Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina may prove to have been the turning point if he survives New York Senator Hillary Clinton’s conniving campaign to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination—no sure thing given the upcoming monster primary day, Feb. 5, in which 22 mostly Clinton-friendly states hold elections.
Whether Obama stays competitive, South Carolina is where, amid Deep South race-baiting (the Clinton camp despicably raised his race as an issue by insinuation), Obama’s call to depart from the politics of the past, i.e., to end 20 years of Bush and Clinton, decisively met with broad support. South Carolina’s response to the Clintons’ attempts to belittle an Obama win in advance: a bigger margin of victory for Obama than had been anticipated. The 27-point gap was a stunning rebuke of the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton is a Christian socialist; she is indistinguishable from the current Christian president. She represents status quo traditionalism—things as they are—particularly with regard to foreign policy. Like her husband, who refused to defend America against Islamic fundamentalists, and President Bush, whose foreign policy since the worst attack in U.S. history ceased to resemble a military defense of the nation long ago, Hillary Clinton is an altruist.
Her Iraq plan, like the Bush doctrine, emphasizes stabilization of, not U.S. troop withdrawal from, Iraq—where Bush chose to send American troops, thousands of whom have been sacrificed—for the purpose of helping others, not defending U.S. interests. Securing Iraq, as she puts it, not America’s self-interest, comes first. As she states on her Web site: “What I try to do every day is figure out how to help somebody. And that’s what I will do as president.”
Sen. Obama also favors helping Iraqis—he proposes an aid package and leaves room for troop deployment relative to Al Qaeda strikes in Iraq—but his approach is predicated, at least by implication, on some degree of the nation’s self-interest. As he told an Iowa audience in September 2007: “[I oppose a]n occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences. The full accounting of those costs and consequences will only be known to history . . . our direction must be out of Iraq.”
While it’s still early in the campaign season and there’s more to learn about Sen. Obama’s views, his victory speech in South Carolina—enunciating the nation’s e pluribus unum motto: “out of many, one”—generally affirms his status as the only major candidate to take the strongest position on the most important single issue in this election: pulling our troops out of Iraq.
As far as rights are concerned, specifically freedom of speech, Sen. Obama also appears to be better than Sen. Clinton, an observation I made a year ago in my column for Box Office Mojo. Republican candidates are not a serious option for those who favor individual rights; they all either support the Bush administration’s self-sacrificing military intervention in Iraq or advocate some form of religious statism.
Heath Ledger Dies
How sad and shocking that actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan home. I first noticed him eight years ago in a movie starring Mel Gibson as a barbaric American called The Patriot; it was a long, brutal picture improved by Ledger’s turn as an idealistic American revolutionary.
His abilities are more prominently on display in two outstanding performances in 2005; as a repressed, rural homosexual in Ang Lee’s aching Brokeback Mountain and as the playful Venetian lover in Lasse Hallstrom’s delightful Casanova. Ledger is brooding and mysterious as Ennis Del Mar in the former, awakening when it is too late, a broken man in the final frames. He is bright and spirited as the title character in the latter, his eyes dancing throughout the jaunty affair, in the end sailing into a lifetime of joy.
Looking back at Ledger’s television footage, he rarely seemed at ease. Practically every clip shows him fidgeting, tapping or touching his face and an overhead shot shows Ledger walking the red carpet with his then-lover, actress Michelle Williams, with whom he had a daughter, pausing to pose for photographs—and, a second later, nervously rubbing his hand up and down his leg, as if the attention is more than he wants to bear.
The handsome Australian—balancing the pressures of being an immigrant, a single father, and a leading Hollywood actor—struck me as a sensitive soul struggling to find his way in a troubled world.
At age 28, he evidently stumbled into a life filled with medication and the company of a masseuse whose first inclination, upon finding his lifeless body, was to call one of the Olsen twins—reportedly, four times—before calling an ambulance. What happened when the ambulance arrived in front of his apartment building is an indelibly sickening sign of our times: a cacophony of cellular phone cameras flashing while Heath Ledger’s body was being removed.
He had tremendous potential and it is tragic to have lost him. Those who missed him in Brokeback Mountain or Casanova or his other movies should see and make their own judgment; I’ll venture that Heath Ledger would have liked his work to speak for itself.
