Thomas Sowell
Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Many years ago, a great hitter named Paul Waner was nearing
the end of his long career. He entered a ballgame with 2,999
hits -- one hit away from the landmark total of 3,000, which
so many hitters want to reach, but which relatively few
actually do reach.
Waner hit a ball that the fielder did not handle cleanly but
the official scorer called it a hit, making it Waner's
3,000th. Paul Waner then sent word to the official scorer
that he did not want that questionable hit to be the one
that put him over the top.
The official scorer reversed himself and called it an error.
Later Paul Waner got a clean hit for number 3,000.
What reminded me of this is the great ferv or that many seem
to feel over the prospect of the first black President of
the United States.
No doubt it is only a matter of time before there is a black
president, just as it was only a matter of time before Paul
Waner got his 3,000th hit. The issue is whether we want to
reach that landmark so badly that we are willing to overlook
how questionably that landmark is reached.
Paul Waner had too much pride to accept a scratch hit.
Choosing a President of the United States is a lot more
momentous than a baseball record. We the voters need to have
far more concern about who we put in that office that holds
the destiny of a nation and of generations yet unborn.
There is no reason why someone as arrogant, foolishly clever
and ultimately dangerous as Barack Obama should become
president -- especially not at a time when the threat of
international terrorists with nuclear weapons looms over 300
million Americans.
Many people seem to regard elections as occasions for
venting emotions, like cheering for your favorite team or
choosing a Homecoming Queen.
The three leading candidates for their party's nomination
are being discussed in terms of their demographics -- race,
sex and age -- as if that is what the job is about.
One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of
the past is discovering how many times people were
preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on
the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far
less important than the momentous weight of responsibility
that office carries.
Just the power to nominate federal judges to trial courts
and appellate courts across the country, including the
Supreme Court, can have an enormous impact for decades to
come. There is no point feeling outraged by things done by
federal judges, if you vote on the basis of emotion for
those who appoint them.
Barack Obama has already indicated that he wants judges who
make social policy instead of just applying the law. He has
already tried to stop young violent criminals from being
tried as adults.
Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the
candidate of new things -- using the mantra of 'change'
endlessly -- the cold fact is that virtually everything he
says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and
virtually everything he says about foreign policy is
straight out of the 1930s.
Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing
government spending, promoting a sense of envy and
grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and
subsidizing those who are not -- all this is a re-run of the
1960s.
We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years
that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates,
double-digit inflation and double- digit unemploymen t.
During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries wer e
ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to
this day.
The violence and destruction were concentrated not where
there was the greatest poverty or injustice but where there
were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and
hamstringing the police.
Internationally, the approach that Senator Obama proposes --
including the media magic of meetings between heads of state
-- was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of
peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human
history.
Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old
and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and
author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
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