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RALEIGH, N.C. -- Sen. Barack Obama, after accusing Sen. Hillary Clinton of "playing gotcha games," declined Thursday to commit to a debate in North Carolina before the state's May 6 primary. "We're trying to figure out what our schedule looks like, but I'll be honest with you, we've now had 21" debates, Obama said in response to an audience member's question at a rally at the state fairgrounds. Clinton has agreed to a debate proposed for April 27 in Raleigh. Over the last three days, Gov. Mike Easley, former Gov. Jim Hunt and Democratic leaders of the state legislature have...

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new-—an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that. But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal. He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the...

Liberalism is the home and incubator of “multiculturalism” -- the belief that all cultures have value and should in no way be changed by little things like the Western world, or modernity. If you practice a form of herbal voodoo and speak a language with 13 remaining adherants, they’ll argue you should be celebrated, subsidized, and provided with a full-time interpreter should you decide to get a job at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In general, the stranger and more rare one’s culture, the more valuable it is held to be as a specimen in the collection of the multicultural...

When they face off Wednesday night in their Pennsylvania debate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be fighting each other for the Keystone State's 158 delegates. But they'll also be fighting a common foe: A growing belief that neither can win the general election in November. It's a problem Clinton has had all along, and Obama, despite being the front-runner, is now proving he belongs in the same soup. Clinton started with half of America's voters saying they would never support her for President, and the number hasn't budged. Against Republican John McCain, she would have to win virtually every...

Well, he's done it again. Barak Obama has inadvertently parted the curtain and allowed us to have a peek behind his carefully crafted stage persona. Yet he even outdid himself this time, when he showed his disdain for people of faith as well as gun owners, deriding both groups as "bitter" while clearly characterizing them as weak and misguided. Starting in the 1960's the Democratic party abandoned its roots as "the party of the working man." It is now run by arrogant elitists like Michel Moore who see people who actually go to church as rubes, and gun owners as...

Barack Obama seemed to have survived the blasphemous rants of his preacher and remained relatively untarnished by the perceived dissatisfactions of his privileged wife. But he may be less lucky with remarks he made recently about embittered, small-town Americans, who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Those words now cling to Obama like Styrofoam packing peanuts. The more he tries to brush them away, the more they seem to burrow into the American psyche. Being effete comes naturally to Democrats...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.</p> <p>Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.</p>

A Conservative History of the American Left, by Daniel J. Flynn (Crown Forum, 436 pp., $27.50) In 1969, the Theater for Ideas organized a symposium to discuss whether acting should be “theater or therapy.” The event was prompted in part by the antics of the Living Theater, which had become famous for asking members of the audience to shed their clothes onstage along with the cast. In an emblematic moment, the distinguished critic Robert Brustein, one of the symposium’s panelists, spoke of the importance of “supremely gifted individuals” such as Chekhov to the theater—and was met with shouts of “F--k...

The Department of Justice reports that approximately 8,000 blacks were murdered in the United States in 2005. In one year, that's exactly double the total number of American military deaths during the entire five years of the war in Iraq; in one year, that's 10 times the average number of American military deaths per year since the start of the war. A recent study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice shows that blacks committed murders in 2005 at a rate seven times higher than whites. The vast majority of those 8,000 black murders in 2005...

After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles.... But it’s now evident that even a Hillary campaign would be tame by comparison to the cultural confrontation flowing from an Obama nomination. The transformation of the 2008 campaign into a full-fledged cultural battle is what is really emerging from the Jeremiah Wright flap. A president who identifies with Malcolm X? A man who grew up alienated from ordinary American life and...

One of the creepy things about our "need to have a conversation about race" is the assumption that whites can somehow make blacks feel better, or be happier, or be more self-accepting. Nobody has the power to do that, except what individuals do for themselves, one person at a time. Most people don't come close to lasting happiness in their own lives. So the popular Leftist charge of America's "institutional racism" comes down to saying that "The Great White Conspiracy is responsible for rescuing you from your bad feelings." That is just cockeyed. Far too many black people don't feel...

WASHINGTON -- The racially charged debate over Barack Obama's relationship with his longtime pastor hasn't much changed his close contest against Hillary Clinton, or hurt him against Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC polls with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, called the latest poll a "myth-buster" that showed the pastor controversy is "not the beginning of the end for the Obama campaign." But both Democrats, and especially New York's Sen. Clinton, are showing wounds from their prolonged and increasingly bitter nomination contest, which could weaken the...

Until the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama's spiritual mentor in Black Liberation Theology, popped out of the woodwork, I didn't even know about BLT -- Black Liberation Theology. But the doctrines of Black Liberation have been preached since 1966 in black churches, with the enthusiastic support of white churches of the Left, notably the United Church of Christ. The Rev. Wright runs an official UCC church. Though I am not a professional theologian, I daresay that Jesus would not, repeat not, approve of BLT. Because Black Liberation Theology seems to go straight against every single word in the Sermon on...

Senator Barack Obama said in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, "The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact." Yet he also claimed that to fear a black person on the street more than a white person is a racial "stereotype", "bred" into us. To the contrary, such a fear is actually "grounded in reason and fact." When the numbers are crunched, a black person is almost six times more likely than a white person to be a murderer.Senator Barack Obama in his Race Speech said his white grandmother "once confessed her fear of black men...

WASHINGTON -It is already easy to imagine the Republican attack ads against Barack Obama. They open with video of his wife, Michelle, saying she was proud of America "for the first time in my adult lifetime" because of her husband's presidential candidacy. Cut to the Illinois Senator explaining that he doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin because it is a "substitute for true patriotism." Then flash a clip of Obama explaining that his Caucasian grandmother was a "typical white person" because she uttered racial epithets and was afraid of black people. Finally, the coup de grace, pictures of Obama's...

Despite the efforts of most of the main stream media (and Obama himself) trying to spin the incidents regarding Barack Obama's preacher and spiritual advisor into something acceptable to Americans, and his speech regarding race, by doing some individualresearch, it becomes clear that the spin will simply just not wash. The Trinity Church subscribes to Black Liberation Theology. I believe that Obama will not leave that Church for one simple and obvious reason. Despite his new found disgust in "some" terminology that Wright employed, Obama must agree with the theology that the church teaches. He is raising his kids in...

—The modified hang-out, and the modified modified hangout Despite the serial profession of a new politics, there is something Nixonian about Obama's recent disclaimers over his racist pastor's diatribes. At first he tried to blame the messenger: "Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor.” The problem is not cherries, Senator, but an entire orchard. The most egregious slurs are not from two decades past, but post 9/11 and especially in 2006. And Obama should have learned from Nixon that when there is something there, it is best...

Excerpt: And, you know, he hasn't been my political adviser, he's been my pastor. And I have to say that the clips that have been shown over the past couple of days are deeply disturbing to me. I wasn't in church during those sermons. The things he said and the way he said them I think are offensive. And I reject them, and they don't reflect who I am or what I believe in. In fairness to him, this was sort of a greatest hits, they basically culled five or six sermons out of 30 years of preaching. That doesn't...

Barack Obama's words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It's all very well to seek, as Mr. Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the "old politics." But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country? In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the...

Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 in April, and by January 2009 five other justices will be from 69 to 75 years old. If Barack Obama is elected president, he will probably--with the benefit of resignations by liberal justices eager for him to be the president who chooses their successors--have the opportunity to appoint two or three Supreme Court justices in his first term, with another two or three in a potential second term. That prospect ought to focus the attention of all Americans who want a Supreme Court that practices judicial restraint and respects the proper realm of representative...