into doing his bidding at almost every turn, or that he is a religious fundamentalist ideologue who wants to remake the world, beginning with the Middle East, in the image of his religious/political vision, but who is at the same time motivated only by a desire to satisfy his “cronies” in the oil business.

No, it is time for the Right to depict Obama as he truly is: an ambitious and clever politician who, in disguising his radical plans for the United States behind fluffy rhetoric, is playing the average American voter for a sucker.