Bolton: Obama the Naive

Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 7:04:37 pm PDT

John Bolton takes Barack Obama to reality school: Obama the naive.

It’s in the Los Angeles Times, and I’m reluctant to link to them because of their overweening leftist bias, but this is a good op-ed. Follow the link from this Google News search page to get around their registration wall: ’Obama the naive’ - Google News.

It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world’s ills. In 1984, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick labeled people with these views the “San Francisco Democrats,” after the city where Walter Mondale was nominated for president.

Most famously, Kirkpatrick forever seared the San Francisco Democrats by saying that “they always blame America first” for the world’s problems. In so doing, she turned the name of the pre-World War II isolationist America First movement into a stigma the Democratic Party has never shaken.

This is yet another piece of history that Obama has ignored or never learned. There may be one more piece of history worthy of attention: In 1984, Mondale went down to one of the worst electoral defeats in American political history. We will now see whether Obama follows that path as well.