Back to Watergate: Obama, Grandmothers and Charles Colson

Christopher Hitchens takes on Obama on Slate today (“Blind Faith“) in way that tossed me back to Watergate (actually I had been thinking about this strange similarity of eras for a few days, but the article helped confirm my ruminations ). Hitch wrote:

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Of course Hitchens is referring here to Obama’s throwing his own grandmother under the train during the candidate’s recent vaunted speech “on race” by making the poor woman the equivalent of the execrable Jeremiah Wright. This in turn threw me back a few years to Watergate times when Charles Colson, in one of the most famous quotes of the period, said “I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.” Many of us thought that was par for the course back then in Nixonland, because we assumed Tricky Dick would do the same. Not that he did, that I can recall. So this places Obama ahead of Nixon (or behind, if you will) and in the company of the sleazy Colson. Not a great place to be, in my book. So much, as I have written before, for the New Politics.