We all know of people who make strange choices, but what about those who make self-defeating choices over and over and over again, so magnetized are they by spouses (and others) who are bad for them? The woman who marries a drunk, then a gambler, then a philanderer – the man who marries a gold digger, then a nag, then an iceberg.

 

Time after time, this type ends up with a variation on an off-note theme, while friends and colleagues shake their heads and remark, "But he’s so smart…she’s so experienced.”

 

That seems to be the universal reaction to last week’s near-implosion of Sen. Barack Obama presidential campaign, which left him the daunting challenge of explaining to a mystified electorate why his soft-spoken, non-combative, let’s-get-beyond-race-and-anger agenda has been threatened-cum-sabotaged by the people he is most attracted to.

 

His archrival Hillary doesn’t have this problem. After decades in the public eye, the electorate is never surprised to learn about yet another unsavory character, shady deal, or questionable legality.

 

But the seemingly idealistic Obama – who says he stands for "hope” and "change” – has now run into a firewall of opposition. Why?

 

Who Hates Obama?

Not the American electorate, which in caucuses and primaries over the last many months has awarded him a majority of popular and electoral votes.

 

Not young people, ages 18 to 45, who have turned out in unprecedented numbers – into the multimillions – to register to vote and who have actually voted for him! This is remarkable given that in every election cycle Democrats have spent zillions to get out the youth vote, but always failed.

 

Not Independent voters who are turning out in record number to vote for the Illinois senator.

 

Not the leftwing media whose members have embraced his candidacy with both giddy enthusiasm and undisguised passion.

 

Not moneybags (like George Soros) and the Socialist and Marxist campus intellectuals who have jumped on the Obamessiah bandwagon.

 

So Who Does Hate Obama?

Which people have so drastically derailed the Obama juggernaut over the past few weeks? We would never have known about any of them if the liberal media had been successful in concealing what they’ve known for years. Thanks only to conservative journalists and pundits were these liberal shills dragged kicking and screaming out of their closets and forced to expose the other "close” relationships Obama has had in both his personal and political life.

 

Exhibit No. 2 (No. 1 to follow): None other than Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the man Obama has considered for over 20 years his trusted and valued "friend” and "spiritual” inspiration.

 

As Ben Wallace-Wells reminds us in Rolling Stone, Obama chose this minister and his church very carefully. He "could have picked any church – the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and `felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.’"

 

That was then. Last week, Rev. Wright – bristling at the young upstart’s audacity to go public in distancing himself from his pastor’s egregious anti-American, anti-Semitic, and blatantly racist pronouncements – seized the moment of Obama’s upcoming primaries in Indiana and North Carolina to speak his mind to PBS’s Bill Moyers and the National Press Club. As Daniel Henninger noted in the Wall St. Journal, "the angry and antic prophet Jeremiah rose to smite him.”

 

The result: effectively to implant Obama’s feet in concrete, the better to deep-six his chance to win the presidency.

 

The day after Wright’s sabotage, Newt Gingrich told an interviewer that the recently- retired leader of Chicago’s Trinity Church "went out of his way to weaken Obama...I think Reverend Wright has a greater interest in his self-importance."

 

But Geoffrey P. Hunt of The American Thinker thought otherwise. It was "for a more cynical reason than ego-preservation...[but for] keeping the pledge payments flowing and collection plates full. Wright's root agenda, in perfect alignment with the far-left Democratic Party politics of indignation, has been to capitalize on the misfortunes of others, to stoke both race and class resentment, offer a platform and voice pipe for the permanently aggrieved all to fill his own coffers.”

 

The reverend’s "worst nightmare,” Hunt adds, "would be Barack Obama as president...because [Wright’s] raison d'etre would evaporate.”

 

Now for Exhibit No. 1: Obama’s wifey Michelle, who told a crowd in Milwaukee, "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.” Michelle also poured out how "bitter” she was toward America in her Princeton thesis. And proving that an acid nature doesn’t sweeten over time, she told one interviewer that Obama "had bad breath in the morning,” and informed the crowd at a fundraiser in Feb. 2007: "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's the phenomenon…and then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive."

 

I think it’s safe to say that Exhibit No. 1 and Exhibit 2 – the two most powerfully influential people in Obama’s life – are not on his side!

 

Okay, you may say, everyone has a few bad apples in their "circles.” A few maybe, but not a bushel!

 

We have also learned of Obama’s not-so-casual relationship with the indicted Chicago "fixer” Tony Rezko, and a laundry list of associates who openly hate America, among them domestic terrorist William Ayers, and the official blogger of his campaign, Sam Graham-Felsen.

 

Then there are the America-hating groups and people who endorsed him: Hamas, the Black Panther Party, and the Marxist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, as well as Obama fundraiser Rashid Khalidi, a "confessed domestic terrorist,” according to Aaron Klein.

 

Why is it that the mild-mannered, seemingly non-combative Obama is attracted to such a large number of America haters? And why does he inspire them to give him their passionate allegiance, their enthusiastic endorsements, and their barrels full of money?

 

Inside Obama’s Psyche

A caller to a radio show recently theorized that mixed-race "mulattos" like Obama are resentful that while they're half-white, they always come out black. They can never take advantage of their white half because while the black community accepts them, the white community doesn’t.

 

I’d say this is a legitimate reason for anger, probably the same rage that fuels Rev. Wright, given that he is clearly of "mixed” parentage.

 

The result, others theorize, is anger at the white parent (or grandparent) – or their symbols, like big bad America – which is probably why Obama wrote in his book Dreams of My Father:

 

"I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, which I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”

 

When he was questioned about Rev. Wright’s racist statements, Obama initially replied:

 

"I can no more disown [him] than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

 

Asked to explain this totally weird comparison – 20 years of hearing his pastor’s racist rants vs. his grandmother’s one-time confession – Obama replied that his grandmother was a "typical white person.”

 

Conclusion: Obama defends the indefensible, embraces those who say the indefensible, and trashes the people who love him.

 

Why? Because the indefensible crowd speaks for him! It is not in Obama’s nature to be aggressive and confrontational, insulting or hurtful, vicious or adversarial. But all of these traits are clearly in his heart and soul and psyche! Why else would he defend them?

 

Obama is a typical passive-aggressive personality who pretends to be a nice guy by using fuzzy language and a let’s-all-get-together mantra to seduce his acolytes, but who relies on his surrogates – wifey, minister, terrorist endorsements, et al – to express his real agenda, i.e., getting back! But getting back at whom?

 

My theory is that Obama wants to "get back” at all those evil capitalists and racist entities that robbed his Marxist mother, father, and stepfather of the respect he thought they deserved. According to the writer Spengler in a riveting L.A. Times article, both his wife and mother "reveal his secret: he hates America.”

 

He Hates America?

That’s crazy, you may say. But it does raise the question of how anyone could love this country and want what both Obama and Hillary – with few variations – have promised:

 

▪ A white-flag surrender in Iraq and de facto capitulation to the radical Islamists intent on destroying our way of life. Obama even told the AP that, "preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq.”

 

▪ The nomination of federal, appellate, and Supreme Court judges who will legislate from the bench and are in line with his stated philosophy that the U.S. Constitution is a "living document” that must be interpreted in the context of the times.

 

▪ Weakening America’s military, including, among other things, making defense cuts during war time, cutting spending on national missile defense, refusing to weaponize space, slowing development of future combat systems, and seeking a "world without nuclear weapons.”

 

▪ Maintaining his 100-percent approval rating from NARAL by supporting abortion on demand with the same vigor he opposed notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions and the ban on partial birth abortions.

 

▪ Handing $845 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to other nations to realize his Global Poverty Act.

 

▪ Pushing for sky-high taxes.

 

▪ Adding nearly $900 billion to the budget of new, big-government programs over his first term in office.

 

▪ Supporting de facto amnesty for illegal aliens, as well as awarding them drivers’ licenses, welfare, Medicaid and participation in Social Security.

 

▪ Continued opposition to making English our national language.

 

▪ Across-the-board gun control.

 

▪ Spending billions on the colossal hoax known as man-made global warming.

 

Come to think of it, the political philosophies of both Obama and Hillary echo those of all lefties. But where were all these like-minded people when Obama was flailing last week, desperately trying to stanch his fast-ebbing support in Indiana and North Carolina?

 

In an ominous report, Daniel Henninger remarked: "At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.”

 

"No prominent black clergyman came forth…[but] Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.”

 

His famous endorsers vanished from the scene. Henninger lists them: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow/

 

No big-city mayors in Obama’s camp spoke out in his defense: Chicago's Richard Daley, Cleveland's Frank Reynolds, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Washington's Adrian Fenty, Newark's Cory Booker, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon.

 

"Any major op-ed page would have stopped the presses to print a statement of support from Ted Kennedy or such for the senator,” Henninger says. "None appeared.”

 

Henninger explains that, "Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation's presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.”

 

But To The Point’s Dr. Jack Wheeler explains it better.

 

"If you could bring the playwrights of Ancient Greece – Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes – from 5th century Athens to watch the Democrat primary race of today, they would recognize it instantly. It is a perfect Greek tragedy...nothing could be more blindingly obvious…any possible hope of Obama being elected president of the United States has been obliterated by his madman pastor.”

 

I still think that Obama will win the nomination. And I still hope America is smart enough not to elect him. This ambitious young man needs a few more years to plumb and purge his rage-infested psyche, get rid of the people-baggage who continue to sabotage him, read up on American history, and move to the middle.

 

Then we’ll talk!