Perhaps the single most illuminating indicator of character is the selection of one’s associations. Obama’s have been consistent and clarifying. For twenty years Obama has been a member of Reverend Wright’s church, holding in high regard this dispenser of racist America hating black liberation calumny. Never mind that the Reverend lives in a multimillion dollar home in a gated white community. We may reasonably conclude that the Reverend has been quite rational in spewing his irrational arguments.

Obama has been involved with Tony Rezko. He has been an intimate friend and disciple of terrorist William Ayers and his wife. Obama has been intimately associated with and benefited from his association with ACORN, a group that is under investigation for massive criminal voter fraud. He has been close with terrorist-supporting Rashid Khalidi and Khalid Al-Mansour. The list goes on and on.

Michelle Obama gives us insight into Barack Obama’s personality and values. Michelle views the United States as mean. She views its people as unhappy and struggling. Yet, she has had  the blessings of a middle class childhood, a hard-working father who get her and her siblings through school and who sufficiently motivated them to get into what pass for the finest colleges and universities in the United States. Even so, she is ungrateful. Until her husband ran for president, Michelle had never in her adult life been proud of the country that has made possible for her so much wealth and achievement and security.

Michelle whines about having to pay for ballet lessons when the family has had an annual gross income of several millions of dollars. She demeans ‘corporate America,’ whatever that is, even though she has made a fortune working for it. She is the unhappiest multimillionaire I’ve ever read about!

Equally illuminating of Obama’s character is the array of people and organizations that see in him a kindred spirit and a collegial world view, , whether or not he officially or formally works with them or is associated with them.  Among those of dubious international stature who perceive Obama as ‘understanding’ them or more likely to be more ‘fair’ with them are Hamas, the terror organization in Gaza and the West Bank of the Palestinian territories; the Iranian mullahs, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the Council for American Islamic Relations, an un-indicted co-conspirator in one or more terrorism trials in the United States.

Given Obama’s intimacy and high comfort level with and his allure to those associated with mass murderers, including murderers of Americans, generally, and of Jews, specifically, I search for a persuasive rational explanation for why, if polls are to be believed, about seventy-five percent of American Jewish voters will vote for Obama?

I am perplexed and dismayed. It may be that Jews continue to want to prove that they are not racists. It may be that many Jews are simply intimidated into voting for Obama. Some have told me that they don’t want to be viewed as racists. How sad. It may be that Jews are always looking for the victims, real or imagined, to support, to show the world their unalloyed decency and morality, always needing to prove that they are ‘good.’. It may be that they are irreparably guilt ridden about their relative success in this great nation. Maybe they just want to be liked and want to avoid confrontation. Whatever.

At the annual AIPAC conference in Washington D. C. a few months Obama committed to an undivided Jerusalem. That commitment lasted less than twenty-four hours. Then an undivided Jerusalem became a final status issue about which, Obama conveniently said, it would be inappropriate for him to commit. Jews in the United States do not and should not think of themselves only as Jews, of course, but this cart-full of anti-Jewish alliances and pronouncements should at least be a significant factor in allocating their support.

For the Jew, then, what can Obama offer that can overcome these negatives? How will Obama’s ideology, the subservience of hard work, discipline, frugality, forbearance, education, investment and sacrifice to socialist neighborly redistribution advance the values traditionally held by Jews that allowed them to prosper?

Some have argued that Jews, by and large, believe in big government—and thus, believe in Democrats—based on the notion that it was the government that allowed them to flourish in the United States as they have never done so in any other nation at any other time in history.

Consistent with that belief, many Jews see themselves as secular, whatever that means. So, Israel is not high on their values priorities. Fine, but regrettably, these liberal Jews fail to grasp that it is the Christians and their values and the institutions the Christians created and fought and died for that have allowed Jews to attain such success in this country. Obama jeopardizes these values.

Some people, including big time celebrity pundits and hosts, including some for whom I have great respect, say continuously, “We don’t know who Barack Obama is.” Nonsense! We know exactly who he is.

There is nothing that we don’t know about Obama that needs to be known in order to know his values and his character. There is nothing we do not already know that prevents us from reasonably predicting his future acts should he become president. Nothing. It is all known. We know him. We know his character.

But Obama, the oily silver tongued rhetorician, is persuading people to vote for him not by reason and debate but by an appeal to emotion based on a gestalt of resentment, entitlement and, by and large, an ignorance of economics, political history and human nature. As Garver lamentably concludes in comparing the ethical content of the competing methods of persuasion, “The sophistic race to the bottom seems to beat the Aristotelian race to the top every time.”

It is intriguing to analyze some of Obama’s audiences. It is human nature that the greater the fear in the audience, the more invested they are in delusion. The greater the anger and resentment,, the more receptive the audience is to hollow phrases that attempt to justify their anger and resentment and to channel it into support for the speaker. Yet, the more the speaker is gifted in deceit, and the higher the stakes of the subject, the greater the challenge that arises for the audience.

            I recall the event where Obama was talking to a crowd at a school, I believe. I little seven-year-old girl asked why he wanted to be president. This should not be a terribly challenging question for a Harvard trained lawyer who has been running for office for over a year.

Yet, Obama couldn’t answer the question. Stuttering like a dull needle playing an old scratched phonograph record… he says,  “duh, uh” and then goes into default mode and trashes his own country…I want it to be great like it once was.. we’re not as good as we can be…I’m going to make us great again! He berates his country to a seven-year-old!

            But the audience, instead of shifting uncomfortably in their chairs or fighting the urge to leave, gives him a standing ovation. For what? Obama doesn’t even explain how he will do all these things. One issue that comes to my mind is, , literally and metaphorically, what kind of people stand for this?

That’s why he can get away with such silliness as extolling his commitment to change, and to ordinary vanilla pre-21^st century change but change you can believe in!

Ask an Obama supporter what change he has in mind and they’ll say ‘I don’t know’ and then they’ll mutter something about being fair and you ask how he will make things more fair and they’ll say ‘I don’t know’ and you ask how getting out of Iraq will make the US safer—or for that matter, any part of the world safer—and they say ‘I don’t know.’

Ask where the trillion dollars for new spending will come from and they say ‘I don’t know’ and you ask why we should care what Syria and Iran think of us, since they want us dead no matter we stand for, and they say ‘I don’t know.’ But they’re so happy about change and even though they don’t know what the change is going to be they can believe in it and they feel the change is already here and they’re changed, which in itself is a change and its just wonderful.

            The audience has a duty to know that Khrushchev thumped Kennedy in his first talks, and that Truman was responsible for the Berlin airlift, not world unity, and that higher taxes lead to less revenue for the government and to less employment. Obama’s rhetoric is mere flattery, not a heralding of truth. The challenge for the American voter is to elevate their reason over their emotions and desires for idealistic fantasy solutions.

Obama understands and implements with ruthless focus that power in a democracy is not derived from truth or virtue or honor or public prosperity. It is derived from numbers. No more. No less. Power in a democracy can, thus, be accrued by purely sophistic methods. The art of persuasion, as Obama knows, as did Gorgias, is to present irrationality in a rational way; to speak in the seductive language of fairness and equality and being ‘neighborly’ and not being selfish. It is easier, of course, and more satisfying, to argue for fairness than to argue how fairness doesn’t apply. He knows that immorality and destructive social policies must be wrapped in a moral cerecloth.