Three Strikes and You're Not Out

After igniting a public firestorm by omitting “God” from their political platform and refusing to acjnowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Democratic Party made amends to its supporters by demonstrating the process of voting until you get it right.

There. It’s back. This demonstrates the deep seated and sincere commitment to faith and freedom within the Big Tent. Rahm Emmanuel said it best in his speech to the convention. In President Obama the public has a leader who is sincerely fighting for them.

On that first day, I said, “Mr. President, which crisis do you want to tackle first?” He looked at me, with that look he usually reserved for his chief of staff, “Rahm, we were sent here to tackle all of them, not choose between them.” There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time. Believe me, if it existed, I would have found it. Each crisis was so deep and so dangerous; any one of them would have defined another presidency. We faced a once-in-a-generation moment in American history.

Fortunately for all of us, we have a once-in-a-generation president. And in those uncharted waters, I saw where the president finds his North Star. Every night, President Obama reads ten letters from everyday Americans.

When I met with the president at the end of each day, he made sure he had their letters to read at his residence—letters from people just hoping for someone in power to understand their struggles and challenges.

I cannot tell you how many times—whether we were discussing the economy, health care, or energy prices— the president would walk to his desk, take out one of their letters, read it to all of us, and say, “This is who we are fighting for”—

There is no element of calculation there. The “people we’ve been waiting for” have lost no time reminding Israel “you’re the people we’ve been fighting for.” Gone are the days of promising anything — even if it meant lying through your teeth — for convenience, even though, as the Washington Post points out, that men like Dick Harpootlian are still prominent in the Democratic Party. Harpootlian famously said of his party’s dedication to the Black Vote that:

he didn’t want to buy the black vote; he just wanted to rent it for a day. In 2000 he was accused of using anti-gay slurs when he repeatedly referred to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) as “light in the loafers.”.

What? For a day? With their constant support the rental payment should last for a least a week. But today Harpootlian’s fire is restricted to assailing Republicans. “The Chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party is refusing to apologize after he compared his state’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley to Adolf Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun.”

Who doesn’t agree with that?

Dick Harpootlian, a tart-tongued Columbia attorney known for his off-color and sometimes inflammatory rhetoric, made the analogy after Haley showed up at the Democratic National Convention earlier this week to offer a GOP response to the proceedings in Charlotte.”

Americans Jews and people of faith can take this assurance in the Democratic platform to the bank. Though on second thought they had better not take it there, as a mattress or a hole in the ground might be a safer place to stash it. At any rate the age of honesty here. Aquarius arrived. In the immortal words of that famous Democrat Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, honesty is the best policy. “You can fool some of the people some of the time. You can fool all of the people some of the time. But only we can fool all of the people all of the time.”